- How did you first come to teaching media production?
Aside from acting as a warm-up, this question looks to establish educators’ pasts and get a sense of the range of experiences from which educators came to media production teaching. Sholle and Denski (1993) speak to the distancing dichotomies between theory and practice in communication departments, dichotomies that often manifest through academically versus professionally focused faculty. My goal was to get a sense of where these critical media production educators come from–the professional field, academia, or some unique mix of both–in order to see how or if these distancing dichotomies still exert influence. Boulton (2016) further addresses how the scholar-practitioner, while often highly desirable on the job market, often finds the dual role to be like holding two jobs at once. In learning of subjects’ backgrounds, my intent was to learn whether this experience is common among other instructors.
- How has your approach changed since your first started? And what part of that change has most surprised you?
Continuing with the past-focused inquiry of the beginning of the interview, my aim with this question was to get a sense of how production pedagogy has evolved. My heavy use of late 1980s and early 1990s literature (Masterman, 1985; Denski, 1991; Grahame, 1991) leaves a huge gap with regards to the issues relevant then to where things are now. Having participants offer their first-hand accounts of how the practice evolved during that time sought to bridge this time gap. The follow-up to this question used an expectation versus reality prompt to look at a specific element from the past. To model the prompt, I frequently shared my own difficulty connecting my production teaching to the critical lessons I was acquiring through my graduate studies to interviewees.
- How do you bring critical approaches into your teaching of production, and do these approaches speak to your own scholarship/activism?
This question bridges past into the present of educators’ teaching approaches. In line with Boulton’s observation that the learning by doing media production should be driven by “a significant amount of critical and theoretical thinking” (2015, p. 90), I sought to better understand how critical concepts drive educators’ teaching of media production. Follow-ups to this question aimed at specifics of their approach: what are the critical issues fueling their work, and how do they translate their interest/passion into the content and manner in which they teaching? In using these sorts of concrete examples, I wanted to connect the often nebulous idea of ‘critical’ media production pedagogy with the grounded activism of feminist, postcolonial, antiracist, and LGBT+ rights work.
- Where did you learn these approaches? And do they differ from how colleagues have taught this subject?
I’ve documented the degree to which critical approaches to media production are not readily available in literature or instructor training materials, and how even available materials come up short in critically engaging the production process itself. With this question, I wanted to know how each educator came up with their teaching approach despite not having a template to work from, and to explore if other sources such as a colleague or mentor helped in this development. When time allowed, I followed-up this question by asking whether they received any resistance to their use of critical content in production classes. As Shor and Freire (2003) observe, the anxiety for students to “gain skills and credentials for a tough job market” justifiably makes them resist experimental classrooms such as those outlined in critical pedagogy (p. 480). These pressures are deeply felt in production classes, which have long been influenced by the professionalization discourse (Boulton, 2016; Sholle & Denski, 1993). I devote time to questions to discuss student resistance; however, my interest here was in difficulties they might have met at the departmental or other administrative levels.
- Can you walk me through an assignment or exercise in your class that illustrates your approach?
My goal here is to move from theory (how they aim to teach) to practice (how that concept is applied through an assignment). Hopefully the assignment educators discuss will connect with their responses to the previous question, illustrating how they translate critical concepts for students both through how they teach, and more importantly, how they encourage students to engage in critical work of their own through the work they create. This question will also open an opportunity for me to ask educators to send any artifacts (syllabi, assignment descriptions, anonymous student work) that can supplement the descriptions given here.
- How do you make the production process itself critical, in particular when teaching technical skills like editing techniques or equipment operation?
Keeping with the example-based thread of the previous question, I wanted to dig deeper into how educators move through the production stage of these assignments. As I’ve argued earlier, many critical approaches to media production often stop being critical once the technical portion of the process begins. I sought to understand how or if educators have built critical approaches into these processes such as video editing, as well as what challenges and opportunities they’ve found in implementing these practices.
- How do you illustrate alternative production approaches or question standard/Hollywood practice?
My aim here is to deepen the thread of the previous question by asking how educators navigate the pressure to teach ‘standard’ production approaches such as the Hollywood standard in their own classes. How do they teach with or against the software, or trouble ‘established practices’ in ways that open up opportunities for critical engagement? I also wanted to get a better idea of how they define ‘established’ practices. I’ve published my own ideas related to these common production conventions elsewhere (Swerzenski, 2021); however, each educator might be critical of different practices or concepts. I use this question as another chance to ask educators for artifacts from their teaching, such as lesson plans, exercise instructions, or even lecture notes. In collecting these materials, I wanted to build a cache of critically-oriented approaches to the standard technically and professionally focused production practices, the likes of which can offer a functional alternative for future production educators.
- What examples of alternate productions/producers do you use in your teaching?
Critical media production pedagogy cannot just be different from standard instructional approaches; it has to offer something to students. In her review of alternative media production, Jeppesen (2016) explores how DIY, community-based, critical, and radical strategies can create new subjectivities, serve communities, and create space for new modes of aesthetic expression. With her approach in mind, I wanted to understand how educators illustrate the value of alternative approaches to students, such as by sharing examples of unconventional media texts (i.e. non-Hollywood films). Where do educators locate these examples? How do they use them in their classes? And how do students react to them?
- What is the biggest challenge for students with critical production assignments?
As I outlined in Chapter 2, the ‘theory’ of deconstructing media and ‘practice’ of producing it happen in separate contexts: different spaces (lab versus lecture hall), different instructors (academics versus media industry professionals), and different workloads (essays versus multimedia projects). As a result, bringing theory and practice together through critical media production assignments is a challenge not only for the educators who come up with them, but the students tasked with completing the work. To this end, I wanted to dive into the difficulty of bridging theory and practice from the student perspective. How do educators critique standard production practices and promote alternative practices in ways that resonate with students? In asking educators to map these difficulties onto the assignment they described in the earlier question, I aimed to ground these issues in concrete examples rather than drift into a more vague review of ‘challenges.’
- Do students ever push back against your emphasis on critical ideas? Alternatively, how do you sell students on this process?
My goal here was to take the prompt from the earlier question and further explore the idea of student resistance. Sholle & Denski (1993), Apple (2003), Zanker (2007), and Boulton (2016) all speak to the tendency for students to resist critical themes in production classes, seeing it as a distraction from skill-building. I was interested to hear about the degree to which educators see this sort of resistance in their own students, be it because of the aforementioned reason or others. As a follow-up, I also sought to understand how educators navigate this tension. How do they position critical work as not in opposition to skill-building, but as beneficial to personal or professional goals?
- Do you choose the software/equipment that you teach? How do you negotiate its role?
In exploring the influence of the professionalization discourse in media production courses, I argue that editing software now acts as the primary influence in enforcing and reproducing that discourse. Though often perceived as value neutral, these tools now actively shape how we author media texts (Manovich, 2013). In the classroom, this influence is often felt through the ‘best practices,’ disseminated through the tool itself, be it through the functions it does or doesn’t make available or the tutorials and other instructional tools built into its interface that point toward correct forms of usage. My goal in posing this question to educators was to expand on (or possibly test) my argument by understanding their own relationship to media production tools in the classroom, and the degree to which they take agency in this technological relationship by determining what parts of what tools are used. Does technology, as Apple (2003) argues, assert the language of efficiency, job skills, production standards over critical considerations? Or do they find in these tools (and their own negotiation over which ones they do and don’t use) new ways in which to approach critical questions? My goal was to better understand educators’ relationship with production software, be it adversarial, symbiotic, or perhaps both.
- How do you uphold student voice through your assignments?
Traditional approaches to media production instruction have largely followed the transmission model, with instructors teaching students the ‘correct’ means of producing a media text via tutorials or other step-by-step processes (Freire, 1970; Buckingham, 2013). By contrast, a critical approach to media production should support Freirean concepts of dialogue, student voice, and transformation, one that “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). For educators looking to instill critical concepts into their production courses, I wanted to understand the ways in which these principles can get complicated when put into practice. How do they teach core production skills without silencing student expression, especially through assessments of their work? And what if students do not wish to engage with critical topics, or, more troublingly, wish to perpetuate racist, sexist, or bigoted messages through the work they produce? To avoid purely theoretical discussion, I asked participants for specific examples of assignments that have or haven’t upheld these goals.
- How do you assess student work, especially in attributing technical and critical value to student work?
Coming after the previous questions on student voice and transformative action, I want to see how educators balance these loftier pedagogical goals with the necessary work of grading students. Do they focus on the technical aptitude students show with multimedia assignments (form) or the ideas they express through these media texts (content)? I’m hoping to get into the details here, and go through rubrics or other metrics educators use to evaluate assignments.
- What is the value of production both in classes like yours going forward, and can that value be extended further across the curriculum? What other uses as a critical tool do you believe media production has?
I wanted to discuss whether educators perceive media production as having an expanded role in future college coursework. Production courses still comprise a relatively small portion of the Communication curricula in the majority of programs (Buckingham, 2013). They are also typically separated from more academically- oriented courses that do teach or utilize multimedia assignments (Denski, 1991). Do educators see these trends as changing in the future, or will this dichotomy remain intact? Finally, do they see opportunities for media production activities outside their current position? One such site has been around the issue of fake news, where production skills may play a role in helping students detect digitally manipulated media texts. I was curious to see whether educators have imagined or perhaps already created new contexts for critical media production pedagogy to be implemented.
