Communicative Practices of an Educator in Integrating Broadcasting Experience in Teaching Documentary Filmmaking to Amplify Marginalized Voices

Abstract

Despite the growing recognition of documentary filmmaking as a pedagogical tool for amplifying marginalized voices, the communicative practices through which practitioner-educators translate professional media experience into documentary instruction remain underexamined in the literature. This study investigates how my professional broadcasting experience, accumulated through more than a decade of work in radio, news writing, and digital production, is enacted as a structured set of communicative practices within documentary filmmaking pedagogy in a Bachelor of Arts in Communication program at Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Colleges in General Santos City, Philippines.

Using auto-ethnomethodology, I analyzed instructional artifacts from my own courses, including course syllabi, documentary proposal guidelines, and consultation and feedback texts. The analysis revealed six broadcast-informed communicative practices: structuring, institutionalizing, and monitoring an accountable documentary production workflow; critiquing, mentoring, and refining through dialogic and iterative processes; constructing, structuring, and diagnosing audience-centered narrative coherence; designing and making visual meaning in documentary storytelling; representing and probing context-sensitive and inclusive documentary subjects; and applying and enforcing professional broadcasting standards in documentary outputs. Each practice is underpinned by a corresponding development communication perspective, positioning documentary pedagogy as participatory, ethically grounded, and socially responsive.

The findings demonstrate that the amplification of marginalized voices is not a single act but a cumulative communicative outcome built progressively across all six practices, each functioning as a distinct mechanism through which marginalized communities are represented deliberately, refined iteratively, and carried into public discourse with credibility.

This study contributes to film education and development communication scholarship by demonstrating how broadcasting-derived communicative practices constitute a coherent pedagogical infrastructure for amplifying marginalized voices, with particular relevance for practitioner-educators and regional higher education institutions in the Global South.