East Tennessee Table is a pedagogical collaboration between students, faculty, and community partners initiated at East Tennessee State University. Media & Communication students were plugged into the project through various entry points including a directing class, documentary class, GA positions, work study positions, and lab positions. This documentary web series was made by local faculty and students, about local characters, and is intended for a local audience. 

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The project is informed by the work of Patricia R. Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel (Open Space New Media Documentary : A Toolkit for Theory and Practice, 2018). They write:

In open space new media documentary, this particular idea of community serves as a relational and social construct built into the project and located in a specific place. In these works, community is not idealized, but is instead embodied, political, situated, and social. It is in constant movement through discourse and action. International commercial media worlds monetize documentary, while open space practices strengthen a community’s identity by sharing knowledge and designing collaborative insights and collective engagements with makers, subjects, and viewers. Open space strategies reorient documentary from a film “about” into a commons “for” by building spaces for convenings and exploration (Zimmerman and De Michiel 2017, 106).

​Creating media is media literacy: This experiential, hands-on project showed participants how reality television and non-fiction media have a connection to “the real” that is constructed using various strategies and techniques.

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Questions to consider:

• ​Non-fiction forms vary wildly. What are the implications of formal choices on the video and its reception?

• Consider how a news story presents a story versus how a documentary film might present the same event.

• Consider how diverse elements of video production (voice-over, sound effects, motion effects, etcetera) impact how you experience the video. What specific things do you notice? 

• ​How could you make a show for your community? How would you make your web series/documentary/video differently if you were imagining the specific place where you live?