Critical scholars from media industry, critical media literacy, and critical pedagogy backgrounds have provided considerable groundwork in articulating a critical media production pedagogy (CMPP). Synthesizing critical pedagogy reflection with media production action should serve to deepen analysis and understanding of media texts as well as provide a mode of transformation via the creation of new texts. Missing from this formulation, I argue, are clear means for enacting CMPP in classroom practice. There are relatively few resources detailing how to implement critical pedagogy aims through concrete materials such as syllabi, assessments, project parameters, and equipment training. Nor do available resources speak to the specific challenges production instructors face in implementing critical methods, be that the difficulty of avoiding the technicist trap or in facing student resistance to non-standard approaches. The aim of this project is to offer a pragmatic guide for actualizing CMPP, such that production instructors have clear strategies for using the approach. In service of that goal, I rely on interviews conducted with 22 media production instructors currently teaching at U.S. colleges or universities. Using a long interview methodology (McCracken, 1988), I document their collective experiences blending critical and technical concepts in their production courses, including the challenges they’ve faced and the strategies they’ve developed for overcoming these issues. As a supplement to interviews, I have also collected teaching artifacts including syllabi, assignments, and rubrics from study participants in order to document how these educators translate critical goals into effective teaching practice.
The use of interviews and artifacts to examine these themes is an attempt to expand my understanding around critical approaches to media production pedagogy, a goal inspired by my own production teaching experience as well as the existing literature upon which the CMPP is built. Speaking directly with production educators, I believe, offers an untapped resource of knowledge on this subject. In the four institutions in which I’ve taught, I’ve encountered many instructors using creative and critically-oriented ways of teaching both with and through media production. These weren’t self-identified critical pedagogues looking to challenge transmission-style approaches or bridge the theory practice gap; they were instructors with interests in media theory and production simply connecting dots in the moment. From the several years I’ve spent theorizing CMPP, I’ve come to believe that the most valuable knowledge lies with instructors like these. However, their critical approaches rarely go beyond their specific classrooms or institutions, and are unlikely to be shared through the usual channels of journal articles or conference presentations. Instructor perspectives, of course, do not paint a complete picture of CMPP. Most notably, they overlook the experience of students. Yet in thinking through the questions that this research is interested in, I argue that they are a hugely valuable and underutilized resource.
The goal of this project will be to compile a portion of this wide swath of approaches and experiences, detailing the specific methods by which instructors use media production as a critical teaching tool, and organizing this collective knowledge into an actionable method for implementing CMPP. Another crucial goal in gathering different educators’ classroom approaches is to openly credit their ideas in a more widely recognized manner. I also hope that codifying the collective ideas of these instructors can help to build a wider network of media educators looking to learn or share CMPP methods.
The following sections of this chapter will detail my use of Long Interview and Thematic Analysis to collect and analyze instructors’ experiences and teaching strategies. It will then provide in-depth background on the instructors interviewed for this project, including relevant information related to their academic, non-academic, and personal backgrounds. I offer these data as a means of exploring the “distancing dichotomies” Sholle & Denski (1993) describe as historically separating media practice and theory. Finally, it will explain my data analysis process and set up the organizational structure of the subsequent findings chapters.
The Long Interview
Interviews and site visits were structured using a Long Interview methodology. The Long Interview, as McCracken (1988) outlines, involves a four-part method of inquiry:
- Review of analytic categories
- Review of cultural categories and interview design
- Discovery of cultural categories and interview
- Discovery of analytic categories and analysis/write-up.
The review of analytic categories in stage one includes an “exhaustive” review of existing literature, one that “constructs an inventory of the categories and relationships” that the interview will explore (McCracken, 1988, p. 32). The literature offered in the previous chapter serves as the basis for my inventory of topics, a list that, in addition to the Freirean concepts that form the theoretical core of this project, includes Sholle & Denski’s (1993) distancing dichotomies, Masterman’s (1985) technicist trap, Manovich’s (2013) software studies, and Kellner & Share’s (2019) alternative text production among others.
The second stage of long interview inquiry involves a review of cultural categories, wherein “the investigator begins the process of using the self as an object of inquiry” (McCracken, 1988, p. 32). Building off the exhaustive literature of stage one, the researcher applies the same scrutiny to themselves, providing a “more systematic and detailed” view of their relation to the topic (p. 33). From this familiarization of the self to the topic, the review then looks to defamiliarize oneself, building critical distance in order to better map pre-existing assumptions and understandings.
The third stage—discovery of cultural categories/interview—involves formalizing the questionnaire and conducting interviews. The structure of questionnaires “provides a sense of direction” for the interview, ensuring that important categories are touched upon while giving respondents plenty of space “to tell their story on their own terms” (McCracken, 1988, p.34). Stage three also involves the selection of interview participants, a process governed not by quantitative sampling conventions, but predicated on finding individuals who possess a special knowledge of the subject.
In the final phase, data collected through interviews is analyzed and written up into findings. McCracken (1988) outlines an additional five sub-stages in this process, which include three distinct rounds of observing interview transcripts and field notes to develop and test themes, followed by a formalization of key themes, and finally the transformation of these themes into final theses.
The remainder of this section will lay out my own application of McCracken’s (1988) four stages of inquiry, including a self-review of my positionality and paradigmatic alignment, an explanation of how material from the literature review will be used to produce cultural codes, the adaptation of these codes into structuring an interview questionnaire, my process for selecting interview participants, and the means by which I will analyze and interpret data.
Positionality & Paradigm
I position myself in this research as both an instructor and a scholar. Both of these roles have come with a number of privileges that are important to address with regards to my relationship to this project. As an instructor, I have been lucky to build up a great deal of teaching experience across a range of subjects and classroom spaces. The majority of this instruction, however, has come in auxiliary roles, specifically as a teaching assistant, adjunct, or practicum instructor. I have not had a great deal of experience designing my own courses or in contributing to curriculum planning efforts. As critical pedagogy and media literacy scholars note, the individual teacher only has so much influence in choosing course subject matter (Sholle & Denski, 1993; Kellner & Share, 2019). Critical media production, by nature of bringing together historically separated theory and practice based courses, must operate at this higher curricular level. In conversations with interview participants working in administrative capacities, I often touched on curricular elements as a means to overcome this limitation in my own experience. Further, as a white, able-bodied, cis-gender male, I have not experienced the issues of asserting classroom authority that have plagued many of my colleagues with more marginalized identities. My selection of interview participants deliberately sought to account for my personal blindspots, capturing the experiences of those who have faced these challenges and can speak to them more perceptibly.
Following my theoretical framework in critical pedagogy, I position my work as a scholar within the critical paradigm. Teaching media, as well as viewing or creating our own, are political acts set in socially constructed doctrines, myths, and beliefs, all of which can exert power over individuals, groups, and societies (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000). This power is often hidden through hegemonic, or ‘commonsense’ beliefs that are perceived as natural, necessary, or inevitable (Kellner & Share, 2019; Tracy 2013). Pedagogy acts as the most powerful method for uncovering the workings of power and as providing a mode of liberation for speaking back to that power. As I have outlined earlier, critical pedagogy is not just the process of a teacher giving knowledge to a student. Whether through a Freirean process of mutual dialogue between student and teacher or the in-program tutorials that allow editing software to teach itself to students, pedagogy is an altogether more complex process. Locating power within this process, be that with software, student, or otherwise, will be crucial in critically theorizing a production pedagogy.
My research will also allude to poststructural questions, in particular the unstable and interactional nature of meaning (Tracy, 2013). This slippage provides opportunity for both educators and producers to locate practices for disrupting hegemonic meanings and asserting alternatives (Kellner & Share, 2019). In working to challenge hegemonic representations in my research and teaching, I also must acknowledge my own privileged position outside many of the representations I aim to challenge. Many popular media texts are the product of individuals like myself: white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Given the limitations of my perspective, it is important in this research for me to be open to different understandings of what it means to perform this work critically, of what it means to challenge representations, the risks that come with making a challenge, and the means by which production can be transformative. None of these terms can adhere to static definitions. I have attempted to bring this reflexive understanding to my own interview practice and subsequent data analysis, addressing the ways in which my worldview might limit my understanding of or engagement with critical issues.
Interview Recruitment
The most substantial data collection aspect of the project consisted of collecting interviews from critically-minded media production instructors. My criteria for defining what qualifies as a “critically-minded production scholar” comes from their relation to a number of key topics and terms previously referred to in the literature, including critical, media production, pedagogy, professionalism, hegemonic representation, and alternative texts. The scope of this project is further limited to instructors teaching within a Communication or Communication-adjacent departments such as Media Studies, Journalism, and Film Studies. A handful of participants fell outside of this scope as faculty members of English, Art, and Education departments. I justify their inclusion through the alignment of their teaching methods with the “critically-minded production scholar” criteria established for this project.
Recruitment did not involve formal parameters with regards to diversity; however, I was deliberate in seeking out participants that could address my limited positionality through their background and experience. The majority of instructors interviewed qualify–within the context of the white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual standard of most production instructors at least–as belonging to a marginalized identity. I found early in the recruitment process that I did not need to make a concerted effort to seek out instructors from these marginalized backgrounds, as these individuals have the most personal investment in challenging established modes of production instruction and media text creation.
As noted in the previous chapter, media production and studies courses–along with the instructors that teach them–have historically been separated. Instructors who do both, as Boulton (2016) notes, are considered “unicorns” by nature of their dual training in production and theory. My experience in finding participants did feel akin to trying to locate unicorns. This difficulty may be a symptom of the relatively small number of critically-minded production instructors currently active in higher education. It may also be because these instructors have few means by which to be recognized for their pedagogy beyond their home campuses, a symptom of the invisibility of much CMPP work. My methods of recruiting participants involved five primary methods:
- Personal relationships with or recommendations given to the author
- Faculty bios or published course descriptions available on department websites that showcased a clear interest in CMPP approaches
- Published works related to the subject of media production and critical pedagogy/critical media literacy
- Presentations related to CMPP themes given at Communication or media production related conferences such as the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, and the University Film and Video Association
- Affiliations with organizations such as EDIT Media that promote critical modes of production teaching
Over the course of the interview collection stage, I reached out to 55 instructors via their institutional emails inviting them to participate in the project. Of these requests, 22 instructors ultimately agreed to and went forward with the interview process. Full names, institutional affiliations, and instructional backgrounds and interests of all interview participants are listed below:
Interview Participants
| NAME | AFFILIATION | INSTRUCTIONAL BACKGROUND |
| Chris Boulton | University of Tampa | A production instructor and, during his PhD years at UMass Amherst, a T.A. for the TV Process course in which I’m currently teaching. Comes from a professional background in television production/marketing, and continues to work as a filmmaker. He is also one of the few scholars to have recently published work on the theory/practice tension in media production. |
| Mark Blaine | University of Oregon | Former colleague at the SOJC whose reflective and reflexive approach to teaching production helped me formulate many of my early pedagogical ideas. Comes from a professional photojournalism background, and continues to produce longform documentary and photo projects. |
| Malia Bruker | Florida State University | UFVA Gender Caucus and EDIT Media member who integrates her documentary making practice toward her critical approach to production courses. One of a handful of participants without a PhD, a status that has greatly influenced academic standing. |
| Jane Cubbage | Bowie State University | Video production instructor whose critical work on disability studies extends to her classroom practice and scholarship. The only participant currently working at an HBCU, a perspective that greatly informs her teaching of hegemonic standards in her production courses. |
| Ruth Goldman | Buffalo State College | EDIT Media member and community media maker/advocate. Not coming from a professional media background like most of the other participants along with her dual appointment in Women and Gender Studies makes her perspective particularly unique. |
| Steve Goodman | New York University/Educational Media Center | Founder of the Educational Media Center and author of Teaching Youth Media, an incredibly influential work on this research. Though the majority of his teaching focused on high school aged students, his writing on and experience in integrating critical pedagogy with video production instruction makes his perspective incredibly valuable for this project. |
| David Gracon | Gonzaga University | Educator and filmmaker whose presentation at the 2020 UFVA conference on critical uses of multicam media production put him on the radar of this project. Like Goldman, he comes from a more DIY/community media rather than a professional production background, and speaks candidly to the difficulties of integrating this “non-standard” approach in many university settings. |
| Oscar Guerra | University of Connecticut Stamford | Filmmaker, instructor, and scholar whose work looks to produce media that provides a way for underrepresented groups to share and disseminate counterstories. His professional production experience outside of the U.S. along with his work with majority minority students at UC Stamford make his perspective of particular value. |
| Annie Laure Nichols | St. Vincent College | Visual designer and educator whose presentations in the Visual Communication division of NCA spoke closely to the synthesis of production and critical theory. Unlike the majority of participants, her teaching and professional work focus on design rather than video production. |
| Adam R. Levine | Amherst College | Film professor and visual artist who teaches Amherst’s introductory video production course aimed at blending technical and creative elements. His approach to video production instruction is more informed by an arts approach than any other participant in this project, a valuable outlook for reimagining standard practices in Communication-based teaching. |
| Lisa Heyamoto | University of OregonSOJC (School of Journalism and Communication) | Former advisor and instructor who oversees (and typically teaches a section of) the SOJC’s massive Gateway to Media production course. Oregon’s department has a particularly strong professional orientation, which makes her own negotiation of critical and professional goals in coordinating the classes intriguing. |
| Elizabeth LeDoux | Bentley University | Educator whose critical pedagogy work presented at the University of Film and Video Association made her a strong candidate for this project. Her home campus of Bentley is a small, business-focused school, meaning few of her students are interested in pursuing media pipeline positions. Her teaching thus reimagines what production courses might offer students beyond specific job training. |
| Patrick Keating | Trinity University | Former cinematographer whose teaching and scholarship combines film production and theory. His approach is very humanities oriented, drawing heavily from video essay format to re-imagine technical production activities as a form of critical analysis. |
| Oscar Keyes | Virginia Commonwealth University | Educator recommended by study participant Jen Proctor. Member of UFVA and contributor to EDIT Media, who works closely with instructors at VCU to help develop critical production teaching methods. His work of instructing instructors on production instruction provided particular insight. |
| Michael Mulchay | University of Arizona | Educator whose critical pedagogy work presented at the University of Film and Video Association made him a strong candidate for this project. |
| Keith Oppenheim | Champlain College | Former CNN reporter and video production instructor with whom I co-directed a journalism summer camp for Russian exchange students the previous summer. Comes to the subject from a much more professional background, which greatly informed his views on critical subject matter. |
| Tanju Özdemir | University of Connecticut | Filmmaker and video production instructor whose more contemplative work studies human relationships, dreams, memories and the contemporary experiences of life. His perspective as an active filmmaker with an international background made his viewpoints on teaching a unique asset. |
| Jennifer Proctor | University of Michigan Dearborne | Documentarian, educator, UFVA Gender Caucus and Diversity member, EDIT Media co-founder, and scholar with numerous publications on the topic of critical approaches to teaching video production were foundational to this project. |
| Damiana G. Pyles | Appalachian State College | Scholar/educator/practitioner who has published “Developing an Ethics of Youth Media Production Using Media Literacy, Identity, & Modality” recently in the Journal of Media Literacy Education. |
| Jeff Share | University of California Los Angeles | Educator, photographer, and critical media literacy scholar whose published works greatly informed this project. Coming from a professional photography background, his teaching–with K-12 as well as college-aged students–directly integrates Freirean ideas. |
| Laura Vasquez | Northern Illinois State University | UFVA Gender Caucus Member and EDIT Media Co-Founder whose teaching work on EDIT made her an excellent fit for this project. Her background in the film industry in particular offers a useful perspective for thinking through the critical versus professional tension so central to this project. |
Instructor Background
Writing some three decades ago, Sholle & Denski (1993) identified “distancing dichotomies” as driving the split between production practice and media theory. Some dichotomies including teacher/student and theory/practice are in keeping with the Freirean framing of Sholle & Denski’s research. Others, including professional/professor and applied/academic refer more specifically to media production pedagogy, where the split between production-oriented instructors with industry backgrounds and theory-based professors with PhDs has hindered critical approaches. My difficulty in recruiting critically-minded production instructors speaks in some part to the continued existence of these dichotomies. More instructive are the experiences instructors interviewed for this project shared regarding their own struggles in navigating dichotomies.
The majority of participants had received a PhD at the time of interview. All remaining instructors possessed a Master’s degree such as an MFA. A handful of participants came to production through theory, with one prevailing route being an exposure to production work through T.A. assignments as graduate students. The more common trajectory was for instructors to come to theory from production. The production backgrounds of these instructors proved more varied. Roughly half of participants held some professional industry experience in television, radio, graphic design, or film production. Similar to my own experience, many entered grad school due to dissatisfaction with industry work:
I was working in public television in Mexico. I didn’t like it that much. I wanted to do something more stable. And with the teaching stuff, I saw that I could continue to do my own filmmaking. I was able to get a scholarship to get my PhD at UNC, and I got a chance to teach what I love, which is with cameras and media environments. It was not something I carefully planned to be honest (O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020).
A second category were instructors that self-identified as artists or filmmakers. For some in this group, graduate studies offered a way to bring more theoretical knowledge to their production work. Others viewed their academic training and the teaching jobs it afforded more as a means of funding their art/filmmaking process. A final category of instructors pivoted to teaching by necessity, typically due to a lack of reliable industry career prospects or an inability to continue their professional practice:
Basically, I developed severe carpal tunnel in both wrists. I couldn’t see my way to a PhD in graphic design; it was just too technically focused. What I loved about my time in school was the theory part, and that had mostly happened in my Communication classes. So I did an BA to PhD degree in Communication, and then found this position where they were looking for someone in a comm department who could also teach graphic design and visual communication. And I’m like “oh hi, I’m the one of those that there is.
A.L. Nichols, Personal Interview, September 4, 2020
Nichols speaks here to the continued “unicorn” status of instructors with both theory and production training. Instructors were by and large aware of this unique status within their departments, with some expressing concern for their rarity:
I’m really the only faculty member in the Communication department that feels comfortable in video production. And that’s problematic. We had a job search recently where I was on the committee. It was a film studies kind of seat that had been vacated. And I was arguing that half of our major is authoring and production, we’ve got a dozen faculty and I’m the only production person. We need more production people if we’re going to say we do both.
C. Boulton, Personal Interview, August 28, 2020
Instructors described many institutional practices that worked to maintain distancing dichotomies. One issue was a clear separation between media studies and production and faculty:
Even those departments with production built in, production and studies have a line drawn between them. That happens among the faculty, among the curriculum, and among the students. Never the two shall meet. Even when production is a consideration, it’s often carved off.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
This separation is often inscribed through graduate school training, where curricula focus fully on developing one skill or the other. Bruker speaks to her experiences with partitioning through her own MFA background:
I didn’t interact with any PhDs. It was pretty siloed in that way. It was just film-school brain. But there was a colloquium that was taught that walked us through how to thrive in academia, how to publish, how to put together a CV. It wasn’t presented as a major track, but a few of us took note and started going to UFVA conferences.
M. Bruker, Personal Interview, October 23, 2020
In contrast to film school training, graduate education in Communication and Media Studies-related fields–with rare exceptions–includes no required production-related coursework. For some instructors, this lack of inclusion reflects not just an oversight, but the diminished status of production work in these departments:
I literally had one of the production professors when I was a graduate student come into one of the graduate courses and said “you’re gonna be treated as a second class citizen.” We are second class citizens in the minds of academics.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
As Proctor elaborates, the siloing of production and studies reproduces a logic among faculty, administrators, and students that the two are naturally discrete:
Something I heard from students over and over again was that what they would learn in their production courses was not reinforced in their studies courses, and vice versa. It just felt like they were in two different programs. That’s also because the faculty don’t talk. They don’t design the departmental curricula around the idea that these courses should be in conversation with each other.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
The institutionalization of this logic posed concrete challenges for instructors looking to bridge the production/studies divide.
It was really hard for me to get people to write letters for me. There aren’t that many people who teach production who make it to professor. FSU wants you to have full professors write your letters, and there are just so few full professors teaching production.
M. Bruker, Personal Interview, October 23, 2020
As Nichols affirms through her own post-graduate school experience: “I had no idea there were any jobs like this. It’s a very unusual space” (A.L. Nichols, Personal Interview, September 4, 2020).
Related to this institutionalized divide, it is worth noting that none of the instructors I interviewed serve as tenured faculty for any of the 58 U.S. institutions with Communication-related PhD programs. The majority work at smaller liberal arts institutions, where their production and studies training is an asset in departments where limited faculty need to cover a wide range of topics. Holding dual departmental appointments was also common among instructors, which for many provided an institutional justification for their blending of critical approaches in production instruction.
The lack of tenured production faculty at R1 Communication institutions is particularly vital in maintaining distancing dichotomies. One outcome is that there is no pipeline available for blending applied media production and academic critical theory. Instructors personally related their own difficulty in trying to convince their graduate advisors and committee members of the academic value of their media production work. Knowing how to teach production, as several instructors affirmed, proved valuable once on the job market; however, it often worked against them in grad school coursework and dissertation project completion. A second outcome is the lack of incentive for teaching media production critically. Such work, as instructors note, rarely aids one’s tenure package, and can often prompt the ire of fellow faculty and department chairs who view production work as watered down scholarship. As the following finding sections demonstrate, critical approaches to media production also require time and effort to implement. Some instructors acknowledge that such a time commitment is unsustainable, especially with publication pressures weighing so much more on their professional status.
Finally, I want to speak briefly to the demographic background of instructors. Considerations of race, gender, and sexuality did not play a significant part in the recruitment process; I experienced enough difficulty recruiting participants that satisfied the “critically-minded production instructor” criteria. I also did not explicitly ask for demographic background from instructors at any point during the interview process. Such data is neither an aspect of Long Interview methodology nor relevant to primary goals of this project. All information related to gender identity, sexual orientation, or ethnic background was offered by instructors in the context of explaining their pedagogical approach or professional background, and has been reproduced in the findings in this same spirit.
As noted in the previous chapter, media production at the professional and instructional level has been historically dominated by white, cis-gender men. Instructors largely affirmed this continued influence, either directly through their experiences working in various departments or indirectly through pressures to reify production standards that uphold this orientation. That the majority of study participants identified as outside the white, cis-gender male ‘norm’ also speaks to who is most engaged in this work of challenging established production pedagogy. As is illustrated throughout the findings, this ‘outsider’ perspective is often key to instructors’ ability to reimagine production instruction.
Interview Structure
Interviews were conducted over a roughly one-year time span between August 2020 and September 2021, with the majority held in Fall of 2020. The format of interviews follows a Long Interview structure, each formalized around a common questionnaire guide (McCracken, 1988). This interview format “provides the opportunity to step into the mind of another person, to see and experience the world as they do themselves,” a necessary perspective for best understanding and articulating the perspective of these instructors (p. 7).
There are a couple of McCracken’s (1988) methods that were altered in this study. First, against his recommendation of devoting 2-3 hours per interview, my interviews with instructors ranged from 1-1.5 hours in length. This decision to shorten the format derived from a handful of practical and conceptual considerations. Regarding the latter, McCracken argues 2-3 hours are necessary to build rapport and create an atmosphere in which respondents are willing to offer “unconstrained testimony” on potentially sensitive topics (p. 42). Given the academic and professional nature of the research topic, I do not see a need to derive “unconstrained testimony” from instructors.
As a condition of the transparent nature of this project, I instead communicated to instructors my intent to avoid the sort of “unconstrained” dialogue McCracken’s extended format aims to court. Through this pre-interview as well as the analysis and writing stages of this project, my goal has been to actively avoid publishing materials that might incriminate participants professionally or otherwise. Building rapport was necessary in speaking with instructors of marginalized identities, as the subject of these interviews on occasion touched on experiences of racism, sexism, and bigotry. Further, my own experience teaching production classes from a privileged position posed a further barrier to relating with their experiences. For these (majority) of cases, I did not alter the interview format or questions posed; however, I did communicate more with these participants in the interview stage to explain my intent in wanting to discuss these potentially sensitive topics and establish clear expectations for navigating topics before beginning the formal interview.
Second, I chose to go well beyond McCracken’s (1988) recommended 7-8 interviews per study by speaking with 22 instructors. This measure was meant as a counter-balance to shortening the length of individual interviews. Collecting a broader swath of experiences and backgrounds also better served the aims of this project. These multiple perspectives provided a wealth of teaching strategies that would not have been possible through a half dozen or so interviews. Further, the expanded field helped better illustrate overlaps in instructor approaches that proved essential in locating analytic themes within the findings.
Third, McCracken recommends face-to-face interviews in order to gain necessary spatial, embodied, and nonverbal information beyond verbal content. Interviews for this project were conducted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, such that in-person interviews were not possible. All interviews were instead conducted and recorded via Zoom. Though the format was not ideal, it offered a number of unforeseen benefits. Most notably, I was able to expand the scope of interviews in order to speak with instructors from all over the U.S., which would not have been possible given the budgetary and time constraints of in-person travel. Zoom also allowed for easy recording of all interviews. I captured video and audio recordings for all 22 interviews, only deleting these recordings after transcribing each conversation. Finally, Zoom provided technical affordances such as screen sharing that allowed instructors to easily access, explain, and share teaching materials during our conversations. Many of these materials were later collected and analyzed as artifacts.
Rather than a set list of questions, I relied upon a questionnaire guide to ensure that each interview touched on the same general subjects and concerns. For McCracken (1988), the goal of the guide is to allow the investigator to retain a low profile, directing the conversation in as subtle a manner as possible so as to produce the most possible freedom of expression from the participant. He recommends a number of question types designed for this purpose, including biographical (asking for background with the topic), grand tour (having participants provide their own map of the topic), and exceptional incidents (requesting specific examples that illustrate a facet of the topic). Questions on this guide derived from one of these basic formats, asking participants to provide a history of their teaching, give a tour of their teaching space, describe their motives and behaviors, expound on ideal pedagogical approaches, and offer issues they’ve encountered. The questionnaire was structured chronologically, starting with how instructors first became involved with teaching production, followed by how they developed their teaching style, and finally into how they imagine production into the future. The full questionnaire along with explanations of each question’s connection to CMPP literature, the framing format it follows, and its intended purpose in addressing this projects’ larger goals is available in Appendix A.
Artifact Collection
Following the initial interview process, I asked participants to share teaching artifacts such as syllabi, assignment descriptions, slideshows, and grading rubrics used in their production courses. 15 of the 22 participants provided artifacts ranging from 1-2 documents to dozens of texts. In total, 231 artifacts were collected. These materials act as a supplement to interview transcripts, offering a deeper look into how instructors infuse critical concepts into the course structure and various assignments. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Clarke & Braun, 2017) offers a flexible tool for assessing educational artifacts such as syllabi, assignment details, and student projects. My application of the method is as a deductive analysis tool: do artifacts work with or against themes developed through interview transcript analysis?
My reading of all materials followed the interview transcription and analysis stage, such that themes were set prior to artifact analysis. This top down approach aims to provide “a detailed analysis of some aspect of the data,” in particular the manner in which the strategies and beliefs instructors described through the interview stage manifested in teaching practice (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 84). With themes already set through the prior long interview analysis, my coding of artifacts deviated from Braun & Clarke’s (2006) six-step process, omitting the “generating initial codes” and “defining and naming themes” stages (p. 87). Analysis instead involved three distinct readings of all artifacts: a first round to familiarize myself with the data, a second to deductively connect established themes from long interview analysis with artifact data, and a third to generate a “thematic map” of the artifacts (p. 87). This final step was key in determining how artifacts would be interwoven with interview content throughout the findings.
This thematic analysis of artifacts will appear in the following chapters in one of two ways. Most visibly, excerpts from artifacts appear as figures in the findings chapters, including certain assignment descriptions, syllabus policy, or rubric structuring. Figures most often appear alongside quotes from the instructor that created the artifact, particularly in cases in which the instructor explicitly describes a specific artifact. Less conspicuously, I often rely on artifacts as means of tracking themes between interview participants. For example, when noting another instructor’s agreement with a particular theme–for instance, using peer review activities–this agreement comes not from explicit mention of the approach in the interview transcripts, but their use of the approach in their own syllabi or assignment descriptions. In both cases, artifacts here act as a valuable source of supplemental rich data for illustrating more concretely the means by which instructors connected the concepts articulated in their interviews into actual teaching practice.
IRB and Research Risks
This research received IRB approval (#2144) on June 24. 2020 via an expedited process. The instructors interviewed for this project constitute a low-risk population, as the interview focus on their professional practice posed limited physical, psychological, or emotional risks to participants. I do acknowledge that the themes covered in this project can be viewed as provocative in certain contexts. In practice, however, the most personally difficult topics brought up by interviewees was the professional friction they faced in trying to implement critical production approaches at their instructions. More traumatic issues of discrimination or harassment did not arise in our conversations.
I also communicated directly with all participants prior to the interview stage as to my intent to publish their names and institutional affiliations. Through this pre-interview correspondence, I also expressed my reasoning for publishing this information as part of a desire to provide full credit for their pedagogical ideas as well as a means of building a network of educators/scholars engaged in this work. I also emphasized that no other personal information such as contact or demographic data will be collected or used in this project. Any identifying information related to students shared in interview discussion or through artifacts would not be published as part of this project. All interview participants signed study consent forms agreeing to have their names and institutional affiliations published as part of this study. A template of this form detailing this and other parameters of the study is available in Appendix B.
Recorded data from the interview such as video or audio recordings, interview consent forms from all participants, transcripts produced from recordings, and subsequent coding data was kept on a secure hard drive accessible only to me and stored in my home office. These original audio and video materials have since been deleted following my transcription of each interview.
Data Analysis & Project Themes
After having conducted all interviews and stored recorded conversations on a secure external drive used specifically for research data, I produced transcripts of each conversion using the software ExpressScribe. These transcripts were saved alongside recorded conversations on a dedicated project external drive. The process of analyzing these data, marked as the fourth and final step in McCracken’s (1988) four-stage inquiry process, involves:
Determin(ing) the categories, relationships and assumptions that inform the respondent’s view of the world and the topic in general. The investigator comes to this undertaking with a sense of what the literature lays out to be there, a sense of how the topic at issue is constituted in his or her own experience, and a glazing sense of what took place in the interview itself.
p. 42
Built into this final stage are a set of five sub-stages. In the first, transcripts and field notes are read on their own terms, avoiding relationships to other aspects of the research. The goal here is to adopt a sort of “disingenuous wonder,” attempting to avoid assumptions about meaning that might limit possible interpretations (McCracken, 1988, p. 44). For the second, the data is read again, this time with a mind toward how they might connect to literature, personal experience, or other factors. This reading pays mind to what the data “set off,” by nature of its connection to previous ideas (McCracken, 1988, p. 45). In the third, reading of the data is supplemented with a comparison with observations about the data collected in the first two stages. This final reading of the data is meant to confirm or develop additional possible themes in the data. The fourth substage moves beyond the data to focus on refining themes, a process that involves determining their interrelationship and organizing them in order of importance. Finally, these themes are transformed into final conclusions.
My analysis of transcripts and field notes followed these steps up through the final substage. In formulating conclusions, McCracken (1988) explains, “One is no longer talking about the world as the respondent sees it. One is now talking about the world as it appears to the analyst from the special analytic perspective of the social sciences” (p. 46). Such a goal, I argue, is deeply steeped in an objective, positivist view of social science research, one that I reject in favor of critical and poststructural frameworks. In presenting findings and conclusions for this project, it is crucial that the instructors interviewed are not “abstracted” or “generalized” but remain very much concrete through personalities, perspectives, and identities (McCracken, 1988, p. 46). To this end, my presentation of interview data aims to illustrate themes and make arguments by including as many attributed quotes as possible. Further, I draw from artifacts to offer ‘exemplar’ examples to better illustrate the specific means through which instructors enact various critical teaching strategies (Tracy, 2013).
Following the final analysis of all transcripts and artifacts, findings were organized around four primary themes. In keeping with the theoretical framing of this project, these themes correlate to around four Freirean concepts:
| Chapter 4: Transmission Model of Education | How do instructors encounter the transmission model in production pedagogy, and how does their teaching seek to overcome it? |
| Chapter 5: Student/Teacher Contradiction | How do instructors contend with issues of power in the classroom, be that through a student/teacher contradiction or via other dynamics? |
| Chapter 6: Dialogue | How do instructors enable dialogue that recognizes student voices and their diverse knowledges? |
| Chapter 7: Transformation | How can instructors ensure students’ production projects can realize transformative goals, be that through the creation of alternative texts or otherwise? |
Each findings chapters will begin by grounding its core Freirean concept by way of assessing the possibilities and problems of applying it to media production instruction. I will then detail 4-6 strategies offered by instructors for overcoming challenges and realizing these potentials. Strategies function here as sub-themes within the larger chapter orientation, emerging inductively through the interview analysis stage in the form of overlaps in instructor approaches. While I often speak generally to these thematic overlaps, findings will also hone in on specific assignments or concrete examples drawn from specific instructors. Artifacts function similarly to further illustrate specific approaches. Findings also rely heavily on extended quotes from instructors, in line with the goal of this project in providing a platform to document and share individual instructor’s perspectives, experiences, and ideas.
