As a storyteller, I like producing documentaries and an opportunity to produce a documentary and build a graduate course at the same time was too good to pass up.
We Are What We Eat: The nutrition, policy and public health of America’s diet is the working title of our public health elective to be tentatively offered fall 2010. It’s a graduate course, with a text book, quizzes, papers, and discussion, but what I’m setting out to do is to create five one-hour documentary interviews with our faculty to create student engagement in the course materials.
There are lots of reasons we need a course like this in a medical school, and one I find striking is this summer’s policy statement from the American Medical Association:
“Preventing disease is paramount in the provision of health care. Hospitals, physicians and nurses are ideal leaders and advocates for creating food environments that promote health. This policy is an important contribution to a prevention-based healthcare delivery system.”
The AMA’s new Sustainable Food policy builds on a report from its Council on Science and Public Health (http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/475/refcomd.pdf), which notes that locally produced and organic foods “reduce the use of fuel, decrease the need for packaging and resultant waste disposal, preserve farmland … [and] the related reduced fuel emissions contribute to cleaner air and in turn, lower the incidence of asthma attacks and other respiratory problems.” Industrial food production is a significant contributor to increased antibiotic resistance, climate change, and air and water pollution.
The new AMA policy states:
- That our AMA support practices and policies in medical schools, hospitals, and other health care facilities that support and model a healthy and ecologically sustainable food system, which provides food and beverages of naturally high nutritional quality.
- That our AMA encourage the development of a healthier food system through the US Farm Bill and other federal legislation.
- That our AMA consider working with other health care and public health organizations to educate the health care community and the public about the importance of healthy and ecologically sustainable food systems.
This is an interesting time to explore this topic. There are new videos about food and sustainability, there is a growing interest in what food labels like “organic” really mean, and a slowing economy has led to interest in backyard gardens, urban gardens, back yard chickens, and our continued concerns about obesity and the health consequences to the nation.
We start shooting the 5 segments this month, shooting with a tapeless JVC GY HM 100 camera, straight to disk, which ought to speed up our post producti0n work flow.
My Twitter feed since Sunday has hit some brief highlights of a workshop I’m attending this week in Norman, Oklahoma.
It’s a workshop who’s attendees are facing incredible change in their world: newspapers are closing, television revenues are shrinking, and more and more citizen journalists are providing lower quality product for storytelling.
Lila Merideth directs a scene on her second day of the NPPA News Video Workshop. (Photo by Donald Winslow)
The NPPA News Video Workshop, for the last 49 years, has brought the concepts of visual storytelling to news photojournalists. When I first attended here in 1997, there was little awareness of the Web as a storytelling medium and most, if not all, attendees came from local TV stations. They captured their video using matching, standard-issue, multi-thousand-dollar broadcast cameras. Twelve years later, news shooters are nearly the smallest percentage of attendees. This uears workshop is made up of storytellers from the military, education, and newspapers as well. The cameras used here have changed, too, and now include small DV camcorders to the high dollar cameras.
What’s changing is the cost barriers to video storytelling . With the barriers to storytelling are lowering, one of the subtle goals of the workshop is to be sure the quality does not lower. And while there is a place for the quirky, poorly produced YouTube video of your neighbor’s welcome mat being stolen by a racoon, inexpensive equipment doesn’t mean the story has to be poor. (For example, this shared by NBC’s John Larson, (added 4-14, my friend Sue Ellen sent this better link via Vimeo) the shooting quality is very mediocre, but the story concept is solid (watch it all the way through to see it build).
Two toolboxes
The reason I am here is to build two conceptual toolboxes: the first will be used to tell better visual stories in my lectures and on line teaching. The second toolbox will be used when I teach a graduate seminar in Storytelling in Leadership scheduled for winter term on our campus. Teaching storytelling on a medical campus is a skill that will help current and future leaders understand was to effect change, improve quality, and guide their organization through the overwhelming challenges they will face in their careers.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement writes:
“Anyone involved in quality improvement efforts knows that scientific principles are at the center of this work. But even the most evangelical quality engineer will caution that this is only part of the solution. Improvement strategies and measurement tools are most effective when embedded in an organizational cultural that ensures that changes are embraced and sustained. And there is no better means of inspiring cultural change than through the simple craft of telling stories. As Donald Berwick, MD, MPP, puts it, ‘Measurement is important, but it’s the stories behind the numbers that are the most enduring wellspring for change.’”
Local television news, done poorly, is banal, lame, and mind numbing. As is any poorly told story. Substitute “lecture” or “online class” for “local television news” and the sentence remains true. Strong effective storytelling, as demonstrated by the presenters here, become compelling, emotional, and the “wellspring for change” as Berwick mentions above.
How the workshop progresses
As I wait for her direction, Lila Merideth of the Associated Press prepares her camera during the NPPA News Video Workshop. (Photo by Donald Winslow)
The participants here have daily assignments and the format is essentially the same: they are given an assignment (usually a rambling description of a cultural trend and a series of lame questions.) Their task, in a mater of a few hours, is to create a commitment statement (what is their story about) and video record no more than 4 minutes of tape. The 4 minutes of recorded video is brutally critiqued and then, the participants edit it down to a one minute story. All of this without audio.
Critics of this workshop, and this style of news photojournalism, say the results are too formula. The attitude from many of the workshop presenters is to ask the participants, for this week, to follow the formula. To “play the game” in the words of long time workshop faculty Darryl Barton and to follow their step-by-step formulas.
How this relates to education
Storytelling — and video storytelling — does not supplant the lecture or the textbook. But it can add emphasis, pacing, and sequencing to learning. Done well, a visual story can lead a student to understand and synthesize ideas. it can illustrate concepst in ways a text book can not. The key, for the educator, is to learn the craft of storytelling first, then move to the digital media and learn how to adapt the storytelling techniques to the medium.
While there are limits to cameras like the Flip, the price point of $200 makes HD video affordable in the classroom. The techniques taught hee can apply to the simple Flip as wel as the $60,000 cameras. When learners see how effective storytelling can be, they can then be beter prepared to use storytelling and the techniques with the professional equipment brought by their AV departments, communication firms, or local television outlets.
