Fostering Campus-Wide Dialogue and Student-Centered Learning through Film Festivals and Media Projects: Engaging Chinese Environmental Issues beyond the Asian Studies Classroom

Abstract

Based on a Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment Pilot-Year Project at Furman University This article discusses how film festivals and other media projects can be used to engage students in hands-on learning while also immersing campus communities in topics of broad concern. A Chinese Environmental Film Festival held at Furman University in 2015 is used as a case study to examine how students can develop festival programming, learning about films as well as developing skills related to multimedia communication, teamwork, and event planning. Beyond the students directly involved with planning the festival, faculty, staff and students from other classes also benefit from the activities related to the festival, which can be used to extend learning in their own courses. The interdisciplinary potential of film festivals and their adaptability to a wide variety of topics make them particularly well suited to liberal arts college settings, though they can be used effectively on larger campuses as well.

Keywords

• film festival
• student-centered learning
• engaged learning
• environmental film festivals
• Asian Studies pedagogy
• film as pedagogy