What are Digital Documentaries?

We are in the Digital Information Age! Using digital movies as a means of engaging students in the human side of injury prevention and how much injuries cost both individually and socially is a hallmark of out EOP approach.

In our graduate classes with pre-service teachers and pre-career professionals in agricultural economics classes (for example), we have observed that many who grow up on farms and in rural communities, where they might not live on a farm, but have family or friends who do, do not have many opportunities to capitalize on those experience. Most school curriculum materials do not relate or even show rural settings and thus are not community relevant to the 1 in 5 Americans who live in rural areas. The EOP approach addresses these issues. Four essential questions guide the project "Who is at risk for farm injury?" "What are the Costs of Injury?" "Who Bears these Costs?" and "How can Injury be Prevented?"

We use Digital Documentaries to reconnect students to these rural roots AND to make others who do not necessarily live or work in rural areas how we are all affected socially by injury and fatalities. We use the "Inteview with a Farmer" assignment and ask students to select an injury category, find someone to interview and develop that story in a digital documentary.

The Digital Documentaries our students have produced give a new voice to these stories and students truly make these stories their own as part of the digital documentary development. The inquiry is documented in the filmic narrative and the pervasive effects of injury and fatality from preventable injury in rural communities is demonstrated again and again.