Campus to clients: enhance tax courses with documentaries, news segments, and other nonfiction video resources.

• Author: Nellen, Annette

MANY STUDENTS TODAY ARE PROFOUNDLY "visual learners." They have grown up bombarded by a visual culture that includes the internet, video games, television, and movies. In contrast, "visual teaching" by tax professors often consists of a batch of PowerPoint slides and computations on a blackboard. Until the last decade, tax academics have had few viable audiovisual alternatives. But things have changed. Valuable nonfiction film and video resources for tax courses, specifically documentary films, news segments, and news stories can be found at many video libraries and video-sharing websites. These nonfiction offerings should help professors expand upon tax lessons, emphasize important social justice issues, and explain the role that taxes play in politics.

Why Should Tax Professors Use Nonfiction Video in the Classroom?

The value of a well-made documentary or news segment is manifold. It often imparts knowledge in a way students will remember. A well-made documentary or news segment tells a compelling story. And students often remember a story when they cannot remember facts or concepts. Nonfiction video also invites discussion, engaging students in a way that allows professors to reinforce those elusive facts and concepts. Videos can encourage critical thinking about the subject matter, along with practice in critical viewing skills. Many documentaries can also illustrate the use of rhetoric, enabling students to examine how arguments are constructed.

The video resources referred to in this article are not meant to be a substitute for responsible teaching. A teaching professional should be able to explain the tax law as well as any multimedia instructional tool. Video resources should be used to enhance the power of a lecture, supercharge class discussions, and increase student understanding. Many nonfiction tax films and videos have an intensely ethical component, providing a launching pad for a discussion of the ethics of tax policy or the tax profession. Others allow students to move beyond tax theory and rhe numbers to see the effect of the tax law on real people. The videos often expose students to social justice and tax fairness issues they might not confront in the real world. In short, many of these film and video resources give an instructor the opportunity to make a lasting impression on students.

Video Best Practices

The video best practice suggestions that follow are distilled from academic literature and interviews with teaching professionals and students. How to best use a specific video as an instruction aid depends on several factors. These include the instructor's teaching/learning objectives, the length of the video, and whether the video is to be viewed in class or assigned as homework.

Video Selection

Best practices begin with a proper assessment of the usefulness of a video's content...