Flint Med: Unpacking Layers of Learning as Film Students Follow Medical Students Helping Flint Residents

• In Event: 58.082 - Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: 58.082-20 - Lessons From Flint: Engaging Learners With Environmental Crises

Abstract

In an environmental disaster such as the Flint water crisis, the need for education touches everyone who lives and works in the affected area. The opportunities for learning also are abundant, reaching beyond the immediate community to include nearby students and educators motivated to respond to the crisis.

This presentation dissects the many layers of environmental education inherent in an innovative collaboration between a nearby university’s communication college, the university’s medical college and the people of Flint. Through a project tentatively titled “Flint Med,” film students plan to spend two years documenting a cohort of medical students as they work and study in Flint, teaching residents to protect their health in the wake of the lead contamination in their drinking water. So learners in this project include the film students, the medical students and the Flint residents -- all grappling with and learning from issues familiar to environmental educators.

This project is grounded in the documentary film tradition of creating a record of socio-political significance (Aufderheide, 2007). Taylor’s ideas about voice and agency in the era of digital communications (2014) also resonate through this work.

The purpose of “Flint Med” is to capture real-life narratives of young physicians to-be as they grapple with the aftermath in Flint of the exposure of the population to alarming levels of lead in the water. This project will create a feature-length documentary film about third-year medical students selected to participate in a Leadership in Medicine for the Underserved (LMU) Program in Flint. Only 16 of 80 applicants are chosen for the two-year program based upon their proficiency in Spanish and a demonstration of their desire to serve disadvantaged communities. The language is a requirement because students are likely to interact with the Hispanic community in Flint and will also work later in the LMU program with impoverished urban and rural populations in Central and South American countries. What is more important is that these students display empathy in their essays in the application and in the activities they’ve engaged in prior to LMU.

The news satellite trucks already have left Flint, but this project will continue at least for the next two years during the length of the LMU program. Our film will entertain, maybe anger, and also act as a teaching tool and model for universities responding to environmental crises through a range of inter-connected learning experiences.

Authors

• Geri Alumit Zeldes, Michigan State University

• Hannah Brenner, Michigan State University

• Rae Schnuth, Michigan State University