By Lenore Devore, B.S., Journalism 1984
As CJC Faculty Mentor of the Year, Houston Wells makes sure no student slips through the cracks, prompting those who’d rather be anonymous to engage in classes and assignments.
“I look back, even as far back as high school, and sometimes it was just the teacher who made a difference,” said Wells, senior lecturer teaching video and documentary production in the Media Production, Management, and Technology Department. “The content is important, but so is somebody who just reaches out. As an instructor and faculty member, I sometimes reflect on my own experiences and how easy it was to feel anonymous. You’re one of dozens of students in a class, so it’s very easy to sort of feel like you are slipping under the radar a bit. I try not to let any of my students feel that way.”
Sometimes, students like the attention. Others would rather be left alone, to fly under the radar, he explained.
“I don’t want to let them do that. In my field, a huge part of what we are asking them to do as professionals is to interact with other people, and in some cases those people might be strangers. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but I want to interact with them, and that takes the form of mentoring. Sometimes it’s academic, sometimes it’s more like career counseling.”
A little bit of “talk therapy,” as Wells calls it, can be beneficial. “Sometimes it’s good – it’s a big scary world out there when you’re getting ready to graduate and it’s nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off of, who’s in your corner and has confidence in your abilities.”
He stays focused on what each student needs in the moment, he said.
“It’s different for every student. It’s a little bit of the philosophy I carry with me that I hope benefits them in some way. It helps me individualize what I’m doing instead of just standing in front of the classroom – it’s interacting.”
Wells has lived in Florida since moving to Pensacola in second grade. He took every science class in high school as he prepared to become a vet, earning a bachelor’s in zoology from the University of Florida in 1994. But he decided not to follow that path and switched gears, getting a master’s in secondary science education from UF in 1995. That led to a job teaching high school biology and marine science for four years.
That’s where he met a TV production teacher and thought his class looked fun, and he would like to teach it. He started exploring post-graduate production courses and discovered the Documentary Institute at CJC.
“I had stars in my eyes. I left my career as a high school teacher and went back to grad school,” where he and his wife “lived as impoverished grad students again.”
He earned his third degree, a master’s in Documentary Television Production in 2001, and hasn’t looked back.
He keeps his classes interesting by changing class material based on what’s current while always relying on the classics. He uses everything from “Seinfeld” to “Breaking Bad” to showcase brilliant technical and character storytelling, “Psycho" to highlight music that sets the tone, and The Shining to highlight symmetry.
“You can look at technical things, and also storytelling and how storytelling has changed over the years, but the heart of it has not really changed,” Wells said. “Something that doesn’t change: We’re still just people. When you are 19 or 20 or 21 and you are finding your place in the world, and it’s exciting but also a little daunting, that doesn’t change. We all want to be valued, we all want to be seen. Behind every single student and every faculty member and reporter, we all have this big mess of a life that’s not on display. It is a joy to me to be able to offer support at this intersection of their crazy life and the classroom.”
One thing that helps Wells when dealing with students – he interacts with them from the introductory Fundamentals of Production class to advanced documentary courses. In the intermediary classes, he asks students to find examples of short nonfiction filmmaking online that they share with the class.
“What appeals to them is when there is an element they want to emulate or change,” he said. “Sometimes I will reach out to the people who made the film. We will watch the film in class and surprise, all of a sudden we will have the filmmaker on a Zoom call. Students can ask the filmmaker things like what drove them to make this documentary.”
Documentaries used to be standard historical pieces that included still images, music, celebrities reading text from old letters and the like. Now, there are many outlets for documentaries like “Tiger King” on streaming platforms like Netflix. Wells occasionally shows students small segments of those, often leading to them wanting to watch the rest.
A big part of his classes is developing their skills so they can create their own documentaries, which they do on Day 1 of their senior year. That includes teaching students who want to enter the world of production how to talk to strangers and build relationships.
“They hear that from me all the time,” he said. “It’s counter to everything they’ve been learning since elementary school. If you want to work in production, nobody is going to come knock on your door when you’re starting out asking for you to do work. So you’ve got to talk to strangers – not just in the realm of you’re trying to make a documentary but if you’re trying to create a career in the business.”
Most students don’t know how to do that when they’re starting out. They have to build a relationship with the subject of a documentary before they ever take the camera out.
“I feel like when they learn to do that in the creation of a documentary, they realize, ‘Oh my God, if you just go knock on a door or make a phone call, if you ask people to tell you about their fascinating lives, many are thrilled to do that.’ And that comes as a shock because that’s not the way we live our lives these days.”
The skills they develop to make a documentary are the same ones they will use in developing their careers, he said.
“Sometimes it’s who you know and sometimes you’ve got to get to know new people. Hopefully, the micro lesson they learn taking a semester course with me is a macro lesson they can learn in developing a career.”
