Faculty Focus

Bill Kuykendall has been leading an effort to develop a documentary of the UMaine-Bangor Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC).  His involvement taps many different facets of his personal and professional interests. For Bill, COPC is an opportunity to strengthen his students’ involvement in the community so they can begin to see themselves as active consumers, not passive observers of the world around them.  “I always want my students to create a narrative that is engaging and informative.  Today’s technology allows anyone to take part, but good, responsible documentaries put the subject first, and take into consideration the totality of the individual and their experience.  The end result should grab the viewer, and be able to move people who didn’t think they had an interest.”

This past spring Bill Kuykendall and one of his students, Colin McGovern, joined hundreds of other faculty and professionals from around the world to take part in an international conference on Community-University Partnerships at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell The two day conference highlighted components of successful university-community partnerships and sought to address questions of ownership, involvement, and commitment between the two entities.  Bill and Colin’s presentation entitled, “Using Documentary Methods to Build Partnerships,” was an example of how a student project is being used to help the UMaine-Bangor COPC explore issues of affordable housing, aging, and health care for the Bangor area.  http://www.uml.edu/com/cita/conferenceinfo2007.html.

For Bill, there is unlimited power in combining the techniques of documentation (oral history, photojournalism, filmmaking, etc) and the community involvement that COPC offers.  “Participants can be actively engaged as partners in self documentation—in telling not only their own stories, but the community’s stories and those of the community- university partnership as well.”  As the UMaine-Bangor COPC project moves forward, Bill, his colleagues, and his students will continue to document the process as well as bring life to the hidden stories behind community issues.  http://newmedia.umaine.edu/generic.php?id=221