Context
Too often we think of arts education as solely a medium for self-expression. Within the current  dominant field of student-centred education, with a high focus on individual learning paths, there is a risk for arts education to become self-centred and individualistic. In this "research in practice project", we have put a world-centred (rather than student-centred) view on arts education into practice by setting up ethnographic video documentary projects in several youth organisations in various European countries, including Limerick Youth Service in Ireland, Asociatia Curba de Cultură in Romania and Theaterhuis Mals Vlees in Belgium, along with the European Confederation of Youth Clubs and the UCLL, funded by the EU’s Erasmus+ programme under the name of Rural Youth Cinema. During the 2023 edition of ECER in Glasgow, we presented the preliminary results of this project. We are now reaching the end of this project and will present our final results, good practices developed along the way, and our thoughts on the pedagogical and educational consequences of our approach. 

Rationale
The decision of focussing on documentary making stemmed from a combination of pedagogical and pragmatic considerations. The medium of film and videomaking is relatively new as an arts educative practice in youth work. It has only been a decade since, particularly among younger generations, the accessibility and widespread availability of video creation increased significantly. Especially in the last few years, the rising popularity of video platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have made video content a prevalent experience for many youngsters, who now engage with it both as consumers and creators. From a pragmatic perspective, it can be effective to tap into this resource and explore this medium that virtually all youngsters already have some familiarity with. Moreover, for youth clubs it can be a low-expense medium as well, as smartphones have become ubiquitous. And yet from a pedagogical perspective, it is especially interesting as a focus on video documentary making is founded on a collaborative basis of co-creation, in which the makers (i.e. the youngsters) are compelled to adopt an outward view, into the world around them. In the act of “recording what is out there”, there is an alluring dynamic of agency between the maker and the medium, in which ephemeral elements and local ecosystems are elevated in favour of self-expression.

Goals and research questions
The goal of this Erasmus+ project, Rural Youth Cinema, is to explore audio-visual, ethnographic documentation as a tool for arts education through a hands-on, collaborative project. The results of this project are twofold: 1) there are the documentaries made in the various countries. These are testaments of the youth work and the local environments in which they were made, but also exemplify the artistic and educational potential of the practice. And 2) we have developed a qualitative methodology to guide youth workers in using ethnographic documentary making in their day-to-day activities. While existing guides focus on the technical tips to work with (smartphone) cameras, in our research we focused on the questions what does it mean to make documentaries with young, sometimes disadvantaged, people? How can documentary making promote and contribute to other arts education youth work activities? And above all, how can it thrive as an sustainable developing arts educative practice?

For this project, we have chosen to adopt a flexible methodology to pragmatically accommodate the operational differences among various organizations. More importantly, we view this project as an explorative and foundational study on the significance of ethnographic documentary in youth work, where specific results and recommendations were unknown at the project's inception. From the outset, our clear decision was to focus on ethnography as a broad direction for the documentaries. Similar to ethnographic or ethno-fictive writing, ethnographic documentary making possesses the unique ability not only to provide a voice for the author/documentary makers but also to highlight this voice (or voices) within the local environment. The makers, in this case, the youngsters, are featured on camera as they move and interact within their community. Consequently, documentary making becomes more than just a creative practice; it becomes a visual representation of the connections between the artistic medium (video documentary) and the context, environment, and day-to-day activities in which it unfolds. In the first phase of this project, we sought to emphasise experimentation and learning through doing. Youngsters were sent outside to make short video fragments without any clear instructions on filming technique, duration, subject, etc. It all started with the question to simply record what is out there, as short, fragmented diaries. These initial experiments serve as inspiration for the production of more comprehensive documentaries in the subsequent phase. A total of six documentaries will be created and showcased in the three participating countries. Following the presentation of these documentaries, we will develop a qualitative guide that delves into the various challenges and opportunities inherent in such a documentary project. Consequently, the activities and documentary work undertaken by the different partners serve as test case studies, mapping and analysing both the practical and artistic elements of documentary making.

In our presentation at ECER 2023 , which marked the halfway point of this project, we hypothesised that the medium of documentary making could act as an in-between instrument in which both forms of creativity and forms of reflection, and both forms of expression and forms of experience, could be integrated. As we are reaching the end of the project, we find that especially in the latter, in the reflective outward-looking element of documentary making, there is a great arts educative potential. It is the directness of videography, similar to photography, that affords an attitude of adaptiveness and sensitivity to the surroundings and the material that can be translated to other art forms as well. Moreover, there was great value in the collaborative aspect of making a documentary together, giving agency to the youngsters as groups with mixing roles.

Adams, T.E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (Eds.). (2021). Handbook of Autoethnography (2nd ed.). Routledge. Barbash, I., & Taylor, L. (1997). Cross-cultural filmmaking: A handbook for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos. University of California Press. Causey, A. (2017). Drawn to see: Drawing as an ethnographic method. University of Toronto Press. Kelly, P. (2016). Creativity and autoethnography: Representing the self in documentary practice. Screen Thought: A journal of image, sonic, and media humanities, 1(1), 1-9. Lee-Wright, P. (2009). The documentary handbook. Routledge. Lin, C. C., & Polaniecki, S. (2009). From Media Consumption to MediaProduction: Applications of YouTube™ in an Eighth-Grade Video Documentary Project. Journal of Visual Literacy, 28(1), 92-107. Pyles, D. G. (2016). Rural media literacy: Youth documentary videomaking as a rural literacy practice. Journal of Research in Rural Education (Online), 31(7), 1. Sancho-Gil, J. M., & Hernández-Hernández, F. (Eds.). (2020). Becoming an educational ethnographer: The challenges and opportunities of undertaking research. Routledge. Trivelli, C., & Morel, J. (2021). Rural youth inclusion, empowerment, and participation. The Journal of Development Studies, 57(4), 635-649. VanSlyke-Briggs, K. (2009). Consider ethnofiction. Ethnography and Education, 4(3), 335-345.