As a teacher, I am regularly thinking of new ways to meet my students where they are and guide them down an intellectual path. But my traditional pedagogy is holding me back.
Despite my relative youth (31 years old), I am an old-school instructor. During my four years as an Africana Studies professor, I have trained by the mantra: the text, our thoughts, our imaginations, our voices are all we need in the classroom.
For me, it is difficult to meet today’s students where they are through our cherished 100,000-word academic books. My students are more used to the sound bites, five-word texts, 500-word blogs, 140-character tweets, short Facebook posts, and page-turning, juicy novels.
I would not jump off the cliff of reality and lament that my students do not read. They read—they read a lot of texts, blogs, posts, stories and tweets. How they read, though, conflicts almost totally to the traditional non-fiction academic book.
I refuse to abandon the centrality of the academic book. However, I am starting to realize it is imperative to use other scholarly mediums to attract students to the subject early in the course. Even better is an attractive, academic book: the kind of book that would entice my visually oriented students with short reading spans while also being deeply and profoundly academic, insightful and, most importantly, thought-provoking. Sometimes well-written narratives do this. But even some of these books do not do the job. Documentaries often are successful. However, my book-centered tradition restrains me from showing more.
When I laid my eyes recently on a preview of the soon to be released (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, I finally found the type of book I had been looking for—intellectually stimulating and socially appealing. Author Yaba Blay, co-director of Africana Studies at Drexel University, labels it a “bookumentary.”
The term bookumentary is defined differently in our publishing world. They are the popular short documentaries that promote books. These short motion pictures may be a clever way of attracting potential readers, but they are not a true uniting of the book and documentary like (1)ne Drop and other tomes like it.
