Research
I research what happens when people make films together. Since 2015 I have made films with school students and teachers, artisanal fishers, artists and film club members, and taught filmmaking in schools, cultural centres and universities. In that work the film was only part of the outcome. The rest was what people learned while making it, and the relationships the making built.
My research asks how that happens and what it gives each side. It draws on three ideas: communities of practice, where what people learn depends on who they become in a group; Latin American educommunication, which holds that people learn by producing messages, not only by receiving them; and critical consciousness, an awareness of social conditions that grows from acting within them.
I work as a practitioner-researcher. I run the workshops and support the edit, and I study what shared decisions about a film do to the people who make it.
Background
My MSc in Education at the University of the State of Santa Catarina (UDESC), 2019 to 2021, studied how educommunication projects are managed, looking at how environmental organisations co-create media with communities. The dissertation proposed a framework of eight processes for managing educommunicative projects, published as a book chapter in 2023.
Before that, I spent six years in Educom.cine, a UDESC extension programme that ran filmmaking workshops in public schools. I delivered more than 50 workshops for over 200 students, teachers and community members, across generations. In one project, school students made a film on teenage pregnancy and interviewed local health workers. → Educom.cine
From 2021 to 2022 I was Educational Technology Analyst on Educom.Saúde-SP, a training project run by the University of São Paulo with the São Paulo State Health Department. I was producer and technical director for more than 50 webinars, reaching about 700 health professionals.
Since 2024 I have worked in Technology Enhanced Learning at Newcastle University's Faculty of Medical Sciences, producing educational media with academics, clinicians and patient groups.
Publications
Journal articles
Forthcoming: Gerhardinger, L.C., Martini, R.G., da Silveira, I., Bosolani, A., Lazaro, J.R.C. et al. 'Advancing transformative agency in educommunicative ecosystems: contributions to critical ocean literacy in Brazil', Ecology and Society. Accepted for publication.
2026: Hood, B., Jardine, H.-A., Reynolds, A., Barron, C., Dixon, A., Barrow, A., Fortune, M., Lazaro, J. and Irvin, A. 'Digital learning to support recruitment into cancer clinical research nursing: evaluation of a national e-learning course', Cancer Nursing Practice, 25(5), e1917. doi: 10.7748/cnp.2026.e1917
Book chapters
2023: Lazaro, J. 'Gestão de projetos educomunicativos: uma proposta de processos' [Management of educommunicative projects: a proposal of processes]. In Soares, I. de O. et al. (eds) Educomunicação e Educação Midiática nas Práticas Sociais e Tecnológicas pelos Direitos Humanos e Direitos da Terra. São Paulo: ABPEducom.
2023: Martini, R.G., de Oliveira, L., Rosa, I., Lazaro, J. and Silene, S. 'Educom.Cine: produção áudio-scripto-visual colaborativa na educação básica'. In Soares, I. de O. et al. (eds) Educomunicação e Educação Midiática. São Paulo: ABPEducom.
2021: Lazaro, J., Martini, R.G., Lins, J.S., Varela, M.L.D. and Vanderlinde, R. 'Educom.Cine: uma experiência de extensão universitária integrada ao Programa Novo Mais Educação'. In Soares, I. de O. and Viana, C.E. (eds) Trajetórias da Educomunicação nas Políticas Públicas e a Formação de seus Profissionais. São Paulo: ABPEducom, pp. 232 to 248.
Workshops and talks
The workshops are where the research questions come from.
2025 to present: Education programme as elected Education Officer, Newcastle Film Club. → Newcastle Film Club
2025: Developing Digital Skills: Video and Animation Ideas for Higher Education, workshop. Learning and Teaching Conference, Newcastle University.
2024 to 2025: Video production workshops. Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle.
2024: Introduction to Editing, workshop. Newcastle Film Club.
2024: Video Editing Workflow, talk. Staff Creative Forum, Newcastle University.
2017 to 2020: 20+ media production workshops for 150+ participants. Santa Catarina Culture Foundation, Florianópolis.
2015 to 2021: 50+ video and animation workshops for 200+ participants. Educom.cine, UDESC.
Key concepts
Educommunication. A Latin American tradition that joins education and communication. People learn through dialogue and participation, by producing messages rather than only receiving them, and communication works only when it runs both ways (Kaplún, 1998).
Community filmmaking. Films made by communities for their own self-representation, as well as films made about or for them (Malik, Chapain and Comunian, 2017). In film co-production, the people involved share the creative decisions.
Communities of practice. Learning through taking part in a group, where the identity people take on in that group shapes what they learn there (Wenger, 1998).
Critical consciousness. An awareness of the contradictions in a social reality that grows from acting within it (Freire, 1970).