What should a wildebeest say? Interactive nature films for high school classrooms

Abstract

Nature documentaries play an important role in high school biology classrooms, yet they deliver a passive and biased account of the behavior of organisms. To engage students in more active problem solving around behavioral topics, we created an interactive video system called Animal Landlord. Part of a week-long curriculum designed to introduce concepts in behavioral ecology, Animal Landlord presents film clips of the Serengeti lion hunting its prey. Students select and annotate video frames with explanations of their significance to the hunt, compare annotations across films, and ultimately generalize a qualitative model of predation behaviors. This paper discusses the motivations for changing the nature of documentary use in the classroom, the ways in which we change the form of traditional narration for pedagogical purposes, and the interactivity that emerges in the social context of the classroom.