What does Magic mean?
It’s truly amazing how, after watching a documentary film together, both teachers and students feel that the experience has given them a whole new perspective on the world around them.
The tools on the MAGIC website make this feeling happen.
This site is aimed at educators such as secondary school teachers, trainers, university lecturers and cultural professionals who consider documentary as a subject and an artistic tool to be part of their curriculum.
We created a platform that inspires users and creates awareness and builds resilience and knowledge for a conducive teaching and learning environment. Because there are things you might want to talk about, but you can’t and it’s easier with film.
We created a new method to highlight the importance of the social issues, using documentary films – helped along with collecting knowledge in the field, film screenings and workshops, and collecting and working with students’ reactions, to produce effective tools to bring students closer to reality in a protected environment and thus offer a model to the teachers and other educators.
The Magic toolkit is packed full up with inspiring materials. Step by step, we’ll show you how we’ve built the curriculum to make a lasting impact. You can read about our community and find materials to help you integrate MAGIC in your classroom: a short film that shows how MAGIC was made in a diary-like way, a curriculum, a pedagogical manual, a manual on how to ask for feedback, a manual to help you prepare and conduct fieldwork related to the film and its theme, and a collection of methods that also use visual tools to address social issues. In the Resources menu you will also find questionnaires to be filled in by your students.
Documentaries in education – new perspectives
A Eurostat study (Being young in Europe today) shows that in 2023, (average) 71% of the EU-population aged 16-24 (young people) had basic or above basic digital skills. Their way of life seems to have shifted online, with activities that take up an increasing share of their daily lives.
So instead of reading books, they prefer to watch movies – the genre of the film is simply a built-in part of their life. They get their info from movies for their conversation, their actions/reactions. According to recent surveys they are “omnivorous”, with preference to series, mostly comedies – that they watch at least twice a week, at home, on-line, mostly alone.
Although digital solutions are very useful to bridge distances, in the end society is built upon direct personal interactions that seem to become scarcer nowadays.
Our experience is that teachers are seeking new methods to contact the newest generations and to improve their knowledge at the same time. Psychologists found that unusual solutions that make students get out of their well-known surroundings can help the change of perspective.
Our Magic path
The MAGIC is a groundbreaking initiative. The innovation of the project is that it combines experience from different fields and develops a new, widely applicable method.
Creating new methods: using and processing documentary films.
Our basic idea was to create new methods and tools to help secondary school teachers to connect to and guide young people with the magic power of documentaries. A method which is able to highlight the importance of social issues and bring students closer to reality in a protected environment as classroom or small working groups using and processing documentary films.
The project’s objectives are to help secondary school teachers to connect to and guide young people. This was achieved by developing a new method to highlight the importance of social issues and bring students closer to reality in a protected environment, using documentary films.
We created a platform to foster the use of documentaries which give a sensitive and sensual portrayal of segments of reality with loveable, real-life protagonists and – in general – have an anthropological approach.
With the MAGIC methodology we introduced a new mindset on how to use the potential of documentaries in education.
4 countries, 10 schools and 18 secondary school teachers, trainers, documentary filmmakers, art educators and theorists have come together to create and carry out a pilot training course with 300 students between the ages of 14 and 19 in their respective countries.
In each country, the same steps were taken by the national teams. However, the socio-cultural backgrounds, the school’s pedagogical program were different as were the themes and films and lengths.
The original plan was to work on a jointly selected film, but it soon became clear that students in each country have different interests and needs.
So, we asked students which topics they were interested in. The choice of topic was also determined by the pedagogical program of the school or institution. The Bulgarian veterinary school, for example, focused about bees, followed by the effects of the environmental and climate crisis, others focused on adulthood or diversity.
During the pilot, it also became clear that the facilities and educational systems of the schools and the classes are different. The socio-cultural backgrounds of students should also be considered. The teacher therefore has a key role to play in the final choice of films. We also found that teachers’ knowledge of the genre of documentaries varies.
The trailers of the films used by the schools to develop the A MAGIC method are here.
In most of the schools involved, arts education was already part of the curriculum. Nevertheless, teachers often had to define the meaning of certain words in order to make them understandable to all. In a school where art was not an integral part of the curriculum, the teacher had a more difficult task in assessing how to integrate the new method into the curriculum. This difficulty was solved by doing and discussing the exercises together.
Teachers were given a guide for developing lesson plans. In the guide, we asked the questions that needed to be thought about and, if possible, gone through in order to run the pilot film education programme. The teachers interpreted the exercise in different ways and added their own experiences, which contributed to the innovation of the pilot film education programme.
The issue of comparability was also raised, as all schools followed the same schedule. Since comparability is influenced by the school system, the pedagogical programme of the school and the composition of the students in the class, a survey was carried out to collect the necessary baseline data from the schools.
The guide also included impact measurement practices. We wanted to see if and how much students’ opinions on the topic changed during the sessions. This exercise was very far from the usual school exercises, so we could not make it compulsory. We were very happy to get feedback from schools that they had done the impact measurement exercise we had developed together.
Teachers also gave feedback on their and students’ reactions and these have been collected.
The classroom was used for projections and activities. It provided a protected environment and an opportunity to experiment.
One of the key innovations of the project is the integration of fieldwork into the process. The field work provides an opportunity to gain practical experience after the topic presented in the film has been explored in depth by the students in the school environment. This activity helps them to explore a new perspective on the characters and the topic presented in the film. It is an activity that can have a lasting impact on the students.
The sequence of activities in the pilot film education programme was as follows:
- Selection of the topic and the film, survey of students’ attitudes towards the topic
- Preparing students for the topic of the film
- Screening of the film
- Processing emotions of the film and the topic using the artistic method and and re-survey
- Fieldwork
- Final survey
The methodology was first presented to a total of 60 colleagues and their views were incorporated into the final version, and finally we organized a presentation for 60 interested people in each of the four countries (240).
This is how the MAGIC Method and all its complementary materials were born.
Partners of the Magic project and their contribution
Bulgaria
National Vocational High School of Veterinary Medicine “Prof. Dr. D. Dimov” Lovec from the beautiful small town Lovec in Bulgaria implemented the pilot film education program and elaborated a toolkit to inspire educators to work with visual tools in their lessons.
Association “Civic Initiatives – Lovech” from Bulgaria carried out all event’s organization in partnership with the school, contributed to the pilot film education program and was responsible for project communication and monitoring.
Hungary
Kürt Alternatív Secondary School in Budapest compiled the technical material for a short, 30 hours-long teacher training.
Cromo Association brought together pilot film education programs from each country and collaborated directly with all the trainers to develop the Curriculum on which the Lesson Plans are based.
Palantír Film Visual Anthropological Foundation has carried out the Leader tasks and was responsible for the development of the platform and the Pedagogical Manual.
Lithuania
Youth Center Babilonas was responsible for the Student’s Feedback Manual, based on the experience of the involved teachers and students.
Inconvenient Films as a film festival organizer contributed to the Lithuanian pilot film education program due their experience on working with teachers and young people.
The Lithuanian team worked closely with Priekule Ieva Simonaityte gymnasium, Lithuania as the pilot film education program was carried out by two dedicated teachers from the school.
Nederlands
SKVR from the Netherlands has an exceptional situation as it is an Institution working with art in any form of education. SKVR carried out the Visual Diary about the participants’ journey of discovery.
Changes and Chances set up all useful information on how to organize together with students and implement a fieldwork. As it can be a completely new activity both for teachers and students, this MANUAL helps a lot to understand how fieldwork helps to achieve long lasting impact with documentaries.
The publications produced under the MAGIC project draw on the experiences of the pilot documentary film-based activity.
The Magic project is based on the Palantír Film Foundation’s Filmschool project. The Filmschool project was the first national research to assess the impact of documentary film. This project was the reference for the MAGIC project.
The Filmschool was about one selected film from the Palantír Film Foundation’s Strangers in My Garden film collection. The film was screened and processed with a social-dramatical method in 8 schools (300 students) in Budapest.
The Strangers in My Garden project is a documentary film collection about migration and integration. The film collection has 42 European award winning documentary films which are available for free in Hungary for educational purposes. The Pedagogical Manual promotes the use of the film collection.
The Manual contains a background study on migration, a study on the methodology of visual education as well as concrete pedagogical tools for the films organized in thematic categories. The Manual is easy to use and contains ideas, essays and exercises based on experience that can be easily adapted to the curriculum and structure of high school classes. The Manual is useful for high school teachers, university instructors, organizations and experts working on issues of migration and anthropologists, but we also encourage its use by students, those outside of formal education and those who have a general interest in the topic of migration.