Introduction
This article looks at the development, production and exhibition of a documentary made by school students in Nea Smyrni, Greece. It discusses the unique approach to documentary film-making taken by the project, which involved the students undertaking research into their local history, from both ‘official’ sources and vernacular sources (for example, grandparents), combined with photographs and other audiovisual testimonies of their locality. From this ‘archive’, the documentary was then edited together, with the addition of recorded voice-over and music to help the flow of the narrative. The documentary, entered into a national competition, has subsequently been stored in a national digital archive.
In our ‘digital age’ (Selwyn, 2017: 1), when education has been permeated by technological tools, and many Greek teachers, and especially students, use the latest technological devices, and are motivated and engaged by their use (Pegrum et al., 2013), it is important that these tools be embedded in their educational reality. This is why the Greek state has been offering teachers training in information and communication technology for educational purposes (https://e-pimorfosi.cti.gr/), and providing them with digital educational material in the form of e-books (http://e-books.edu.gr) or digital teaching resources.
Within this framework, Greek Educational Radiotelevision (EduTV), a department of the Ministry of Education, deals with the promotion of audiovisual and digital literacy in the Greek education system. Among other activities, it runs various audiovisual creation competitions, the aim of which is to engage students, with their teachers’ guidance, in the process of digital film-making. Moreover, distinguished student films are broadcast by the Greek Parliament television channel. All this material is accessible to the wider public through the EduTV platform (http://www.i-create.gr/).
During the school year 2018/19, the history teacher at my school, and myself, an English teacher, decided to participate with one of our classes in a national school competition organised by EduTV; 27 students in the second class of the high school, all around 16 years old, volunteered to participate in this project. Student groups, supervised and guided by teachers, created a digital documentary on the topic ‘Your history is your town’s history’. The students collected original material, such as photographs, newly shot footage and archive footage, created metadata from this material to form their own digital archive, and then made their digital documentary, From Smyrna to Nea Smyrni: Important buildings in their intellectual, religious and cultural tradition, using their digital archive. The digital documentary is available on the school YouTube channel (Evangeliki Model High School of Smyrna, 2019).
The film is a historical documentary about three important buildings in the history of Smyrna (current Izmir) in Asia Minor and Nea Smyrni, a municipality in the metropolitan city of Athens, Greece. The documentary starts by showing a group of students going to Evangeliki Model School of Smyrna early in the morning and, as a discussion takes place, one of them finds the opportunity to narrate to the others the history of three buildings in Nea Smyrni, which are deeply connected to the story of the place. Nea Smyrni was founded by Greek refugees from Smyrna, who were persecuted by the Turks in 1922 and found refuge in Greece, where they settled. So, the metropolitan church of Nea Smyrni is Agia Foteini, named after the largest church of Smyrna; Evangeliki School was a higher education male school in Smyrna, but a secondary and high school was named after it in Nea Smyrni; and the Cultural Centre of Nea Smyrni was established to preserve the Asia Minor civilisation and culture of the Greek refugees. These three buildings represent the religious, intellectual and cultural life of the two cities, and they are presented through the projection of archive material and recent photographs, and a narration based upon history books and official documents.
As for the teaching activity carried out, in the history lesson, students conducted research in groups, and found history books and documents about the history of the three selected buildings, as well as archive material, such as photographs, documents and objects that they photographed, related to these buildings. At the same time, they were taught basic theory and techniques of documentary making. Then, they were divided into groups and worked on documentary making: scriptwriting – narration and characters’ roles; filming; editing of archival material; narration recording; music composition; image and sound editing; and the addition of English subtitles. We finished by screening the documentary in class, with a discussion/evaluation of it in the class plenary.
In Greece, there has been significant discussion about creativity in education. This is also part of the agenda of the curriculum designers (IEP, 2018); indeed, so much so that it led to the publication of the new national curriculum in 2021 (IEP, 2021). Additionally, film-making has been widely used both in various subjects and in after-school clubs and activities, as shown by the school video-making projects on the EduTV platform (http://www.i-create.gr/). In addition to this drive towards a more creative curriculum, the area of creativity in digital media and film-making, especially with regard to young people, has received significant attention in the past 15 years (for example, Arnaouti, 2015; Banaji et al., 2010; Burn, 2009; Burn and Durran, 2007; Cachia et al., 2010; Gilje, 2010; Lange and Ito, 2007; Potter, 2012), which indicates the local and global (or national and transnational) relationships between creativity, film-making processes and young learners. However, creativity with regard to the use of archives for educational purposes has been studied mainly in the context of history and social science education, focusing on the exploitation of primary sources by teachers and students for the deeper understanding and interpretation of the past (Needham and Haas, 2019; Şenturk, 2013; Theimer, 2015).
Therefore, since creativity related to digital film-making in education is of interest in Greece, and it can relate to creative educational practices elsewhere, this innovative approach of combining digital archiving with digital documentary making in the Greek education context attracted my attention. That is why, along with working on it as a teacher, I also decided to approach it as a researcher. My research focus was on the aspects of creativity coming to light during this project, and I developed the following research question: What are the factors lying behind students’ creativity during the processes of digital archiving and documentary making? More precisely, I conducted an exploratory case study, in which I used ‘inductive thematic analysis’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 12), and studied the themes emerging from the students’ participation in the project regarding their creativity during the two processes of digital archiving and digital documentary making for educational purposes. For data collection, I used a pre- and a post-project questionnaire with open questions (Cohen et al., 2007: 130). Using a ‘research diary’ (Bryman, 2015), I kept notes of the events while commenting on and interpreting them, and drafts of students’ work and their final products served as ‘documents’ (Bryman, 2015: 546) demonstrating the students’ creative processes and final outputs. Given that the themes found were common to both digital archiving and digital documentary making, they were analysed together.
In what follows, I explore the drivers for the young people in terms of their often enthusiastic participation in the project, and the representational elements of the final output. I explore two main creative motives for the student-participants, utilising their own words: first as cultural custodians, who felt an obligation to preserve aspects of their local culture and history for future generations; and, second, as a means to represent something of their sense of identity, via multiple identities (as teenager, as school student, and as part of the local community), which combined to give fulfilment to their creative vision.
Cultural memory and identity expression: two factors of creativity
This research study shows that factors related to the content of the students’ digital creations play an important role in the expression of their creativity. More precisely, the student-participants’ creativity is revealed through the expression of their cultural memory and their identity, different aspects of which incited their creativity through their choices for the production of their digital artefacts.
Cultural memory expression
According to Straub (2008), cultural memory is a community’s organised and coherent conception of its past culture. So, by creating this digital archive and digital documentary, the student-participants contributed in their own amateur way to the creation of future generations’ cultural memory. The films created by the students will be kept on a digital platform of the Greek Ministry of Education, and will become archive objects themselves, available to future generations and to the collective cultural memory. In this sense, the students have acted as local historians, unearthing the secret histories of their localities, and preserving them through creative digital means. In a sense, and without realising it, the students were playing their own, small part in the formation of their ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) and its cultural memory, acting as representatives of the inhabitants of their locality. As one of the participants, Amy, stated: ‘It is important that we have the chance to present our town in our way.’
Students’ contribution to the creation of both the digital archive and the digital documentary can also be seen as a collection of ‘hypomnemata’, in Foucault’s (1997) terms. They are digital artefacts, material products, which will last in time, and they can be revisited by their creators and the potential audience for information and reflection whenever they want or need to refer to them. In Derrida’s (1995) words, the students chose what to save from amnesia, and thus selected the material they wished to preserve in time through this archivisation process. In relation to that, one of the participants, Christopher, stated: ‘I learned many things about local history I was not aware of.’ This highlights the fact that through this project, the student-participants themselves became more familiar with their local history, and what they created served as hypomnemata to themselves, who learned about and may need to revisit aspects of their school and town, and thus of their own history. Furthermore, the student-participants were aiming for their audience’s approval and appreciation of their work, because the better the quality of their archive and documentary, the more chances they had to win a prize in the competition. Thus, they wished to create hypomnemata that would serve their whole imagined community, all the people interested in the history of Smyrna and Nea Smyrni now and in the future, who will visit their archive and watch their documentary and, hopefully, find them useful and informative. In this way, they saved the memory of the objects from death, and prevented them from falling into oblivion. Although they could never, of course, truly know the past, as they had not experienced it (Derrida, 1995), their curation and creative reimagining of the past gives us an insight into what they think is valuable, and worth retaining.
The project data show that the concept of cultural memory is three-fold. First, students learned and remembered events concerning local history and culture from the vernacular discourse of people in their community, that is, their older relatives, speakers at public events and on radio or television, or even priests in the church, concerning local religious history. This is the kind of memory with which students came to class, and it was complemented by the memory that was developed at school, through the research and study of official sources and a more systematic approach to the past (Arnaouti, 2014). The coexistence of these two kinds of cultural memory becomes apparent in Christopher’s statement, ‘I learned many things about local history I was not aware of.’ He implied that his former knowledge of local history was complemented by formal education. These two aspects of remembering – from vernacular discourse and from education – are followed by forgetting and recovery, which is the kind of cultural memory that the project participants served. There are aspects of local history that had been forgotten in students’ personal environment. By learning about them through formal education, they contributed to the recovery of their memory by including them in their digital creations.
In order to create their digital artefacts, students saw their structure as a hybrid of bricolage, taxonomy and narrative. They began by searching in books and websites, and contacted school alumni to find material – information and photographs – which could prove useful for the development of their documentary content. The archives they searched are both objects of formal institutions (for example, the school library and municipality publications and website), and archives as parts of the informal culture and oral tradition (for example, personal narrations and personal objects such as photographs). The double-faceted character of the students’ conception of the archive created a tension that their work sought to reconcile in the bringing together of different and diverse elements that were attributed a new meaning when combined in new thematic digital products, called ‘bricolage’ (Barker, 2004: 17). As an extension of that, bricolage in the case of the documentary can also be seen as a semiotic process, which includes the orchestration of various modes to create a new audiovisual whole (Poepsel, n.d.). In support of this, one of the participants, Mary, stated: ‘I expect to be creative by collecting different types of information and editing it.’ The gerunds ‘collecting’ and ‘editing’ include the concepts of the video’s ‘representational’ and ‘organisational’ functions (Burn and Parker, 2003), given that the student considered here how she wished to represent her local history by choosing and archiving material that she found to be important to the project, and then, the editing concept was concerned with the way this material would be organised to create a meaningful media text.
Regarding the taxonomic aspect of their digital creations, students saw both their digital archive and their digital documentary as the results of a series of actions to be taken in a specific order, a kind of ‘archivisation’ (Derrida, 1995). For instance, participant Cleopatra commented, ‘It is interesting and we do learn things by searching, reading, selecting and making something of our own.’ Cleopatra’s listing corresponds to the stages of Potter’s (2012) curatorship actions: ‘searching’, ‘reading’ and ‘selecting’ stand for collecting appropriate material, which also includes the action of interpreting, while ‘making’ can stand for the actions of cataloguing, arranging and assembling for exhibition, which can apply both to archiving and film-making. At the same time, this student’s statement includes all the functions of media texts according to Burn and Parker (2003): the representational, as students chose their material according to the messages they wanted to put across, and the organisational and orientational, as they organised their material into a whole for making their digital creations, in order to address their audience.
Another way of thinking through their digital creations concerns their narrativising tendencies (Nygren, 2014; Rosinbum, 2017). Both the digital archive and the digital documentary have to tell a story in a coherent and cohesive way, by reconstructing the past (Derrida, 1995) and relating it to the present. Therefore, the selected material and the various modes combined have to be put in a meaningful order to transmit a message to the audience, that is, to narrate the history of each one of the three buildings throughout time. Therefore, since the archive content had to be used for the creation of the documentary, inevitably there was a parallel consideration of the two by the students. In relation to that, Jonas expressed his concern about the photographs of Agia Foteini that he had to take: ‘Miss, I must take pictures of specific parts of the church, parts we will focus on in our documentary narration. First, we have to discuss what we will mention there.’ His statement makes clear that in this project, the archiving and documentary making were intertwined and, although the research stage took place first, students were constantly reflecting on the usage of the archive material collected for the narrative of the documentary. Regarding the narrative aspect of their digital creations, Cleopatra discussed the role of music in film-making: ‘Music plays an important role in making the narration flow and captures the spectator’s attention.’ So, students took the audience into consideration, and thus served the ‘orientational function’ (Burn and Parker, 2003: 6) of their media production, aiming to create an illusion of reality for them, through the use of the widely adopted ‘continuity editing’ (Bordwell and Thompson, 2010: 234), which is a basic film-making rule.
As for the rules that students followed in order to create their artefacts, they mainly focused on formal theory, due to the strict guidelines of the competition, but there were cases of constant play (Jenkins et al., 2010) as well. As Burn and Durran (2007) claim, the creative function of media literacy has to do with the ‘selective tradition’ (Williams, 1961: 66). In this case, then, students were provided with the official theory of making archives and documentaries, but when it came to film-making, they also made choices under the influence of popular culture, which they sought to legitimise in the context of formal education (Arnaouti, 2014).
Students’ compliance with formal documentary-making theory is shown when studying the documentary itself, where in most scenes there is close correspondence between image and narration in terms of fact exhibition, followed by ‘complementary’ (Burn and Parker, 2003: 25) sound. Rose’s soundtrack, which runs throughout the documentary, is a classical tune with increases and decreases in the volume according to the content, which creates cohesion between the various modes orchestrated for the effective narration of local history. Moreover, the choice of a classical tune is itself dictated by the rules of formal theory, and belongs to the ‘selective tradition’ (Williams, 1961: 66), as it is a highly approved kind of music for historical documentaries. As Rose stated: ‘The music I will compose should have a classical tune, since it will be the soundtrack for a documentary about local history. What else could I make?’ Students’ conscious and willing application of the formal theory as a major part of their learning process shows that they followed the selective tradition, as promoted by their teachers and the education system, and mainly used their resources according to the competition guidelines to create digital artefacts that would make them prize-winners, as a result of their ‘critical creativity’ (Burn and Durran, 2007: 67).
Nevertheless, the landscape is more complex, since there is proof of students’ playful tendency and the influences of popular culture throughout the project. When students lacked the appropriate image that supported their narration, they resorted to the mash-up technique (Lange and Ito, 2007), deviated from formal theory, and depicted their narration with a similar image that belonged to a different historical period. Therefore, the ‘representational function’ (Burn and Durran, 2007) of the media text was served with the use of the semiotic tools of photographs with similar, but not the exact, content of the narrated event, which is evidence of their play with the resources throughout the project, and of their bricolage way of working on the documentary.
Identity expression
Through their creative digital work, student-participants also expressed the local, student and teenage aspects of their identity, which were intertwined. To start with, students saw their town as their ‘heimat’ (Blickle, 2002), which is the place where they felt at home and to whose imagined community they belonged. This place is Nea Smyrni, which they acknowledged as the continuation of Smyrna, in Asia Minor. Therefore, even the project theme itself gave them the chance to express their local identity. By presenting, among other things, their school history, they presented in a way their own cultural heritage, which is connected with who they were as students and Nea Smyrni inhabitants.
Since they belonged to this school community, their own student and local identities were projected. This becomes evident in both the opening (‘Evangeliki Model High School of Smyrna presents’) and the closing titles (‘The students of Evangeliki Model High School of Smyrna’), where they appeared as representatives of their whole school. This is supported by participant Jonathan’s statement that ‘it will be very important for our small community to win the competition’. The word ‘community’ referred to their class, who worked on the project, and also to the school in a broader sense. So, in this case, the student-participants represented their school in a national school competition, which involves both the representational and the orientational functions of media production (Burn and Parker, 2003). On the one hand, it shows the way in which they chose to represent reality, in this case who the film-makers were, and to express their identity as students of this historic school. On the other hand, it stresses the way in which they addressed their audience, and how they wished them to receive and interpret this short documentary: as an artefact related to their school, of which they felt proud. This fact also raises the issue of the students’ identity: they projected themselves as members of this school community, as well as of the wider local community.
Additionally, the fact that the opening titles appeared over an old picture of Smyrna and the closing titles appeared over a still photograph of the modern school with the students’ names listed, accompanied by an old still photograph of Nea Smyrni central square with the material sources listed, shows the importance of, and also the continuity of, history in these two places. The choice of old stills can be seen as a way to stress the historicity of both places and the documentary focus, while the modern school still with the students’ names projects the creators’ student identity. As Giddens (1991) claims, modern identity is formed by which aspects of their personality people choose to project. All these choices complied with the rules of formal theory, and served the ‘representational function’ (Burn and Parker, 2003) of the media text.
Furthermore, when the documentary focus changed from the history of the school, which was the students’ initial choice, to the history of the three most important buildings of the town, students pursued a more holistic approach to local history. Since they decided to work on the three buildings representing the intellectual (school), religious (church) and cultural (cultural centre) traditions of their town, their approach lay in the ‘selective tradition’ (Williams, 1961: 66), as they expressed their creativity while working on themes highly appreciated by the educational institutions, that is, the school, the Ministry of Education and the competition organisers. In fact, the importance of this historic school, and the sense of pride that it gives to the students, were highlighted by Amy, who stated: ‘These details matter to show the historicity of the school.’ Students’ wish to project their local identity was also stressed by their will to study local history in depth before working on their digital artefacts. As Jonathan stated, ‘I expect to learn about the cultural heritage of the town I live in.’ So, the students’ focus was on their ‘heimat’ (Blickle, 2002), which was unique and special to them, their local history, and the desire to do justice to the place and its history through the representational function of documentary.
Apart from expressing their local identity, student-participants also had the chance to project their teenage and student identities. This became evident from the very beginning of the project. The first people they approached when they started looking for archival material were their families, and, especially, school alumni, who belong to the wider school community. Then, in the opening titles of the documentary, students showed their connection with Evangeliki Model High School of Smyrna and, in the first scene, they showed four students heading to school before the narrative started; therefore, they made a visual statement concerning their age (adolescence) and their identity as high-school students through the acting in the film’s opening. The narration discussing the history of the buildings, accompanied by relevant stills, followed, and the film concludes with a scene showing the students in the position in which they were left at the end of the first scene. In this way, the documentary started and finished with them, stressing their multifaceted identity as teenagers, students of this historic school, and inhabitants of this historic municipality. The students’ desire to express themselves, and thus their identity, also became evident in participant Nikiforos’s statement: ‘My team and I are responsible for how the video will look, and we can do it in our own way.’ The students also had the freedom to make artefacts that reflected who they were, and thus their identity (‘in our own way’). As Giddens (1991) puts it, the way in which people choose to use material goods and the activities they undertake contribute to the projection of their identity. In support of that, other students also showed their need to express themselves through their work. Rose, in her turn, stated, ‘I’ve composed a tune on my own, inspired, of course, by the documentary theme’, putting an emphasis on the expression of herself within the project framework. The student-participants’ engagement with the project ultimately animated a number of previously identified ways of thinking about identity, and the representation of identity through creative practice, albeit within the restrictions and limitations provided by the project’s guidelines. This self-expression was achieved through a mix of play, professional identity projection (wanting to be an actor or a musician) and communal identity projection, as well as through the curatorial desire to best represent, and preserve, aspects of their community through the documentary form.
Motivation: a major factor of creativity
Motivation emerged as another recurrent theme related to students’ creativity. Although students’ motivation was connected to a variety of factors that incited their creativity, the most dominant one was concerned with recognition of their work. Since the project was realised in the framework of a Panhellenic competition, being viewable across Greece, students were very much concerned about a successful final result, and about the recognition of their work. Amy, for example, was enthusiastic about the project from its beginning, and she stated in relation to its viability, ‘our documentary will be on a digital platform forever. It is worth it!’, and ‘We’ll become famous!’ The longevity of the final film, being preserved on a national digital platform ‘forever’, and the idea of becoming ‘famous’, reflect Amy’s, and the other student-participants’, desire to make a lasting impact via their creative practice, and to begin, perhaps, to burnish a reputation as young creative professionals.
As the project progressed, and students dedicated time and energy to it, they felt more involved in the process, and thus their motivation to see the value of their work recognised became higher. Amy wanted their ‘individual names’ to be mentioned in the end titles, and she made it clear that only those who contributed to the class project should be rewarded. These students’ reactions were related to Potter’s (2012) ‘displaying’ aspect of film-making, and the final stage of projecting their film for the audience, and anticipating their reactions, related to the audience’s ‘interpreting’ action, which is how they perceive and interpret its content, and how they are affected by it. Moreover, students’ reactions are also concerned with the orientational function of film-making (Burn and Parker, 2003), as we see their concern about the recognition of their work by their potential audience, which made them competitive even among themselves.
Furthermore, students’ motivation is also related to the fact that their school project was to address not only the competition critics, but also the wider public, and thus, it connected their in-school world with the out-of-school world, the importance of which is stressed by Buckingham (2003). Jonathan’s statement that ‘it will be very important for our small community that we win the competition’ highlights the desire to bring fame to their school, and to prove that a small school, in terms of numbers, can be great in terms of achievements.
In this sense, we could say that the creativity expressed by the teenage students in producing a widely acceptable artefact is the result of a structured process that uses the semiotic tools available, in this case the digital production tools, to create two products, according to the competition guidelines and the formal theory of archiving and documentary making. Therefore, since students cared for their success in the competition, they mainly, but not completely, compromised with a more rational way of creating, in which they left playfulness behind for the sake of a more formal method of production (Vygotsky, 1998, 2004), as analysed above.
The fact that the existence of a real audience played a positive role in the students’ motivation to creatively engage with the project is also suggested by Goodman (2003). In the post-project questionnaire, all students referred to their potential audience and the reactions they expected. Annie was typical in stating, ‘We possibly expect positive reactions from people of all ages, from both the ones who are going to judge our project and the other viewers as well.’ She distinguished between the competition critics and the rest of the audience, and hoped for ‘positive reactions’, a recurrent phrase in the students’ responses. Another case consists of the students who expected to make the audience interested in local history, and thus were motivated to produce the best possible documentary. As Amy stated, ‘People should realise that some buildings in our town are jewels.’ Here, Amy’s desire to inform the audience about a subject of importance to the film-makers relates to one of the central purposes of the documentary film genre (Nichols, 2010). Last but not least, some students considered the audience’s affective engagement desirable, as they referred to the feeling of pride that a documentary about local history could give to the inhabitants of the locality, who belonged to the same ‘imagined community’ as they did (Anderson, 1983).
Conclusion
This research study implies that creativity in a student project is incited by various factors, the most prominent of which is the expression of student-participants’ cultural taste and identity, as well as their motivation. In this creative project, students combined archivisation and documentary making. They were involved in a two-faceted activity in which they had to select the information and objects that they would include in their archive, and then construct a multimodal narrative around this archival content. Therefore, their choices of archive making affected the next stage of documentary making, not only because archive making provided the material with which to construct their film, but also because, although the two processes seemed to take place in a linear way, the potential use of each selected archival object in the documentary was omnipresent in the students’ thought during its selection and archivisation.
Students’ cultural memory and identity expression constitute factors that boost their creativity. More precisely, their cultural memory is concerned with how they experience it as an inheritance from previous generations, and also how they contribute to its formation, after the interpolation of formal education, in order to pass it on to future generations through their digital works, which are hybrids of bricolage, taxonomy and narrative, and result from the interplay between formal theory and playfulness. During this process, their local identity, and their membership in Nea Smyrni’s ‘imagined community’, as well as their teenage and student identity, all found means of expression, despite the strict framework of the formal education competition.
When it comes to the student-participants’ motivation, as an important factor of their creativity, it is mainly connected to students’ expectation for their work’s recognition. Students took into consideration the existence both of the competition critics and of the wider audience, and they did their work with the intention to inform them, to attract their attention and their positive comments, and even to contribute to the viability of their work, as it was to be uploaded to a state digital platform. Moreover, doing a project that would be projected outside the school borders also meant a connection between the in-school world and the out-of-school world, which gave meaning to their school activity, as they had to make something that would matter both to them and to the other inhabitants of the locality.
Ultimately, as well as analysing the conditions under which these Greek students expressed their creativity and the factors enhancing it, this study could serve as a point of reference for other practitioners and researchers interested in the expression of teenagers’ creativity in the context of digital media literacy. What is more, it offers a new perspective, that of students creating their own digital archive first, from which they then create their digital documentary; therefore, their engagement with the project involves two semiotic processes of meaning making in a creative way.
Furthermore, the interaction between archive and film in the context of film education can be further addressed and researched. Because of its small scale, this study offers only a glimpse into the co-development of a digital archive and a digital documentary for educational purposes, but addressing the combination of archival and documentary work is a new field that can prove of interest in Greece and elsewhere.