Moving out of the transmission model of education by resolving the student-teacher contradiction and establishing co-intentional dialogue within the classroom produces what Freire (1970) calls critical consciousness. Education, as Shull notes in the forward of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, becomes a practice of freedom: “the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (1970, p. 15). Critical consciousness here leads to transformative action: “nam(ing) the world, to change it” (Freire, 1970, p. 76). Rather than set transformation as an end goal for critical pedagogy, Freire advocates for pedagogical praxis, or the cyclical movement between critical reflection and transformative action. Through this process of invention and reinvention, students and teachers use the classroom space to imagine transformative actions, then reflect back on those actions, and reformulate them toward greater transformation. “Because liberating action is dialogical in nature, dialogue cannot be be a posteriori to that action, but must be concomitant with it” (Freire, 1970, p. 134)
For Sholle & Denski (1993), the great potential of media production is as a “transducing element,” a means of translating critical media concepts into transformative action and vice versa: “Through the displacement of a transmission model of media training (or, the teaching of media reproduction), the teaching of media production is recast as an ongoing process involving the transformation of consciousness (and reformations of the self)” (p. 143). Media literacy theorists further envision production activities as a form of transformative action. Students’ critical consciousness of hegemonic media forms can be put into practice as means of counter-knowledge creation. “A critical media perspective enlightens students to the potential that they have, as media producers, to shape the world they live in and to help turn it into the world they imagine” (Morrell et al., 2013, p. 3). Media production’s transformative power here is rooted in the creation of these alternate texts, “empowering individuals to create alternative media for counter-hegemonic expression” (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. xiii). This power holds the potential to affect change far outside the classroom. Situated at the start of the media professional pipeline, students engaged in media production courses produce works that have the potential to influence culture at a mass level. Alternative media production as a transformative action holds the possibility of creating real institutional change.
The remainder of this chapter will focus on critical media production pedagogy as a vehicle for praxis-based transformative education, specifically through the creation of alternative media texts. To begin, I want to inventory a few key issues that have hindered the transformative potential of production courses imagined above. First, many advocates of alternative media production approaches assume students are interested in creating alternative or counter-hegemonic texts. As many of the instructors interviewed for this project report, students are much more likely to enter production labs with the intent to recreate rather than challenge their favorite media:
As soon as students are in front of a tool, or a toy, that’s where they focus it. And I think when students go into what’s counted as a production course, it sets up the expectation that this is going to be about how to make movies, it’s not going to be about how to think about movies. (It) feeds into this idea that students think production is something different, something separate than thinking about theory, representation, and meaning.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
This sort of “ginning up production courses with theory,” as Boulton describes, runs the risk of students not only ignoring critical considerations, but actively working against them out of frustration. Instructors’ efforts to instill critical concepts can also result in a transmission approach to teaching theory. Attempts to move students away from hegemonic forms can result in students viewing critical issues in the same manner as camera or software training: a need to avoid committing a “representational foul” rather than empowering personal expression (C. Boulton, Personal Interview, August 28, 2020).
A second issue comes in the inability of alternative media production to achieve praxis. The creation of these alternative works is often viewed as a finishing activity: a means of inscribing critical concepts into a concrete product. Such an approach ignores the production process as a site of critical attention, in particular how individual production choices affect meaning making. It also represents an inversion of the technicist approach to media production. Critical inquiry takes the primary pedagogical role over technical training, which merely produces a similarly unproductive result. As Sholle & Denski (1993) note, the transformative potential of alternative media production depends on its ability to mount a worthwhile challenge to dominant media. To this end, the value of learning standard production practices cannot be overlooked:
I could come up with some alternative perspectives. But then the system that the institution has put in place–Adobe Suite–I could say screw Adobe Suite. But then the department is like, no this is what we need them to learn. Adobe is obviously a major corporation, they’ve got near monopoly status across all platforms, so the process in and of itself is a colonized process. But we can while we’re in that process use these same structures to create alternate voices. At the end of the day, people are still watching TV, on social platforms. So no matter what you do, even if you are using alternative voices and perspectives, the Internet is part of the structure, television is part of the structure, editing suites, the cameras, the people who produce the cameras, even education, all of that is so corporatized. There’s no escape from this.
J. Cubbage, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Cubbage here speaks to an inherent flaw with the pipeline argument. If the transformative value of alternative production originates from the work students produce beyond the classroom, then instructors must provide both the skills to thrive in media professions as well as the critical lens through which to imagine and implement alternative practices once inside these institutions. The challenge for instructors comes in striking a Goldilocks balance between technical and critical skills. Too much of the former leads to the technicist approach detailed in Chapter 4, while the latter will result in these alternate works being ignored in favor of more slickly produced media texts. As Cubbage summarizes: “The shaky videos and muffled audio, it’s gonna detract from your message” (Personal Interview, October 28, 2020).
Finally, transformative goals can often do more harm than good. The charge for students to engage in critical or social justice-oriented projects is often received by students as an imperative to probe sensitive aspects of their own lives. Too often they disclose vulnerable parts of themselves they may not be ready to share with others, or do not understand the impact of making public these parts of their lives through the creation of a media project. As Ellsworth (1989) notes, critical pedagogy’s call for students to bring issues from their own lives into the classroom and to create understanding between teachers and fellow students often places undue burden on marginalized students. Within the context of production courses, these students can feel pressure to perform and package their marginalized identities. Relating again to the pipeline argument for alternative media production, there are also ethical questions in challenging students to create transformative content as a means of training them for industries that may reject or co-opt these goals:
Something that does concern me (is) this notion that I was going to teach future educators to have a conscience, to change the industry from the inside… Freighting one aspiring creative industry professional to be conscious of an organization is naive. It doesn’t reckon with this series of soft powers in place. These are compromises we make in our lives everyday.
C. Boulton, Personal Interview, August 28, 2020
Beyond the feasibility of the pipeline argument, Boulton also reckons with the dubious ethics of instructors charging student producers with transformational goals:
There’s a risk to raise someone’s conscience without any attention to how to manifest or actualize it in any kind of practical way. You’re setting people up to feel like cowards and hypocrites. Like we’ve taught you what’s right, now go out in the world and violate that every day. Good luck sleeping at night.
C. Boulton, Personal Interview, August 28, 2020
These issues represent perhaps the most challenging of those documented in this project so far, due in large part to the real world consequences involved. Transformation through alternative media production must grapple with a past history of student expectations around production work, a present struggle to balance critical and technical skills, and an uncertain future over the value of the approach in real-world practice. The strategies outlined below do not offer a comprehensive guide for overcoming these issues; however, they do provide a number of innovative and nuanced ways for realizing media production pedagogy’s transformational promise.
Strategy 1: Modeling different modes of production
Opening space for alternative production practices that serve transformative goals must begin with challenging students’ expectations around media production and the desired output of those practices. For film instructors, screening work from a diverse range of makers was a commonly used strategy:
I show a lot of short films from all over the world. Students never really watch those on their own, so even showing them short films as its own form that tends to be more open-ended, more poetic, with a looser narrative structure kind of gets them out of their comfort zone already. I often focus on short films with minimal or no dialogue, so it’s very much about visual storytelling. We’re looking at a short film from a filmmaker with a disability or from another part of the world. A lot of it is about form, showing them new forms of storytelling and partly about representation. Showing them different points of view, how someone different from themselves can use this form for a powerful story and probably to tell a story they’re not used to seeing.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Showings and discussions, as many instructors emphasized, need to delve deeper than just on screen representation. Keyes’ discussions of queer theory within production courses, for instance, look to make explicit how identity and experience directly inform making:
One of the important things is in establishing the difference between queer theory and queer people making things. It’s this idea that you see the world differently because of your experiences. The way that you’re going to encounter a camera, and the way you’re going to think about the things assembled in your timeline are going to be shaped by your experience of being queer.
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2021
Queer making, or any other ‘non-standard’ approach for that matter, here is framed not as being different for the sake of difference, but as opening up new modes of expression. In a similar vein, several instructors screened experimental works from filmmakers including Bill Viola, Victor Masayesva Jr., and Maya Darren. Beyond exposing students to works outside the Hollywood canon, the films point to how these director’s backgrounds affected their process of making. For example, a lesson on Masayesva Jr. might begin by showing how the director’s Hopi identity influences the subject matter for his films. It then speaks to production style, illustrating how identity shapes all aspects of his filmmaking process: using Indigenous storytelling devices instead of the Hollywood three-act structure, employing a majority Indigenous crew, and premiering/screening films in Native communities instead of the mainstream festival circuit. Related to a process over product approach, screenings and discussions open up opportunities for students to reflect on the potential value of alternative media production practices in leading to transformative work.
Modeling alternative media production practices required students to integrate critical and ethical issues with their making. Similar to the Oxyana discussion detailed in Chapter 5, Pyles frames discussion around problematic documentary work that looks to move past critiques of the work onscreen, and asks students to consider the production choices that led to a particular outcome:
I think the features of documentary storytelling can afford you the ability to pull in lots of different identities and emotions. It can be factual in some ways, even though we know documentaries are not just facts. We’re spinning the way images are being produced.
D. Pyles, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Working with her Appalachian State students, Pyles often features work that represents Appalachian culture. A common example is the work of Shelby Lee, a photographer best known for his stark black and white portraits of Appalachian families:
We talk about what it means to represent oneself and one’s culture. Lee for example claims to represent his own people, others saying he’s perpetuating stereotypes. And some (students) in the class will say that is true. But others will reject them. And if we were to do a photography assignment, we would talk about what your own photography does for those representations? What does it mean to represent a particular identity?
D. Pyles, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Pyles’ use of Shelby Lee complicates the idea of being from a culture as automatically qualifying one to represent it properly. As many of her students are likely to identify as belonging to the Appalachian culture Lee claims to represent in his work, these discussions around representation are grounded in students’ own backgrounds. Similar to Morrell et al.’s (2013) project with Boyle Heights students detailed in Chapter 2, Pyles’ Freirean commitment to grounding classroom work in students’ lived experience presents alternate production modes as a concrete means of challenging hegemonic representations, in particular stereotypes that directly affect how students are treated in the world.
Another commonly used tactic in modeling alternative production modes is to bring in professional media makers as guest speakers. In addressing some of the critiques Boulton raises about not being able to actualize transformative production strategies in professional settings, guests speakers can help model for students what industry work looks like, understand how critical issues discussed in class translate to that professional context, and make clear the challenges and opportunities–particularly among marginalized students–that they may encounter:
I bring our graduates and people from the community in to speak in class. And I am very careful with who I bring in. Like I have this tiny woman who’s second AC, and she goes over what she does and it’s going over all their heads because it’s so technical, and she’s picking up these huge rigs (camera packs). And I bring in my African-American students who are working in x, y, z in the industry. I believe very hard that it’s difficult to be what you can’t see… That behind the scenes work, just looking around to see who is doing what, that’s so important. R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020).
Among instructors working as filmmakers and other producers, sharing their own background was also cited as an effective way to justify the value of alternative modes of production:
I explain at the beginning of the semester the lens through which I come to filmmaking, how important it is to be a critical filmmaker, and how that can make you a better filmmaker. You’re going to come up with the original unique stories that no one else has come up with before if you have this critical foundation in your work.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Instructors with media industry background also tended to be upfront about their challenges in trying to reform practices from the inside. Teaching to her primarily Black students at the HBCU Bowie State University, Cubbage relates her experience as a Black woman working in a white male-dominated television news industry as a means of cautioning students looking to enter industry careers:
I’m acculturating them to what the process is if they want to work in the media. Like they say I want to be an entertainment reporter. You’re already oppressed. You wanna be in front of the camera and tell stories and be entertaining instead of I want to go into my community and tell news that’s not being told. To change that ideation, because they might have been dreaming about this since they were 13, who am I to crush that? No one said that to me. No one said “are you sure you wanna go in the news? News is kinda racist.” I went into news, and realized it’s racist. Now I’m teaching.
J. Cubbage, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Similar to the tactic of challenging production standards detailed in Chapter 4, instructors largely took a negotiated approach when justifying the value of alternative production modes. Vasquez, for example, stresses the importance of “knowing the rules,” while speaking to the value of bending those standards to open up new forms of expression and unique ways of communicating messages:
As a means of tone setting, the techniques offered above largely avoid the high-minded language of transformation in favor of a more tempered presentation of alternate production strategies. Instructors grounded issues of representation in real world consequences, such as the cultural stereotyping that often results from media misrepresentation. In-class examples often related to students’ identities or lived-experience, with production assignments then positioned as direct means by which students might confront misrepresentation. Instructors did not sugarcoat the challenges of transformative action, offering clear-eyed looks at the challenges they may face in looking to transform industry practices from the inside. Finally, instructors also spoke personally to the value alternative production modes hold for them, leaving students to figure out for themselves how non-standard production approaches might work for them.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
I’m not sure I accomplish my job by putting out everybody who fits into the same box. You got that aesthetic! Go reproduce it. But can you interrogate that aesthetic? I think you can. The best way to do that is with your camera. And if you look at some of the feminist work that comes out of the ’60s and ’70s, that’s what they did. Some of it was very experimental or challenging work, but they really used the camera to challenge the aesthetic of the femnine, of what it means to be a gendered being. Once we pull back the veneer, it’s a brave new world out there.
Strategy 2: Assignments that build in critical engagement
Making alternative production matter–that is production teaching practices that are capable of transformational influence–relies on a careful balance of technical and critical skills. Some instructors formalized this balance through theory and practice days set in lecture and lab spaces respectively. A more praxis-based tactic was to integrate critical reflection into technical production assignments, typically through the use of project parameters and assessment guidelines. Integrating critical ideas into assignments can often head off student resistance to critical discussions as interruptions from their production work (Zanker, 2007; Boulton, 2016). Integrating issues of representation and power into assignment parameters instead lets these critical considerations arise inductively through the production process. As media scholars have noted, production work possesses critical, praxis-based potential simply by nature of asking students to go out into the field (Sholle & Denski, 1993; Buckingham, 2013). The act of going into the community to speak with people, pointing cameras at the world, and editing the results into whatever form they choose, as Oppenheim emphasizes to students, are all decisions that require critical consideration:
More than not, we’re not saying “let’s take a look at structural racism in news reporting.” That’s not to say that doesn’t come up, we usually don’t address it directly in the assignment… I let them go find their own stories, I don’t choose for them. So in my approach, these societal questions and how we report on who we are come up accidently.
K. Oppenheim, Personal Interview, August 24, 2020
Against the educator-as-liberator tendency Freire warns of, taking time to reflect on production decisions isn’t about establishing correct ethical positions, but in letting students experience first-hand the complicated politics of representation inherent in creating media work:
The critical issues can emerge organically. I had one group that profiled a guy who gives backpacks full of food and supplies to homeless people. And a whole host of issues came around how to represent the homeless people receiving the packs. And that was a good space to talk about those representations. A lot of homeless people have mental issues, or might be engaging in illegal behavior to where being on camera can expose them to arrest. Those issues of ethics come up. Like we’re in solidarity with the poor in this university, so how do we not just reproduce that poverty through this project. How do you represent people with dignity? How do you deal with your own privilege? You go to this elite school, and you make this project that goes on your resume, and you go onto a career while these people largely stay in their class positions. We don’t necessarily go into a bunch of readings on it, but we discuss the issues when they come up.
D. Gracon, Personal Interview, November 13, 2020
For instructors not teaching documentary or journalism-focused material, such inductive opportunities to engage with critical issues are less abundant. Narrative film or video courses present a particular challenge, with students often primed to recreate hegemonic narratives through their own video projects, such as the ‘slasher-bro’ tendency detailed in the previous chapter. One countermeasure is to implement formal parameters around content, for example Vasquez’ “no sex, death, or violence” rule:
I had these guys filming, and they were out at the side of the road, and of course out comes the gun. And I said, you know what, you’re going to reshoot that. And they said we can’t reshoot the whole thing. And I said, well you gotta come up with something else. They went out instead and whipped a teddy bear out instead. It was sort of bizarre, but it was within the rules. But I had to challenge them. They knew the rules, they broke them, and they could either turn it in and get a 0, or change it.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Though substituting a teddy bear for a gun might seem a more absurd than critically productive outcome, Vasquez’s hard line approach functions here to force students out of established media tropes, and challenges them to creatively find their way outside those conventions. Proctor uses a modified version of this tactic in her Action Sequence assignment. Working in groups, students are tasked with creating a 3-5 minute short film meant to demonstrate their proficiency with three-act narrative structure and rising tension through editing and shot choice. Within these technical goals, however, Proctor includes the parameter “No use of weapons in this sequence”:
Action sequences can so easily rely on violence for the excitement that this becomes something where they have to learn to create action without violence. Sometimes we’ll have a prop, typically a goofy one that doesn’t lend itself to violence. So how can they create tension or suspense visually without it being about violence? That I think helps them to grow when thinking about sequencing or narrative structure. Thinking more creatively about what the essence of action is. Because when we think about action, we think about fighting. But that’s not necessarily what action is, so it gets them to think more foundationally about it.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
As an example of an assignment that builds in critical issues inductively, the Action Sequence is notable for its seemingly small scope. Proctor does not start students from a large structural issue like violence in the media and ask them to address the issue through their work. Instead, the parameters denaturalize a hegemonic belief–that action equates to violence onscreen–and challenge students to imagine other ways in which action and tension can be rendered.
The Action Sequence replaces the negative framework of using parameters to ‘right the wrongs’ of film violence with the positive orientation of parameters as creative challenge. Proctor then uses student responses to this challenge in order to stage more critical conversations on onscreen violence. Crucially, responses and subsequent in-class discussions are rooted in students’ own attempts to work through issues. Though Proctor’s assignment is a particularly savvy illustration of this approach, many other instructors found opportunities for this sort of inductive engagement with critical issues along all steps of the production process, placing moments of critical reflection within the script-writing, filming, and editing tasks. These praxis-based techniques can build more grounded, practice-based engagement with critical issues, and demonstrate for students the value of alternative production strategies as modes of personal expression not available through established forms.
Strategy 3: Nudging toward critical work
Among the toughest challenges instructors noted is student aversion to critical work. As media theorists have noted, students treat production courses as sites in which to recreate the media texts they love (Sholle & Denski, 1993; Morrell et al., 2013). Instructors here cannot adopt a high-minded critical approach by chastising students’ tastes as ‘harmful hegemonic representations.’ This “critical liberator” approach is sure to invoke resistance, and stands against the co-intentional nature of Freirean education. Instructors largely refrained from a rigeous, sage-on-the-stage impulse to instill critical values or reprimand problematic work, instead using the unique context of production courses to develop deeper level understandings of critical issues in the media. Among the most common tactics was to diagnose problematic content by examining individual production choices. Share, for example, frames discussions of film stereotypes around the language of storytelling. Rather than brand a work as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on its use of stereotypes, his approach highlights the intentions of the film’s producers and why they might rely on stereotypes to convey a narrative:
How often and easy it is to do that in a way where you’re reproducing stereotypes. Because the easiest way to communicate is the way we’re used to. So in a movie, you want to make the audience understand that the woman is pregnant, then you go have her vomit. Like really? We’re representing pregnancy as vomit? Just recognizing that the stereotypes are real, and that they’re the easiest way to communicate. Most people in Hollywood, I don’t think are racist. But a large majority of people making movies are using racial stereotypes because they’re the easiest way to communicate. So the more we can start to question, to really think critically about our choices is all the more important.
J. Share, Personal Interview, September 15, 2020
Share’s framing here avoids the totalizing language of much media critique, a rhetorical move that allows discussions around stereotypes to focus not on “what’s wrong” but on “what can we do better?” His framing also asks students to empathize with media producers, with the understanding that, as media makers themselves, these issues are ones that they will likely face when creating their own work. The ability to work through critical issues becomes part of students’ media making toolkit alongside camera or software skills:
I want to teach them how to think on their feet. As I said before, we have a very diverse group of students, so they’re more receptive to a lot of these ideas than students at other places that I’ve taught. That makes my job a little bit easier. But they aren’t any less likely to fall back on stereotypes and those very typical tropes of student filmmaking. I’m always pushing them to be more creative.
R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020
The push Goldman and other instructors describe often works in the form of a strategic nudge toward critical work, avoiding the top-down approach of shooting students down for wanting to recreate hegemonic representations or demanding they take on certain critical issues in their work. This often becomes more difficult when students choose uncritical topics, which seem to be reproducing conventions:
My first instinct is to say yes. They want to do sports, football. So who’s interested in that? Well potentially a large potential audience. But my objection might be, it’s not enough. Can we get more context on it? What is it about the athletics program and the recruiting that make this more interesting? Can you make a story about football captivating to someone who doesn’t give a shit about football? And if you can’t do that, then what else you got?
K. Oppenheim, Personal Interview, August 24, 2020
As Oppenheim’s example illustrates, a student’s choice of an uncritical topic seldom comes from a desire to reproduce media conventions; it’s often just the easiest choice. Instead of dismissing the student’s idea outright, his approach instead employs critical questioning to nudge the student to think through issues of audience, message, and originality until something less conventional emerges. Instructors of more narrative film based courses too use this tactic of nudging students to expand their horizons and allowing them to engage with different ideas at their own speed:
I have a decent number of students who are at least entertaining the idea of film or documentary making or news production. And for that cluster, they’re mostly interested already in some film history. So I just want to expand that a bit. Let me give an example. I have a terrific student that just graduated, one of my most talented. When he came in, he had the taste you’d probably expect an 18-year-old boy to have. He was into Tarantino and Nolan movies. And I like both of those directors. I didn’t think it was my job to get him to rethink those. But just to expand a little bit. I want him to start watching Ozu films. So you know Kurosawa, have you heard of Mizoguchi?
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
In line with the navigating critical discussions strategy detailed in the previous chapter, instructors also use one-on-one meetings to push students toward further critical reflection. These private conversations are a necessary practice for when student work exhibits outwardly harmful content, cases in which a nudge might not be enough:
I will come right out and say something is sexist or homophobic or racist. I don’t mince words at all. If someone submits a script like that, I’ll sit down with them. I won’t allow them to make it.
R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020
The one-on-one format can also allow for more nuanced discussion around critical issues than in-class critique or written feedback:
I think it’s more valuable to hear it in person. Because when they read it, some of them just shut off. So I prefer to set aside the time to just talk with them. The text always lacks some emotion. So that’s why I try to leave some of the more important parts of the rules to the class. I open it so they can talk things over face-to-face.
T. Özdemir, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Frequent check-ins such as those Özdemir describes offer an effective means of guiding students toward more deeper consideration without foisting theory onto them. Other instructors followed a similar mode of critical nudging in line with a praxis-based production approach, with the student taking initial action (choosing their project theme), reflecting back on that action (via instructor questioning and class screenings), and eventually reworking the initial action to arrive at a piece that skews expectations. Course structuring is essential here in enabling effective praxis, with iterative assignments, critical discussions, and feedback sessions all working to move between critical thinking and production practice. The nudge as a pedagogical strategy is aimed at giving students the time and feedback necessary to critically reflect on and reiterate production choices, components that are particularly essential for students working with sensitive subjects. Cubbage builds this praxis-based movement into the final PSA assignment for her 200-level video Video Production course, using check-in assignments to nudge students toward critical considerations of audience, social justice, and media format:
I had students bring in their own advertisement: who is this message created for, whose voice is evident in this and whose is left out? Then I had students make a presentation to unpack their ad. And then from that critical analysis, I had students make a public service announcement. They had to write a script and go out to talk about it. The issue could be no texting and driving, sexual health, environmental justice. They had to write the script, get a camera, edit it on Premiere and go through. So it was not directly teaching media literacy but injecting some of those themes in there. The students had the theory and the pedagogy. I had to approve the script, so I can tell them how to correctly structure a broadcast script. And they could choose to do audio or video PSA. We were scaffolding the critical skills and the technical skills.
J. Cubbage, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
For her similar PSA assignment in her 300-level Intermediate Video Production course, Goldman breaks the group project into three parts spread over a month of class time: a reflective treatment of the PSA, a complete script, and finally the finished PSA. The treatment section front-ends the written reflection strategy documented in Chapter 5 in order to get students to reflect on production decisions before picking up the camera:
Well I’ll look at their script, which is a very easy way to get these things across to students. We’ll talk over “who’s their client, who’s your audience.” And I say, okay if that’s your audience, do you think your script reflects that? And frankly, this generation is so much easier. They don’t care about someone’s sexuality. So I would just read their script and ask them “okay, what do these people look like? What race are they?” And I’d push them, say if they got only white actors, I would say “does this look like Buff State? (Goldman’s Home Campus)” And then they say “no.” And then they’ll ask some of their other classmates to be in it to correct that.
R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020
These reflective questions prompt students to make clear connections between technical and critical considerations, with features like casting, audience, mood, setting, and musical choices all needing to serve an intended defined message.
Goldman’s PSA project also avoids the issue of production action serving as a finishing activity. In-class screening and peer critiques of PSAs happen on the second-to-last week of class. Groups then use peer feedback to create another cut and screen this version for an outside faculty member in the final week of class. Only after these two rounds of feedback do students submit their final PSA video.
The critical nudge as practiced by Goldman and other instructors serves to head off student resistance through a careful implementation of praxis-based teaching. Their courses build in multiple opportunities to move between critical reflection and production action. The critical nudge also works in a similar fashion to the technical restrictions discussed in Chapter 4: gradually introducing critical questions such that students don’t feel overwhelmed or repulsed, but are able to bring critical ideas inductively into their making process.
Strategy 4: Portraying the personal
Several instructors did not experience the resistance to critical topics documented by many media theorists (Citron & Seiter, 1981; Zanker, 2007). Many instead pointed to a palpable enthusiasm among students to create works that engaged critical issues and social justice causes:
I’m finding that students are far more interested in these subjects than I thought. So maybe we have to start asking them, what floats your boat? What story do you want to tell? So I think we have to turn it back and start interrogating what their stories are if we really want to see some changes.
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Instructors also found many students were eager to convey their own experiences and histories through class production projects. The personal nature of these works connects deeply with the transformative goals of alternative media production:
I had one student who said to me “I want to tell the story of when I was shot.” So I had to talk to her about whether that was an okay story for you to tell, because this is not about let’s get PTSD again. So we talked about that, then did that. She interviewed friends, visited the hospital, and told that story. I had another project where a student talked about her biracial parents, and how nine grandchildren later now everything is okay. I had a colleague ask me “how the hell do you get those stories?” And I say “tell them yours.”
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
The student projects Vasquez describes outlines a deeply Freirean vision of media production pedagogy, with students reflecting their own experiences and issues, building deeper understanding of the issues through interviews and other real world engagement, and developing technical camera and editing skills as means by which to create works that challenge audiences’ understandings of the issue. Yet encouraging students to reflect on and share their experiences through media projects also comes with very real risks:
I think sometimes professors that are well-meaning encourage students to be like “yeah! put your whole heart in the story! The story of a Black body traumatized is going to do so well in film festivals!” So I try to be conscious of that in all directions. And I say that as a trans guy who was going through transition in the midst of doing my master’s thesis. So I think I’m like “oh, no wonder I was unable to come to school for two weeks. I triggered myself writing a script.”
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2021
Keyes’ retelling of his own traumatic experience is one very direct tactic for modeling the potential harm inherent in probing sensitive parts of one’s identity through production work. He also speaks to the tendency among instructors to value deeply personal or triggering experiences as more critical or engaging, a value that is upheld through media fixation on these topics. Alternative production practice must acknowledge these tendencies, with instructors using their role as facilitators to navigate this tricky line between transformative work and trauma. Another aspect of this facilitation work is to be transparent with students as to the limits of what they can feasibly create with their media projects:
If you think you’re going to get a sharp production out of 10-weeks, you’re sadly mistaken. Those that do it come to us with a level of polish that we didn’t give them. But I want to teach them to take that thing that’s inspiring to them and start on a larger path. Like I had a student last year whose father died homeless. She’s incredibly passionate about it. And I want to be sensitive to her passion, but from this journalist mercenary perspective I’m also like “you’re not ready.” So in conversations with her, it’s like “hang on to that. You’re not ready to do this story right now in the context of this class. Don’t do that, because you’re going to come up short, and you’re going to feel really bad about it. What I want instead is for you to start a project that’s going to help you get the access to do that project down the road. And check back in with me, enroll in a different class down the road where you can do it justice. That for me is what production can do.
M. Blaine, Personal Interview, August 20, 2020
In line with the critical nudging strategy, Blaine’s approach avoids shooting down ideas, yet doesn’t shy away from communicating the limitations of what can be accomplished in a single class. Blaine and other instructors often advise students to continue larger, more involved, or more emotionally resonant projects through senior thesis or capstone projects. Beyond tempering expectations around personal projects, instructors must also uphold technical standards. This need goes further than ensuring the work has the transformative potential to challenge hegemonic work. Students also risk a feeling of personal disappointment when the finished project fails to live up to their expectations:
That happened with the student who wanted to tell her story of getting shot. The assignments were a car wreck; pretty unusable stuff. What I probably would have done with her is to go through the footage with her image by image. What she was doing was gathering bits and pieces together and trying to tell the story. So what I do for critique is they sit down, they get an index card, and the index card has the comments on it. Can you help this? Can you make this piece stronger? I never say it isn’t good. It’s always, what can you do to make this stronger? Can we make this a more compelling piece, and what do you think we can do? I always turn it back so that they’re the ones that are put in the place. Do you see anything wrong with this shot? And do you think you could do a better job if you had more time?
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Vasquez’s use of check-in projects and one-on-one meetings serve to help bridge issues of impact and intent. Her attention to tone here works to prevent technical issues like shot framing or sequencing as personal attacks on a students’ character or the worth of their story. By contrast, making the piece stronger by developing production skills becomes a process of empowering students’ ability to best represent their personal narratives.
The transformative power of media projects such as video or film works also comes from their unique materiality. They hold the ability to directly reflect real life through images and audio elements as well as share these real world experiences through the public format of screenings. Yet these inherent qualities also pose unique problems, particularly when works portray precarious elements:
Another time, students were working on a film about family relations. One girl started telling a story about physical abuse by her father. A pretty harrowing story. And the students asked if she would be willing to be the focus of the film, and she said, okay I think I will. And they went into her home, and there was her baby sister or niece in the room. And afterwards we talked it over and asked “wait, what is our responsibility?” This girl was not a minor, but now we’ve seen a minor in this environment where she’s experienced abuse. And we had to talk to the student, to tell her we’re mandatory reporters. The girl was not happy about it, but we had to report this case. They ended up taking out certain parts where the niece was, the underaged child. And they had to really weigh, to negotiate how you represent this student, and how she wants to be represented. It’s this question of poverty porn, and exploitation. And on the other hand, you don’t want to ignore these social problems and traumas that are real. How do you in these cases capture some of that but with dignity? That’s a great way to teach some of the bigger ethical questions of filmmaking and journalism. But you need a very experienced teacher or professor to guide that.
S. Goodman, Personal Interview, October 29, 2020
Goodman and other instructors here speak to the high level of responsibility and consideration needed when inviting students to portray the personal. There is huge transformative value in having students use production courses to explore and relate personal experiences and perspectives on critical issues. Yet instructors must do their due diligence to set reasonable expectations around personal disclosure as well as communicate the potential risks inherent with showcasing parts of themselves through media formats.
Strategy 5: Connect with students’ power as producers
Media production courses hold outsized influence due to their role in producing future media producers. Following the pipeline argument, these students will graduate from video, audio, and image production classes to take positions in advertising, public relations, journalism, and the media industry. The work they produce in these professional roles thus has the potential to influence culture at a wide level. Students can use that potential to act as change agents, challenging hegemonic media forms through alternative production strategies. They can also avoid transformation altogether and reproduce existing conventions.
Instructors often explicitly expressed to students the power they wielded as media producers, in particular their ability to affect change through the work they create. Beyond in-class screenings, public presentations of students’ work–in particular films and documentaries–offered a way to demonstrate the impact these pieces could hold:
We always would have a public screening, and I’d try to get a venue like the HBO Theater or Lincoln Center, and have a reception with their families where they can be celebrated. They would have Q&A, and with the critical thinking aspect, it’s a great learning exercise to say why did you do this or that. Having a real audience is so important. It’s a perspective about the value of student voice and the importance that you give to that work. That their work can actually be used. The idea that this film on toxic mold was used to organize for better public housing, or this was used by people organizing against police brutality. For many of them, the goal is for them to use the work for civic engagement and social justice.
S. Goodman, Personal Interview, October 29, 2020
Goodman’s access to venues in New York certainly adds another level of cachet to these screenings; however, any venue that allows for wider audiences to appreciate student work can serve the purpose of personal empowerment. A related tactic was to advise students with film festival submissions, connecting them with opportunities, helping to prepare materials, and in general, offering venues for their production work outside of the classroom context.
Another aspect of transparently communicating students’ power as producers is to detail how to harness this power. Blaine emphasizes the value of baseline technical production skills:
That essentially gets down to the “killing your darlings” idea. And I think you just need to let it go. Do star wipes, unmotivated rack focusing, get it out of your system, then walk it back and “why’d you do that?” Then say, “you know what, industry convention is not that.”
M. Blaine, Personal Interview, August 20, 2020
Industry conventions in this context are not anathema to alternative production modes; a grip on conventions is necessary in order to critically negotiate them into alternative forms. Cubbage takes the impetus on technical skills even further, stressing to her students the need to develop tactile production skills in order to reach positions of power within the media professions:
There’s what we call broadcast standard, in other words can I play this on a radio or TV station? It doesn’t have to be perfect. No one’s paying you thousands and thousands to do this, but I don’t want to see jump cuts, you need to use a tripod. Students feel like they should be able to just do it. But there are standards. I mean, how many Youtube videos have you watched that are like “what is this?” People don’t use a lavalier. People don’t realize that if you’re out and there’s background noise, you have to channel the audio. So we cover that, what’s good and bad, what are the dos and don’ts. We have to go there and walk through the process.
J. Cubbage, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Setting production standards here serves as a baseline for Cubbage to ensure student work can have value beyond the classroom. Instructors also presented students with tangible outlets for their production work outside of the traditional industry pipelines. For his multi-camera television production course, Gracon pushes his journalism students to think beyond the traditional local news path by pointing to other venues for their reporting work:
How can we get into some deeper content in this space? Or how about working for public television, to think about something outside the news pipeline. I mean imagine being a music major and when you graduate you can only work for 3 record companies. But in the broadcast journalism field, that’s kind of what it is. If you’re going to work in that field, which few of them want to do anyways, you have ABC, NBC, CNN and Fox. And I’m like what about alternate journalism like Democracy Now? Or interactive documentaries. I want to open up the space to them, or else I feel like it’s limiting and weird. You can start your own production company, or be a documentarian.
D. Gracon, Personal Interview, November 13, 2020
Another tactic was to highlight students’ transformative power at the community level. Many instructors employed service learning based projects, with students interviewing and portraying stories of local non-profits, activists, and community opinion leaders. While these projects have a tendency to be treated by students as trials for more professional work, Gracon and other instructors stressed the influence students wielded even these class projects through their ability to capture and retell community narratives:
I had an assignment called Teach the Community. And the task was to have them make a project that taught the community about media literacy. Some students made a zine, and they had to go out and distribute it to people on campus. And then they had to talk about how it was handing it out to people. Did people like it? Or other students would do a documentary screening and have a discussion. But it was this idea of how you actually do it in some capacity rather than just thinking about it. The idea of praxis is really important.
D. Gracon, Personal Interview, November 13, 2020
Service learning projects like Teach the Community, as Gracon notes, are a powerful vessel for praxis-based learning: moving from reflection on community issues to production actions meant to document and address those issues. Instructors also had student producers recognize how they could be exploited for that power. Keyes in particular warns his students not to adopt the grueling hours that typifies production practice:
You put students on a narrative film project, and trial by fire they’re like “oh my God we bonded because we all stayed up until 8am for two nights in a row.” But then they learned this unhealthy pattern of production that burns them out, that puts them up to have their labor exploited, that sets them up to drain themselves for an industry that already makes it really hard to access their labor rights.
O. Keyes, Personal Interview, January 8, 2021
Speaking to this similar sense of student agency, Vasquez looks to root students’ power as producers not as a matter of the skills they hold, but in their personal application of those skills:
I think it’s because I pose it as your chance to tell your story. You get to put your input on it. So how will you imprint your story on your school friends who are attending the high school you’re attending? Do you imprint that story? What I’m really trying to teach throughout is how to look. What do you see when you look at something?
L. Vasquez, Personal Interview, October 28, 2020
Goldman leans even further into personal power, stressing for her students the need to build self-efficacy. Learning goals in her video production courses avoid earning specific camera or software skills in favor of less tangible, but more transferable skills:
I want them to feel confident, and to have a realistic idea of what the production world is like, including prejudice. And I want them to come out of my classes knowing how to tell stories, to have confidence in their voice and their ability to tell original stories. And I want them to come out of my class knowing how to think on their feet.
R. Goldman, Personal Interview, January 12, 2020
These tactics differ widely largely by nature of the different institutions from which instructors come, from Gracon and Cubbage’s industry pipeline focus to Goldman’s a broader use of production skills as a sort of critical problem solving kit. Common to all these tactics is the need to to name for students their power as producers, and articulate as specifically as possible the challenges and opportunities they have in employing this power.
Discussion
Transformation stands as arguably the most important as well as idealistic of Friere’s goals. Media production’s great promise to critical pedagogues, as Sholle & Denski articulate, is as a “transducing element”, capable of alchemizing idealistic classroom concepts into practice (1993, p. 9). Video, audio, and visual production assignments offer feasible mechanisms by which coursework can possess transformative action, with praxis-based courses funneling critical media ideas into practice through students’ media projects. Following the pipeline argument, the role of these courses in producing future media professionals also gives greater valence to these projects. And while the work students produce in class may not change the world, the approaches they develop in these courses may inform their creation of transformational texts in the future.
The strategies offered by instructors here aim to actualize many of these high-minded goals in the practical context of production labs. Central to most of their tactics was a need to deflate often quixotic notions of transformation in order to set reasonable goals around how students might challenge hegemonic conventions through their work. In teaching practice, this means avoiding a top-down approach to preaching critical ideals by not foisting critical themes or chastising students’ tastes. They critically probe the production process itself to showcase the value of alternative approaches in real world context via screenings and personal accounts. They also use praxis-based approaches to cycle between action and reflection in order to develop a natural relationship to alternative practices. Working in the role of facilitator and advisor, instructors nudged students toward critical ideas, a process bolstered by praxis-based assignments that allow students to reflect on the ethical/representational issues inherent in their production choices.
Instructors’ efforts to set more reasonable expectations as to what transformational work can just as easily be interpreted as falling short of critical pedagogy goals. Strategies such as nudging toward critical work–while aligned with the Freirean caution against forcing critical ideas upon students–rarely resulted in student projects that critiqued or challenged power in a true critical theory sense. No example offered by instructors neared something like Morrell et al.’s (2013) work with Boyle Heights students, in which transformative goals emerged from grounded discussions with students regarding their experiences and collective action was taken to achieve those goals. By contrast, transformative work as rendered here by instructors was largely individualistic. Reflection too most often came after action in the praxis cycle, rather than initially motivating that action. Bruker’s use of group pitches offers a possibility for bringing in a more collaborative and reflective approach to formulating and achieving transformative goals within production classes, though this could likely be pushed further.
Instructors also ran up against a larger struggle to equip students with critical framing while still providing the skills needed to enter the media industry pipeline. Balancing these two goals–so often at odds within production classrooms–means transformation is largely interpreted here as encouraging students to see the value in unsettling hegemonic approaches. Showing another path is not the same as laying out means to achieve it, and as such, none of the approaches here can be said to achieve the full vision of Freire’s praxis-based approach of transforming the world. Yet what they may lack in transformative action I believe is equally made up in the significant contribution these strategies provide for reflecting on transformation: emphasizing the need to achieve change without sugarcoating the difficulties in enacting it. Instructors acknowledged the struggles students may face in trying to transform institutional spaces from within, relying on their own own experiences as well as guests from the industry to temper expectations. They balanced critical and technical skill building, and related both aspects in context: the need for baseline production skills to secure work in industries, and the critical lens to do more than reproduce these conventions once on the inside. They also offered concrete venues for work outside the industry context, including public media outlets and personal projects. Key throughout these strategies is to recognize the unique power media production holds as a conduit for even critical pedagogy’s most utopian goals. Though they may not result in transformative work in themselves, what instructors offer here in their production courses offer venues to think deeply about how to realize transformation, offering actionable approaches to affecting change.
