Reshaping housing pedagogy and public policy through documentaries in Lagos, Nigeria

Academics, in their roles as higher education teachers and researchers continually face the need to draw the attention of various audiences to compelling issues in their cities. In this article, we present examples of how documentaries can be used to communicate to students and policy makers in a more realistic and engaging way. We show how the two academic co-authors improved academic and non-academic learning outcomes by adopting student made documentaries as a pedagogical tool in teaching a final year class about deep-rooted housing problems in Lagos. We also show the role academia can play in documentary production to enable research communication to the policy sector. We point out that academia must be able to transform from their roles as teachers and as researchers, to explore other non-printed traditional communication routes so as to engage more effectively with their end-users. Thus, the use of documentaries must be contextualised and adopted with recognition of newer forms of engagement, such as social media. Nevertheless, we promote the tremendous value of documentaries as both a pedagogical and social advocacy tool in the housing sector.