Study guides and Australian documentary: The role of bridging materials in building educative, cultural and economic value

The use of documentary, and in turn the value of documentary, is well established in formal education contexts. In addition to an established pedagogical value, this article examines the cultural and economic value of documentary in education through both national legislative reviews (the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC’s) Copyright and the Digital Economy) and a specific learning resource in the form of study guides. Within this research, study guides function as a means to explore the plurality of ways in which documentary may be valued through several stakeholders invested in sustaining educational engagement with the form. Most notably among these stakeholders is copyright collection agency Screenrights, which bridges the valuing of documentary between screen and education sectors alongside national funding agency Screen Australia and the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM), an independent, non-profit, professional association promoting the study of media in education. ATOM in particular is synonymous with the creation of study guides for documentary films. Investigating the educative, cultural and economic value of study guides offers a discrete albeit valuable study of the ways in which documentary functions within Australian education contexts.