Abstract:

Actual communication media such as television, radio, newspapers or the web provide us with huge amounts of information while trying to attract us increasing their market share. Documentaries, traditionally used to describe the nature and its life, play an important role in this strategy.

A documentary is a dissemination medium that expresses reality in a visual manner. Through documentaries we can notice and understand that we belong to the world’s nature we live in, a fact many times forgotten, and that allows us a deeper understanding of ourselves. Documentaries can also make us be aware about life that, although existing far away from us, still is part of us and we are responsible for it.

During communication we must keep in mind the emitting source, the transmission channel, the emitted information and the receiver. Secondary education students are perfect documentary audiences, if these are aimed at them, as students are always willing to learn and discover. But, from an educational point of view, why not designing a project so that information receivers and emitters are the same people? To accomplish this we must provide information of interest and choose an appropriate transmission channel.

The following project was conducted by a year 9 class (second grade of secondary education, 13-14 years), while studying Natural Sciences. The project took advantage of a school trip to Valencia’s zoo “Bioparc” where we can find a large variety of African animals. The trip was useful to gather up information and to film the videos that were used to produce the documentary. The aim was to get year 8 peers to know the characteristics of several animal groups, namely Amphibies, Reptiles, Birds and Mammals.
The transmission channel for the gathered information was the documentary.

The novelties consist in:
a) The students are in charge of the design of the documentary and its making of;
b) We promote collaborative work by dividing the class in different groups, where each group will focus on one group of animals;
c) The project will include information about environmental concerns;
d) The documentary will be shown to all four groups of 1st grade of secondary education in our school, which will get special knowledge on the animals and develop social-environmental values.
e) Questions placed after the documentary will be answered by their colleagues in a plain language.

With this project, it has been intended to inspire students to observe reality, to prove the importance of the dissemination of information, to create attitudes on other fellows and to encourage creative work.

Keywords:

Socio-eviromental values, documentary, peer-to-peer education, collaborarive work.