A crucial barrier to achieving critical pedagogy aims is what Friere (1970) calls the student-teacher contradiction, a power imbalance born out of the transmission model. Teachers wield power as transmitters of knowledge, rewarding and punishing its correct reception via grading. The contradiction also establishes the teacher’s knowledge as more valuable, leaving students in the role of passive receiver rather than co-contributor. Critical educators, Freire notes, must “reconcil(e) the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students,” neutralizing power imbalances such that the knowledge, perspective, and interest of each participant in the class is given value (1970, p. 59). As hooks (1994) affirms “Education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge is a field in which we all labor” (p. 14).
Making all voices equal by addressing the student-teacher contradiction has proven particularly difficult in practice. Ellsworth (1989) points to the failure among critical pedagogy theorists “to launch any meaningful analysis of or program for reformulating the institutionalized power imbalances between themselves and their students, or of the essentially paternalistic project of education itself” (p. 306). Addressing the contradiction by “supporting student voices,” she contends, is inherently problematic, as “pluralizing the concept as ‘voices’ implies correction through addition. This loses sight of the contradictory and partial nature of all voices” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 310). Instructors are often unwilling to relinquish their authoritative position, becoming, as hooks (1994) observes, “enthralled by the exercise of power and authority within their mini-kingdom” (p. 21). In his later writing, Freire notes this tendency among many critically-minded instructors to instill correct theoretical concepts to the exclusion of student input:
You raise “correct” issues of racism or sexism or nuclear war or class inequality, and get no response from the students, who are hearing you speak in tongues. If you go beyond student desire or ability, or if you work outside their language or themes, you see the results: their resistance. Your approach was not systematically rooted in the real potentials for change.
Freire & Shor, 2003, p. 483
These institutionalized power imbalances, though present in education across all levels and subjects, pose particular challenges to media production instructors invested in critical pedagogy. As detailed in the previous chapter, the need to build foundational production skills centers transmission-oriented technical training as the primary learning goal. Power is then rooted not primarily with the instructor as in Freire’s original conception of the teacher-student contradiction, but with technical skills in general. As Bruker notes, “some of our students come in really tech-y already, fetishizing the tech” (Personal Interview, October 23, 2020). Instructors often reinforce this fetishization, creating a power hierarchy structured around one’s ability to work a camera or use Adobe Premiere. As many instructors noted, this hierarchy traditionally privileges certain groups:
We were seeing this pattern over and over again at institutions across the country, together with the anecdotal observation that our classes tended to be white/male dominated. Student work tended to rely on a lot of stereotypes. On top of that, the lack of diversity in mainstream media industries. So it was like, what are we preparing students for?
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Challenging the hegemony of the white cis-male aesthetic in media industries, and by extension, media production classrooms, is a theme that I will explore more fully in Chapter 7. In examining the teacher-student contradiction in media production pedagogy, I instead want to keep attention on the technicist logic as the prime agent in enforcing the student/teacher contradiction. This power, as instructors detail, is grounded in background elements of course structuring, including rubrics, assignment parameters, and learning goals. As noted in the previous chapter, time constraints pressure instructors to focus initial attention on technical skills: a need to establish the rules of production grammar before breaking them. From a grading standpoint, fixating on technical benchmarks like out-of-focus shots or sloppy editing is often easier than assessing less easily defined critical elements. The tech fetishization Bruker describes also means grappling with students’ impatience with critical topics. Failure to address the technicist power dynamic, as Sholle & Denski (1993) contend, is more than a matter of missing critical opportunities. There are real consequences in reproducing hegemonic skills and logics through production pedagogy:
As the dominant power relations of race, class, gender and sexual preference are reproduced, moment by moment, in popular film and television, university educators whose value neutral and atheoretical pedagogy has trained a generation of media (re)production students and (value) maintenance engineers must be asked to examine the wider and unavoidable political dimensions of their efforts.
Sholle & Denski, 1993, p. 24
Addressing the student-teacher contradiction in media production courses must attend to both the power imbalance between students and teachers as well as that between technical and critical knowledge at large. As demonstrated through the strategies detailed below, instructors worked to overcome both issues by challenging the technicist power hierarchy through their own teaching a course structuring in order to open space for diverse student voices and understandings.
Strategy 1: Addressing Positionality
A central conceit of Freire’s approach to critical pedagogy is the recognition of education as a political act. This recognition, he notes, is especially necessary in ‘value-neutral’ technical training classrooms:
One cannot say, “I am simply a technician, removed from the world, from history.” Not only must I give testimony of my desire for change, but beyond that, I must demonstrate that within me is more than a belief; it is a conviction.
Freire, 2015, p. 22
Instructors disputed the value neutral approach by sharing their own subjectivity and politics as media educators/producers. A common tactic in situating their positionality in the production field to students was in their own background as a means of connecting with students:
In a place like Stamford, we have a lot of Latino students, and it’s about representation not just in what you do, but with your presence. Like “hey, this guy has an accent. He’s a professor with a PhD.” I think that’s how you can really inspire some of the students. You have to respond to the reality of the classroom of the demographic we have there. It’s not just what you do and what you teach them.
O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020
Highlighting one’s background can not only challenge notions of what bodies are most privileged in production spaces, but model how one’s background informs their making. Guerra often screens his documentary work, in which he connects his positionality as a Mexican national in telling stories about undocumented workers and asylum seekers:
I always tell them this is what I’m working on. Sometimes I ask for feedback on a trailer or something. So maybe the only difference between you and me is that I’ve been doing this for a couple more years.
O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020
Inviting student critique to one’s own work can put instructors in a vulnerable position. Yet these sorts of practices are key in diffusing student/teacher power dynamics toward, as hooks notes, a “holistic model of learning… where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process (1994, p. 21). Using their positionality to disrupt the objective/technicist approach was, for some instructors, achieved through their self-presentation:
I do think having me standing in front of the class… I usually have short hair, and I often wear ties. I’m gender non-conforming, and I’ll make jokes about stuff. So sometimes they’ll very proudly come to me with a script and say “we thought it was important to put a same sex couple in our script!” So I know for a fact that having me in front of the classroom makes a difference.
R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020
A majority of instructors interviewed for this project self-identified as female or non-white. Though there are no clear demographic figures for U.S. college-level production instructors, anecdotal evidence from instructors interviewed here along with surveys of National Association of Broadcasters and University Film and Video Association conference attendees speaks to a continued dominance of white-cis men in production teaching positions. Simply disrupting this ‘standard’ view of what a production instructor is supposed to look like, as Goldman details above, can serve as an opportunity to challenge the technicist approach from the moment students step in the classroom. The importance of diversifying production faculty was a commonly mentioned theme among instructors:
Don’t talk to me about diversifying the academy, you diversity the pipeline. You diversify the teachers. And as they become diverse, and they attract diverse students, that’s what makes for a diverse Hollywood vision.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
A handful of instructors spoke firsthand to how efforts to diversify production faculty had actively altered student demographics:
The other thing that’s great about our department is that we’re not dominated by men. My major is probably 60/40 more women than men, and the rest of the school is predominantly women. I know at Temple when I would TA, it would be that bro-ey, boys club thing. But that’s not the case in our major, partly because men aren’t a majority.
M. Bruker, Personal Interview, October 23, 2020
For Vasquez, diversifying production faculty is an important step in addressing hegemonic production standards; however, it doesn’t address some of the deeper logics of the technicist approach. In addressing her positionality more deeply, she shares with students how her own film school and industry training shaped her perspective:
My aesthetic, whether you like it or not, is the white male aesthetic I inherited from Hollywood. So once I put that aesthetic on them, I’m just as bad as any other male teacher. So I always try to say I need to withhold my aesthetic. How would you tell this story? I know what I would do, but I don’t think that’s successful. For you as the teacher, that is the challenge. I don’t think I can contribute to the discourse of entertainment if I recreate it.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Vasquez provides an apt example of how to avoid the ‘sage on the stage’ tendency to challenge the value neutral approach through a top-down critique, instead addressing the problem in the sort of personal terms more likely to resonate with students. Breaking from hegemonic standards thus becomes not an edict set by a ‘critically enlightened’ teacher, but a co-intentional project shared by both instructor and students:
I just see myself as one of them, as a student trying to learn and expose myself to their work. I don’t go into a class like I’m the big boss. Rather, I like to see that, in a class of 15 students with 7 assignments, I’ll see over 100 examples from diverse perspectives from students, and I will learn a lot from it. And I think this helps me a lot so that it breaks this hierarchy that you need to have control of the class.
T. Özdemir, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
A co-intentional approach also confronts the dominance of technical skills, opening space for a range of other knowledges to be used productively in the classroom:
You show them with your own persona and presence in the classroom. I think if you find your passion and they see that, it’s not just you teaching them. It’s not a transmission sort of thing. No, it’s about sharing this knowledge. Let me tell you what I know, and you tell me what you want to do. It’s a two-way street.
O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020
Demonstrating the desire to learn from students sends a clear signal to the value their work and perspective can hold in the classroom. Positionality here works to model the importance of non-technical knowledge in production, opposing the technicist/objective view of value-neutral skill building by making present the power imbalances that exist in production work and demonstrating for students what diverse bodies, backgrounds, and perspectives can bring.
Strategy 2: The Importance of Restrictions
Production classroom power imbalances are often most pronounced not along the teacher/student contradiction Freire describes, but on the student-to-student level. Technical knowledge of equipment operation or software proficiency can empower certain students in lab spaces while isolating others. In line with a process over product approach, the common method for addressing this dichotomy was to set heavy technical restrictions on assignments:
I love really restricting students. I think creativity comes out of constraints, that problem solving that comes from working with just this and this to make this. So from a production stand-point, you don’t just walk into a scene camera blazing.
M. Blaine, Personal Interview, August 20, 2020
Like Blaine, Levine rationalized restrictions to students as a creative tool:
A lot of (my teaching) is actually about taking things away. For a while I don’t let them use sound. The first two assignments, I have them use just one shot that has a certain structure. Then I give them three shots. Then I’ll have them design sounds for something they’ve already shot.
A. Levine, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
For the three-shot assignment Levine describes above, restrictions are a means of getting students to closely examine their production process. “It might seem like nothing to make three shots, but I’m going to ask you about each one: why it starts here, why it ends there, why is this or that in focus. In these small projects, every little decision counts” (A. Levine, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020). Restrictions work to put technical choices in context, what Nichols likens to the art school practice of limiting one’s palette in order to apply colors with more intention:
Otherwise they’re not happy with something, but they don’t know why they’re not happy with it. It’s because they’ve tried to use too many things at once. So I’m like look, here are the four major typeface families. You get to pick from one kind for titles and one of the other kinds for lyrics. Make sure we can read them. You’ll get to use more in the future, but for now that’s what you’re getting. And we just move on in slow steps and build and build.
A.L. Nichols, Personal Interview, September 4, 2020
For Nichols’ 200-level Critical Design course, which focuses on developing InDesign and Photoshop editing skills, restrictions play a key role in balancing the right amount of technical and critical elements. An early assignment challenges students to design a book jacket in InDesign using only shape and line tools:
I have them pick a book that they’ve read and they’re familiar with. I have them go through this exercise where they think through the themes, the setting, important ideas, symbols, characters, time period, and generate twenty possible symbols or graphic icons that could represent the book. We kind of treat it as a re-issue of the book; they’re not allowed to duplicate existing covers.
A.L. Nichols, Personal Interview, September 4, 2020
For teaching a complicated program like InDesign, restrictions serve an important goal of shrinking the software down to a handful of necessary functions. For students with little or no tech experience, designing assignments that require using only a specific tool (in Nichols’ case, Shape, Line, and Arrange) helps prevent them from feeling overwhelmed or inferior to their peers with more tech know-how. Restrictive assignments also head off the technicist rush to hit production benchmarks, allowing more time to discuss the meaning-making qualities of individual production tools. For her Book Jacket assignment, Nichols is able to key in on the design properties of distinct shapes or color options, and critically push students to consider non-standard uses of those tools through their designs:
How might they want to think about this book from a different point of view? They almost always pick the books they had to read in high school, because that’s the last time they had to read a book: The Great Gatsby is always done. So for that, I’m like, “don’t do a green light on a dock.” If you were going to do this book from a different character’s point of view, the point of view of somebody who usually isn’t thought about in society, who would that be? Why aren’t books marketed that way? So we have this moment where we’re thinking about who is the audience, who is the protagonist, why do we make books be this way, what makes a book legible to an audience.
A.L. Nichols, Personal Interview, September 4, 2020
Similar to Proctor’s Action Sequence discussed in the previous chapter, Nichols’ Book Jacket project is a prime example of inductively critical assignment. Production choices must be informed through a critical understanding of the text’s characters, themes, and public perception. In reimagining a non-media text into a multimodal form, the assignment also acts as an effective bit of transmedia navigation, a tactic that will be further explored later in this chapter. Though students often resist restrictions as hampering their creativity, instructors used a familiar tactic of countering this reaction by reframing restrictions as creative opportunities. Clearly defined constraints also work to counter student disappointment at failing to follow through on ambitious projects:
Recognize what you do well. And what you do well is tell intimate stories. You’re in a close setting. You’re a single camera, maybe two. A small crew of 3-4 people. You’re in someone’s private space. You aren’t a gigantic production space. And because of that, people trust you. So in my work, I have found that if I limit them, if I give them that frame by saying “I want you to be whatever Hollywood is not. Don’t take me down a dark hallway.” That’s such a cheap way to trigger adrenaline. You haven’t shown me creativity or depth. So that’s where I start with my lower level classes.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Setting more realistic expectations helps to de-escalate the technical skill power imbalance many instructors face. Beyond formal technical limitations, many instructors also set limitations on the content of media projects:
It’s in the assignment design. So instead of saying go out and make whatever film you want, which I also don’t think is a great learning experience. It’s more about “I’m going to push you to be really creative by putting these constraints on you, and here’s the research that shows this is good for learning. Now see what you can do.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Proctor’s Six Shot Story project offers an example of this restrictive approach in practice. Using Hemmingway’s famous six word story as a template, the assignment places multiple parameters on students: only six shots to tell a three-act story using no dialogue or music.
Restrictive assignments like the Six Shot Story disrupt the technicist power dynamic by diverting student attention away from technical skill. Shooting and editing together six shots is a task students with even limited camera or software experience can accomplish. Other skills that do not depend on equipment proficiency such as creative shot framing, clever story development, or captivating background choices can then be given more emphasis and appreciation. Restrictions, as deployed in the assignments offered here, serve to slow down the production process, forcing students to pay attention to individual production choices rather than racing to create a slicker finished product.
Strategy 3: Giving Critical Knowledge Value
Related to the tone-setting goals described in the previous chapter, instructors made concerted efforts to establish the value of critical knowledge to their students. For action-oriented production courses with heavy technical demands, this tactic focused on normalizing critical reflection throughout the production process:
The theoretical tenets of media literacy would always contain that media production element, an action oriented thing like “how do you create a campaign to engage media producers or how do you start your own venture? How do you act on the message?” And given the limitations of the semester and the student’s own experience with production skills, you have to build up to those sorts of products. You’ve got to be very deliberate about your processes. If you go too fast, even with so-called digital natives, then you get a lot of people getting lost in the sauce.
J. Cubbage, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Being deliberate about the process for many instructors meant verbalizing their own pedagogy to students, particularly the importance of non-technical learning goals in their classes:
I tell them that at this point, I don’t really care about the technical. That’s what they’re here to learn. I care more about their attitude, and that they’re invested in the project. Maybe their project is horrible, but they’ve been trying. If they’re asking questions, if every time I’m asking for feedback, they’re participating, I see that. Everyone has different levels. I have some students that are very advanced, and others that have no clue what they’re doing but are really passionate. I’ve had students that are good, but didn’t care. So what I tell them is what you give is what you get. Yeah, if you mess it up and it’s a horrible project, I still know as a professor if they’re trying.
O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020
Guerra’s course assignments typically focus on a single media mode such as sound, image, and video. These smaller projects are less about achieving mastery than about exploring each form as a possible mode of expression. In this way, the assignment design functions as part of a larger effort by instructors to move away from the deficiency model of the transmission/technicist approach, one focused on disciplining students’ lack of camera or software proficiency. Bruker shares with students her own film school experience and the unproductive tendency of production courses to devolve into a technical arms race. In place of that model, she pushes the value of self-efficacy and collaboration in learning production skills:
Production by nature is not something that you’re just an expert at or that you stay an expert at. It’s about being able to meet hurdles when they happen, because they always happen. Figuring out how to fight past the barrier and go from there. It’s setting a collaboration versus competition environment that acknowledges where everyone is starting based on their experience.
M. Bruker, Personal Interview, October 23, 2020
In practice, Bruker implements this collaboration versus competition approach by starting her documentary production courses with a pitch session:
I said, “whoever wants to direct, pitch.” And it was that four women and one guy did so. They self-selected who’s gonna direct. Then the other students picked their first, second, and third choice, and here are the roles that I would want to do. And I took all of that and tried to give everyone their top choice.
M. Bruker, Personal Interview, October 23, 2020
Choosing directors based on pitch sessions also disrupts the common production lab tendency of director positions going to students with more comfort behind the camera (Citron & Seiter, 1981). Leaders are instead chosen on the ideas they bring to these initial dialogues, a clear signaling of the value non-technical skills hold in Bruker’s classes. Pitch sessions also provide a useful venue for student voice, with project ideas and group assignments deriving from student interest. This self-selecting tactic, as Bruker has found, allows students to follow themes or interests she might not have expected:
Last semester when I taught this Doc Production class, there was a student who ended up getting arrested for hazing. He self-selected to be in a documentary group by a Black female director about Black hair. So I think that they’re doing a pretty good job of letting each other influence each other. It’s a pretty good community.
M. Bruker, Personal Interview, October 23, 2020
Bruker’s pitch sessions speak in many ways to the value of avoiding the top-down approach that consolidates teacher authority. Facilitating these sessions instead provides a productive venue for student voice, allowing them to both contribute their background and pursue their interests. Critical skills can also be given value through class learning goals. Keating’s Video Essay course, for example, includes as one of its goals “develop(ing) a good command of Adobe Premiere.” Editing skills in Premiere, however, are means by which to achieve the other five learning objectives listed on the course syllabus.
In the context of his Video Essay course, editing is used not in its traditional role of assembling short films, but as a deconstruction tool for “scholarly criticism.” The mix of scholarly and production aims to make the course accessible and applicable to a range of students:
If you’re more into film history, it gave you a little bit of production but you were making things that were about films. But also if you were into film production, you could really feel like you were doing film scholarship, you could feel like your special set of skills in production were really helping. That course really struck the balance nicely.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
Parameters serve a number of key functions in the course, most notably through the content restriction of students choosing from one of four films to analyze throughout the semester. Though not allowing students to choose whatever film they like could be interpreted as an expression of teacher authority, Keating justifies the tactic as invaluable in helping students compare and contrast their peers’ approaches to analyzing the same text. A clear example of editing as critical analysis skill comes through Keating’s Alternate Preview assignment, in which students must produce a trailer-length re-edit of their movie that alters the tone of the original:
People do really interesting things with that one. Like one student used Vertigo, and she told a sort of #MeToo story. Some told a story of the film’s production, which is allowed. And the reason all of these are such great assignments is because they force you to watch the movie over and over again. You get to know the movie so well.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
The assignment showcases a number of the inherent advantages production skills offer as critical tools. For one, analyzing through editing software like Premiere provides a direct engagement with the text. As Keating notes, students have to scrub through footage and rewatch scenes to produce their essays, ensuring they interact with the content more than they might otherwise with a written assignment. In addition, students approach editing not from the technicist standpoint of assembly, but as a meaning-making process: in this case, a process of re-making meaning using the razor tool, multitracking, and audio remixing.
Both Keating and Bruker’s approaches function in different but effective ways to disrupt the initial emphasis on technical knowledge in their production classrooms. The desire to establish skills upfront can inadvertently place the course on a technicist track with limited chance to veer back to critical issues. Instructors here modeled the value of other knowledges in undertaking production projects, be it innovative documentary ideas or re-imagining of existing texts.
Strategy 4: Critical Assessment Practices
Critical pedagogues have noted the difficulty in creating assessments that align with Freirean goals (Keesing-Styles, 2003; Serrano et al., 2018). Grading, as McLaren (2003) notes, is a key mechanism of the hidden curriculum, reasserting teacher power, and with it, the transmission logic of a correct knowledge. While scholars like Shor (2003) uphold assessment as an integral part of the learning environment, they espouse an authentic approach, one that validates the experiences and ideas students bring to the classroom (Serrano et al., 2018). Within the context of media production pedagogy, difficulties in reconciling grading standards with critical pedagogy goals often center around technical proficiency (Sholle & Denski, 1993; Boulton, 2016). Many instructors openly grappled with the difficulty in needing to establish ‘baseline’ standards through the grades they assigned, while recognizing how this emphasis often devalued the critical learning goals.
One tactic was to ensure that critical thinking and reflection efforts were given literal point value in assessments. This is not to say instructors didn’t emphasize technical skills. Özdemir’s rubric for his video production course, for example, exhibits a clear focus on continuity, framing, and editing aptitude:
What I pay attention to with something like editing is first to make sure that they’re getting the skills for each assignment. So editing and sound are what I really pay attention to. So for the continuity editing assignment, I share a short film with the same actors shot in the same place, but shot and cut in three different ways, one was happy, the other sad, one more anxious. And then they choose how to create a similar, continuous style in their assignment. So what I pay attention to is passage of time, if it is well shown, continuity holds throughout the film, pacing of dialogue is well timed, cuts are motivated, framing conventions are followed, edit creates atmosphere and space, audio in dialogue is smooth, these are the criteria I pay attention to with their projects.
T. Özdemir, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Özdemir’s use of technical terms like continuity, pacing, and framing conventions set technical expectations for his student filmmakers. However, his use of language such as “well-timed”, “motivated”, “creating atmosphere”, and “space” frames production terminology in the language of creativity and storytelling. Rubrics for his Narrative Short Film Production courses further apply this reflexivity, such that ideas are not valued less than the technical skills needed to execute them. Vasquez makes this understanding explicit to her students: “What I tell them is, ‘I don’t really care how you shoot this. What I care about is the story you’re going to tell’” (L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020). Challenging the technicist power imbalance for many instructors centered on reformulating their assessment practices, as rubrics and grading guides directly communicate to students the value of critical and technical elements in their work. There was no consensus among instructors as to a ‘correct’ balance between critical and technical skill assessment. Similar to Özdemir’s rubric approach noted above, instructors sought reflexivity in their grading to better address critical or technical elements on a case-by-case basis:
I have a rubric that has four categories. I try not to use overly negative or superficially affirming language. So I have exceptional, good, promising, and needs improvement. And I have technical, response to prompt, editing/sequencing, and concepts which are all weighted. And those technical categories are rated one star versus three stars for the concepts. And this is just my philosophy, but it’s a problem if you have a brilliant idea and I can’t see your image. But also, you can make this thing that’s super slick, but I don’t understand it or it’s not responding to the prompt or it has no structure.
A. Levine, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
Instructors also design assessment categories to synthesize technical and critical goals:
I do insist on proper framing and editing practices. But at the very end of their critique on the documentaries, I want to know what the call to action is. What’s your message, and did you get it across to the audience? Was it a text screen, was it implicit, was it a direct request for funds or assistance? How did you get across that you wanted me to do something? Did you just want me to cry? If that’s all, then there’s a little pornography in that. No, you want me to do something that is active, that could change the world.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Nichols’ rubric for the Analysis Poster offers an example of this balance in practice. Technical goals such as color balance, visual arrangement, and layout design operate within the larger categories of visual explanation and context, making sure aesthetic doesn’t supercede argument in the project assessment.
Another important aspect of critically-minded assessment is knowing when not to grade. As noted earlier in this chapter, production work can be especially alienating for students who feel they don’t possess tech skills. Jumping right into graded assignments that require a show of technical proficiency is certain to make these students feel left behind and exacerbate existing power dynamics. Building on his remix-based approach detailed in the previous chapter, Keyes instead advocates building in low-stakes opportunities for play:
It really comes down to creating manageable chunks for the instructor, then showing the instructor the pedagogical moves: how to break up the activity, what to leave up to chance. Like you could give all these technical parameters, or you can have them make those mistakes and address them in the moment. And then I would encourage them to not evaluate that first assignment as a grade, but to make it participatory.
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2020
An additional approach is to use assessment as a means of drawing out critical concepts, a tactic Share employs for his photography courses:
A lot of the assessment that we can do with critical media literacy is more what we refer to as authentic assessment, where people have to actually create something and demonstrate the idea. So one assessment tool for, say, the good/bad photo: if you come back with two pictures that are exactly alike that used none of the techniques, that’s telling me you didn’t really get it. But if you come back and show me pictures that have black and white, all these different angles, for assessment that’s proof that they really understood it, not only abstractly, but that they were able to put it into application. To me that’s a more powerful form of assessment. You can also add a layer of analysis to that by asking them to write a little essay about your thoughts during the process. What did you think about when you created this? We don’t want to focus so much on the product as the process.
J. Share, Personal Interview, September 15, 2020
Proctor outlines one of the more innovative and expansive approaches to assessment surveyed for this project. For the majority of her courses, she deploys a choose-your-own adventure course design, allowing students to select which assignments they wish to complete:
I use sort of a gameful approach. The way the overall class is structured is you start at 0, and you earn points as you complete assignments. There are more assignments/points than you need to get a high grade. So you can pick and choose certain assignments to do in order to earn points, with the exception of a few foundational assignments that are required. If you just do those foundational assignments, the highest you can get is a C-. So even if those required projects are higher stakes, the course overall is lower stakes, which I hope gives them more freedom to experiment and take risks. That said, for any individual assignment, it is going to be a balance of have you achieved the technical goals, have you demonstrated proficiency in the camera, in export, and compression and have you demonstrated that you’re thinking thoughtfully about representation and narrative structure and composition. And they have to submit a reflection about their process.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Proctor’s assessment approach, though time consuming, offers the potential to address a number of power dynamic issues for production educators. For instructors, grading harshly on either technical or critical matters doesn’t hold the threat of crippling a student for the rest of the semester, key in making sure non-technically inclined students don’t feel left behind. For students, the range of available point generation assignments reward both technical (practical exam, skills demo) and critical (helping classmates, reading responses) skills. The lack of specific deadlines for supplementary assignments also provides the space students may need to develop skills at their own pace.
Assessments, as instructors demonstrate here, served the crucial purpose of inscribing instructors’ pedagogical approach in practice, with carefully designing assignments and project rubrics modeling the importance of technical and critical skills to students. These assessment methods likely do not qualify as authentic in the realm of critical pedagogy, with grading criteria still established by the instructor rather than co-intentionally with students (though the following section will speak to opportunities in this vein) (Serrano et al., 2018). What grading strategies like Proctor’s do allow is a validation of students’ experiences and ideas in production assignments, personal abilities that have long been ignored in traditional transmission approaches to production pedagogy .
Strategy 5: Using Written Reflections
Against the top-down assessments employed in the transmission model, critical pedagogy scholars advocate for authentic assessment methods that are co-intentional with students (Serrano et al., 2018). Among the methods they advocate are student generated assessment and self-assessment practices that “allow students to reflect upon their personal development and skills acquisition” (2018, p. 18). To this end, I want to highlight a commonly used method of self-assessment used by instructors: the written reflection. Speaking to earlier strategies discussed in this chapter, these sorts of reflection essays and creative statements can provide a direct means of assigning point value to critical skills in multimedia work:
The creative assignments would often have a written component, like a short paper that illustrates how they’re tying the concept with the project. I’d leave it open ended, so like sometimes I’d get an idea that I’ve never seen before. I want them to have that agency, but they also have to create a rationale for how the course concepts connect the creative text… the ability to articulate it in a short 3-5 page essay, like directly apply the concept to what you did creatively, they can show me they’re connecting the dots.
D. Gracon, Personal Interview, November 13, 2020
Written components can offer a strategic check-in for instructors, ensuring that students are thinking intentionally about production decisions and reflecting on critical issues through those decisions:
I know a student is being rigorous when they’ve started shooting as soon as I’ve given the assignment. We can look at raw footage a week later, and they do three or four cuts before the final. And for the larger projects, they also write a self-reflection. So in addition to writing about a proposal, they then reflect back on the process. And thus they implicate the process. Things happen that they didn’t expect; things change. And they get a chance to talk about how they were open to that. That to me is a kind of rigor.
A. Levine, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
Given that production courses rarely include quizzes or written exams, reflection essays can also serve the more practical purpose of making students show their knowledge of class concepts. As a supplement to an original media work, however, these reflections let students demonstrate their use of the concept in achieving a distinct creative goal. As Vasquez points out, reflection essays also provide venues in which students can negotiate their own relationship to ‘standard’ production concepts:
I always teach them the rules. You must know the rules. And when you break it, you must justify it. You can break it. It’s not a real rule. You’re not going to go to jail for it. But you have to argue for why you’re breaking it. So why do we use the rule of thirds? Because that’s where your eye goes, etc. We can spend time on that. If you want to challenge that, and have the person falling off the bottom of the screen, is that attractive, is that appealing? What did you want me to look at, oh the blank wall over their head? So I do ask them to justify what they did. If they’re going to shoot in their apartments, as they often do, why do you have the coat on the floor in the shot? If that’s part of the story, great! But it’s got to be conscious. Justify everything, and you can break any rule.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Among instructors that supplemented production assignments with written components, Goodman particularly stressed the importance of written and oral reflections in his production pedagogy. As founder of the Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City and an instructor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Goodman has positioned his classroom use of video production as a critical thinking and community action tool. As an after-school program serving high-school aged students, the EVC is somewhat outside the collegiate classrooms that this research is most focused upon. Yet the format of the program reflects the typical semester-long shape of most university-level classes: students select a topic, shoot and edit together footage related to that topic, and feature their finished work (a 10-20 minute documentary at the EVC) at a screening-style event. That building up to one big project, as Goodman notes, is important in establishing for students “a real pride in creating.” Yet from a technicist perspective, emphasizing a single big project also works against a critically-minded process over product approach. To reinstate the importance of critical thinking, Goodman requires both written and oral reflection on students’ production choices throughout the semester. Most notably, EVC sessions end not with the big screening but with a “portfolio roundtable”:
At the end of the workshop, students show their work to educators in the staff. And we’ll go over the outcomes for the course, and those can be technical like editing or camera work or critical in terms of engaging a concept. And at the end, we bring those back. So we’ll have seen the 20-minute documentary, but what was your role in it?
S. Goodman, Personal Interview, October 29, 2020
The portfolio presentation covers the entire semester of the students’ work, including “journal entries, completed handouts, logs, storyboards, interview questions, drafts of narration.” Reviewing both the micro and macro elements of their work over the months-long course of the program provides students a perspective from which to observe their growth and emerging identity as producers:
And the portfolio will have their first interview, maybe where they’re mumbling or not looking at the camera, then by the last one, look I interviewed the drug counselor, and look how I really got it right. Or I chose these images to add, that really added this part to the final film. I could have picked this one. They’re giving evidence in these different areas of their performance, but also their journey in learning the skills. We’re interested in the process of learning and growth. You have to show the journals, the early footage, so we can see their change over time.
S. Goodman, Personal Interview, October 29, 2020
Beyond reflecting on their own production choices, the portfolio review session includes an intensive feedback roundtable. Participants in this 30-minute session “could include other teachers, staff or students at your school or after-school program, as well as parents, community members who are knowledgeable about the topic of the documentary and filmmakers.” For Goodman, the audiencing component helps actualize the impact-versus-intent aspect of media making. What ideas did you want to communicate with the project you made and how was it received?
The comprehensive nature of the portfolio review, in particular its written component, asks students to contextualize technical and critical skills:
This all comes after the Premiere, they get warm and cool feedback from their portfolio presentation, they get a discussion of their work. It’s another opportunity to focus on both the technology and critical analysis. And the analysis is usually the harder part of it.
S. Goodman, Personal Interview, October 29, 2020
The strength of Goodman’s praxis-based approach comes in making critical reflection more than an add-on or an interruption to production practice. Against the technicist “best practices” language of right or wrong practices, his emphasis on having students verbalize their intent as producers is a means of making concrete the meaning-making aspects of the process. What were you trying to say with this work, and what were the tools you used to say it? Critical work becomes not an interruption from the technical, but a means of deploying technical skills in their own voice. Related to authentic assessment goals, Goodman’s use of student self-reflection assignments pushes students to define their own learning goals, and assess themselves along those criteria.
Strategy 6: Minding Group Dynamics
The collaborative nature of media production work is one of its distinct pedagogical advantages, providing a viable alternative to the transmission model. Documentary or narrative film based projects in particular are group-based by nature, requiring a crew to operate the camera, direct on-screen action, and capture sound (Sabal, 2009). Yet these group settings present a set of new, often thornier, power dynamics through which production instructors must navigate. Technical skill often becomes the de facto yardstick for determining who has authority within the group:
That’s such a big issue. Who’s got the camera? Who’s doing the shooting? How are we balancing the power in the production group, and are we conscious of that balance?
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
It’s at the group level where instructors report imbalances between gender and to some degree race to be most pronounced. Keating advocates for an active approach to addressing the imbalance by assigning groups:
One issue that does come up when students go out to do these exercises you can be pretty confident that boys will direct. So I usually assign roles in order to ensure more diversity. I’ll even plan it ahead of time, or I’ll use a random number generator to decide. And then if there are multiple assignments, I think about who directed earlier projects, to make sure everyone has a chance at each role.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
While Keating’s approach to group assignments looks to defuse power imbalances through an equal distribution of production roles, other instructors use assignments more deliberately to ensure individuals that have been historically marginalized in production classrooms are given positions of power within group work:
There’s a crew, and it’s always a white man, sometimes a Black man, directing. Or the DP (Director of Production) is always male, even now in student productions! I’ve really shaken that up in my classes. In one of my assignments, they make music videos with a professional musician, and with that, I’ll make sure there are women directing and DP’ing, so that they get used to working like that. So that they get used to taking orders from a Black women. They get used to the person who’s most technical being a white woman.
S. Goodman, Personal Interview, October 29, 2020
Beyond group assignments, instructors also attended to small micro actions such as who carries equipment, disrupting these tacit practices around who performs technical/physical work:
I’ll often tell my female-identifying students in the course “please be active. Do not leave the equipment to these guys, because you are just one of them. I want you to carry a sandbag, carry a C-stand, carry a light. Do not think this is work for men. This is your stage, and I will just ask you to be as brave, friendly, and open as possible. Never ever think this is a position for male students only.” I’ll assign a DP (Director of Photography) in every class, and I typically give women the priority, just to create a balance. And when it comes to guest speakers from the industry, most are women or women of color. And we then always talk of the challenges of being a woman in this patriarchal industry.
T. Özdemir, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Beyond making students aware of power dynamic issues, many instructors address the issue by re-organizing groups and the work each member does:
Something that I notice and that I will say, for instance, if I need someone to carry the equipment, I’ll ask the women to help. Or if we’re doing positions or I need someone to help with some technical thing, I will choose women, or physically put the camera in women’s hands. I will tell students “I need you to notice who is in your group, who has their hands on the equipment. Are you the person that’s dominating the camera?” If you’ve got 2 women and 2 men in your group, and the guys are rushing forward to do all the technical things, you need to check yourself. They actually have a little sheet when I’m teaching a piece of equipment, they have to certify that everyone has used the equipment. That’s a tone thing that’s really important, especially in my beginning classes. I show them statistics. I talk about who’s doing what behind the scenes, how it’s up to them to change that.
R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020
That attention extends to the editing stage, another site where students with limited production knowledge often feel insecure. When groups edit together, too often one technically savvy student will take on all editing tasks while the others passively watch the screen. When editing footage individually, students with less experience can feel isolated or overwhelmed by the software. Keyes provides a novel solution by splitting the difference between the two approaches:
If I’m working in a media lab, I’ll still have them go around one computer, but I’ll have them work in rotations. So every 10 minutes, the ringer goes and they switch drivers like they would in a driver’s ed class. That way they’re still working on the same project, but they’re also building on their group cohesion. I need them to like each other by the end of class; that’s a goal for me. I’ll also do it where we break out the editing, so like one person’s in charge of titles, one in charge of sound, one assembly for that four frame project. So you may have the most excited person put the images together, then the next person will put the audio in, and then the least confident student has the most stressful part of getting it all together. But what I usually end up seeing is those other two students helping them out… I think it’s important to see that they can have conversation at a computer. There is this siloing that happens in a media lab where people are like “I’m at my own station, in my own zone.” And I’m really big into embodied pedagogy, just remembering you have a body in a shared space with other people (O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2020
Keyes’ group editing method leverages a number of the inherent advantages of production work as a vehicle for critical pedagogy. For one, it uses the imbalance of technical knowledge within the classroom as an advantage, providing the collaborative venue for more technically savvy students to productively use that knowledge in helping their peers. As he elaborates:
Collaboration and peer-to-peer connection is such a big part of how I approach teaching, what I do is tell them “if you finish early, go help someone else in the class.” Suddenly there’s no time to dick around. They can either get weird with their edit, or they can sit with someone else to help them. I’ll frame it for them like “you have this super rich body of knowledge. I want you to feel like you can share it.” Then they’ll learn the software better themselves. Teaching media stuff, there’s a pretty open field for it. And it makes you less of a dick that I think can make your career prospects more open.
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2020
Keyes collaborative editing approach also foregrounds the importance of dialogue and interpersonal communication in production courses, demonstrating the value of collaborative openness over competitive divisiveness. Empowering students to teach each other also has secondhand benefits for the instructor:
I do it that way to save myself stress on the back-end. If they trust each other, they’ll become my tech support. Like when I taught media arts, I wanted them to know how to troubleshoot themselves, so I wouldn’t get stressful emails at 3am. And I want them to be able to trust each other, or share things voluntarily. Very often these programs are so competitive. Like if you know how to do something in After Effects that nobody else does, you don’t share that information because that’s your edge?
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2020
Skill sharing and the other collaborative activities that Keyes implements tap into the pedagogical value of production activities beyond critical or technical skills:
In the class, I’m modeling what a sustainable work ethic looks like, what it means to have good communication skills, what it means to do that social and emotional work in a process together. Those are the skills whether they’re teachers, or whether they’re going to go into industry, whether they’re going to have to navigate the art scene. We’re using media tools that are all about communication, yet we don’t talk about the most basic part which is “what does it mean for two humans to communicate with each other?” We get so wrapped up in the technical part that we don’t realize that we can use these technical exercises to access these social and emotional skills.
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2020
The communicative benefits of production work Keyes highlights here showcase yet more of the many untapped advantages production work holds when freed from a traditional technicist approach. The practice-based, group-oriented courses such as the one Keyes describes are natural laboratories in which students can build crucial collaboration skills and healthy work habits. CMPP approaches provide critical reflection time not just to examine production-related choices, but to consider the sorts of inter and intrapersonal skills that are transferable far beyond the context of media production.
Discussion
In addressing the student teacher-contradiction, this chapter focuses on the larger issue of power imbalance within production classrooms. These spaces warp the traditional Freirean dynamic between teachers and students into a technicist versus critical tension, which places teachers and students in equal competition over who possesses more technical skill. The strategies outlined here seek to resolve these dynamics in a few key ways.
First, instructors disrupt the objective, value-neutral approach by acknowledging their own positionality to students, making clear through personal reflection how critical questions inform their own making and teaching practice. Addressing their positionality opens space for students to reflect on their own background and knowledge, and how these skills can inform and drive their making practice. Second, instructors addressed how assessments reified the technicist approach by valuing technical proficiency over all other skills. Their use of restrictions in project parameters and balancing of critical/creative skill categories with technical ones in assignment rubrics worked to even this balance. Assessments also worked to synthesize critical and technical skills through assignments and grading categories that used production as a means of analysis and vice versa. Finally, they oppose the competitive logic of the technicist drive for skill accumulation by emphasizing collaborative models of production. These were implemented in practice through pitch sessions for group project ideas, managing group dynamics, evenly distributing tasks among members, and empowering students to share skills, both production and otherwise, with each other.
These strategies–while innovative–cannot be said to resolve Freire’s student-teacher-contradiction. Restrictions on assignment parameters and restructuring of grading rubrics may help de-emphasize the authority of both the instructor and the technicist standard; however, parameters and learning goals are still dictated by these sources. Though the value of authentic assessment practices, wherein students and teachers co-create assignments or grading expectations, did come up on occasion in interviews, these practices were not used in any of grading rubrics, syllabi, or project descriptions instructors submitted as artifacts. Assessment strategies offered by instructors focused more on rewarding non-technical knowledge through rubric categories, providing students agency to choose assignments that most resonated with their interests, and allotting point values to written reflections so that students can evaluate and contextualize their work. Even here, a more critical approach to assessment largely amounts to a greater reflection on production choices: essentially thinking more intentionally about production rather than challenging or reimagining its core practices. Keating and Nichols’ use of video editing and layout design respectively as critical analysis tools moves closest to a full re-working of production as a mode of building theoretical understanding. Moving even further in these directions might offer a path to more fully probe the issues of power, representation, and voice central to critical pedagogy and critical media literacy thinking.
If these strategies do not represent a resolution of the student-teacher-contradiction, they still provide a number of promising in-roads for addressing persistent power dynamics both in production classrooms and perhaps elsewhere in the curriculum. A central theme among these strategies was an ability to turn problematic power dynamics into critical opportunities. Instructors’ use of their positionality, for example, worked to repudiate the value-neutral technicist approach by reinforcing the embodiment of teacher and students. They made explicit the power asymmetries, especially those along gender lines, within their classrooms to illustrate how these dynamics are reproduced in media industry settings. Further, they saw group work power struggles as chances to build better interpersonal communication skills, and model collaborative production modes. This ability to make lemonade out of lemons is primarily a credit to instructors’ innovative pedagogy; however, I also believe it speaks to the power of doing-based work when approached critically. Production courses serve as learning labs in which issues of representation, power, and positionality are experienced first-hand. It requires a careful structuring of these courses through project design, rubrics, and group assignments to give students the space to reflect on how power operates in practice and develop strategies to enable more diverse and equitable production modes.
