Dialogue holds a central position in Freire’s theorizing, acting as the mechanism through which to achieve many of critical pedagogy’s loftier goals. In avoiding a transmission approach, dialogue provides the pivot to reflection necessary in breaking up technical action. Dialogue in Freire’s conception must also address the student-teacher contradiction. Discussions provide the structure needed to make space for diverse student perspectives and knowledge, such that one voice in the room–most often that of the instructor–does not dominate. As Fassett & Warren (2006) highlight, dialogue must be “a process of sensitive and thorough inquiry, inquiry we undertake together to (de)construct ideologies, identities, and cultures” (p. 55).
In the context of media production pedagogy, dialogue should work for students such that “their commitments, styles of consumption and investments in the media be foregrounded, questioned, and understood” (Sholle & Denski, p. 161). Working within a praxis-based model of balancing theory and practice, dialogue as a teaching mechanism serves to critically consider aspects of the production practice and highlight the meaning-making value of technical decisions. The instructors interviewed for this project situated dialogue in their teaching in a number of venues, including discussions around film screenings and debriefs following technical training sessions. For this chapter, I want to focus on the most common method instructors implemented for establishing Freirean dialogue: the feedback session.
Almost every instructor I interviewed had students show work and give/receive critique to their peers. As a common film and art school practice, feedback sessions offer a number of obvious benefits for production educators looking to advance critical pedagogy goals. Against the top-down transmission model of instructors using class time primarily to instill technical skills, feedback opens space for students and their work to serve as the classroom focal point. Production assignments such as graphic design and video projects in particular lend themselves to public showcase:
There’s a pride in what they’ve made. And for some, that’s the first time they’ve done that. And I know that some kids are much more adept at media now, but to make a documentary is still quite an achievement in terms of complexity. So I think it’s something where they show their principles to their teachers, their parents, their peers. Because it’s a visual means, they can just show it in a way you can’t show a homework assignment or test grade.
S. Goodman, personal interview, October 29, 2020
Following in this spirit, Blaine finds students are more open to receive and provide critique with multimedia assignments than for more traditional text-based ones:
Students who felt like they were good writers would push back against any critique. Like they may have been a good writer from an academic context, but from a storytelling/professional context, you gotta level up a lot to get there. What I found with doing visual media was that there was much less of a barrier. I don’t think people had come up writing essays and being told they were good at it. You had more of a blank slate about people’s own self-perception about whether they were a good storyteller or not.
M. Blaine, Personal Interview, August 20, 2020
Watching back and discussing student work offers necessary reflection time key in such action-oriented production courses. Inviting students to critique each other’s work also helps to downplay instructors’ voices as the dominant authority. Further, those critiques offer a vehicle for students to apply their divergent experiences and knowledge within the classroom. Hearing feedback from their peers offers students valuable guidance toward improving technical or storytelling capabilities:
You can’t account for other people’s reading of your work. I speak to them from experience, like when I’ve been at a Q&A from my own work, and someone has taken offense. And I have to take that critique as legitimate. Once you make something, it’s out in the world. You can’t control it. People will read it in different ways and get frustrated.
A. Levine, personal interview, September 1, 2020
In practice, however, feedback sessions too often fail not just to achieve this promise, but to work against student empowerment goals. One issue comes in the assumption that students will automatically provide constructive feedback:
Like it’s really hard to not just say “I really like that.” Like I had a student that kept saying in every critique “you really hit the nail on the head.” And I was like what does that even mean?
A. Levine, personal interview, September 1, 2020
Several instructors noted the propensity for comments such as “it was great” and “I liked it”: hardly the kind of constructive assessment that builds future improvement. Bland complements, however, are often better than overly critical ones that may blunt student creativity and confidence:
You have to build community through critique rather than breaking down an individual. It’s one of these ideas where the research shows when people receive negative feedback, they shut down parts of their auditory processing. They aren’t able to hear you as well as they could prior; their body has had a physical response that’s shut them down.
O. Keyes, personal interview, January 8, 2021
Giving students ‘voice’ in these sessions can often exacerbate power dynamics. Often the professor’s voice still acts as the ultimate authority, or certain student voices dominate the conversation, using their comfort in the space to alienate others:
I remember I once had a class where the most talented student was a man, and he was just all in it for himself. He made good movies, he thought he was better than everyone else, he thought he was better than me. He was probably right, he was really talented. But he just didn’t have this giving personality. And that was not a good class. It just had a sour feeling about it.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
As noted in the previous chapter, student work often perpetuates negative stereotypes and tropes. Screening this work can prove uncomfortable or even harmful. Attempts to engage critical issues–particularly issues of representation often central to narrative or documentary work–are often met with defensiveness or devolve into personal attacks on character. Sharing sensitive work can also be triggering for students, an act of public shaming that helps no one:
I get students who want to explore really personal topics and then end up triggering themselves by doing that work. And 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!”
O. Keyes, personal interview, January 8, 2021
Though sometimes unavoidable, these issues documented here are largely surmountable. The following sections will detail five strategies offered by instructors for overcoming these obstacles and maximizing the potential of feedback sessions as a vehicle for Freirean dialogue.
Strategy 1: Setting the Tone
Though uncommon in theory-based media and communication courses, showcasing and critiquing student work in class is a more normalized practice within media production pedagogy (Wolf & Briley, 2007; Ito et al, 2009; Nixon, 2021). Yet as detailed in the previous chapters, standard production practices often operate within a technicist logic. With feedback, the draw to fixate on technical issues often dominates discussions. With this potential issue in mind, instructors stressed the importance of situating feedback within the larger critical aims of the course. A first step, as Özdemir explains, is in explaining to students the aims of and expectations around feedback sessions:
My job for them is to be an intellectual storyteller, to keep telling them “you don’t need to go to a school if you just want to be a technical person.” We now have all these websites and online tutorials about how to learn Premiere Pro or a variety of cameras. You can learn everything from these resources; you don’t need us. But if you want to intellectually be a good, creative storyteller, then you need school. You need the experience of your professors and your peers, their feedback, to become a better digital content creator.
T. Özdemir, personal interview, September 16, 2020
Setting a clear tone for these feedback sessions was a high priority for many instructors. Vasquez in particular stresses the importance of “tuning students” to examine work with a more critical eye. Her documentary production course opens with screenings of short documentaries, with subsequent discussions meant to draw the connection between technical filmmaking choices and ethical issues:
What are the ethical issues here? How is the filmmaker using fair use? How is fair use helpful to the filmmaker? That’s a big issue for the documentarian, and they need to address it… We’re really examining the social structure embedded within the image.
L. Vasquez, personal interview, October 28, 2020
Watching and discussing more experimental works can also help reorient the tone, offering instructors the chance to establish a different value system for work. Taking time to watch and critique other works, as several instructors noted, might frustrate students eager to pick up the camera and create. Yet these early class sessions offer the scaffolding needed to hold more critically-oriented feedback sessions later in the semester. Instructors take this early class time to highlight the critical elements of the course. Goodman’s use of feedback, for example, relies on the Freirean idea of transformation by attending to the ways in which their work can speak to local community needs and values. Others use feedback to model different ways of watching and evaluating, what Vasquez describes as “tuning” students toward particular elements of the work. Levine also notes the importance of establishing the value of critique sessions as a necessary part of the creative process:
What I say to students is “the reason I want you to account for every decision you’re making, is that as much as we can talk about your intention, you need to be aware that you can create unintended meanings or readings.” And that’s why critiques are so important, and that honesty in critiques are so important… (It’s about) being able to talk, and hopefully write, about your work, and being able to talk about someone else’s work.
A. Levine, personal interview, September 1, 2020
Levine was one of many instructors that brought their own work into the classroom. The practice aimed to address the teacher/student contradiction by modeling the importance of feedback in their own work and connecting with students as fellow media producers. Directly explaining the importance of feedback here is crucial in achieving student endorsement for future sessions.
Strategy 2: Developing Critical Language
Instructors offered a range of strategies for getting students to give and receive more effective feedback. As Guerra notes, “I think that having critical feedback tends to be more important than what they actually learn. Learning to take feedback is something I really work on, which is really hard” (Personal Interview, November 2, 2020). The most commonly noted difficulty was getting students to offer their peers more than rote critique. One method of heading off the problem was to offer specific parameters around feedback language:
I have a list of banned words, like cool or weird or great that are just non-words. I pass along one of those hotel bells, so someone gets to be the monitor for each of those critiques. If they hear a banned word, they get to ring the bell… So we have to monitor ourselves, my own transgressions included. It’s teaching them how to use language about the work precisely.
A. Levine, personal interview, September 1, 2020
Other tactics spoke to the constructive value of critical comments as opposed to “it was great” platitudes. Many students’ aversion to critical language, instructors noted, came from a fear of “being the bad guy.” Proctor addresses this issue by reframing bad or failed work as hugely valuable to producers:
Failure should be something we embrace because that’s a moment of learning. That’s another way of lifting all the boats in a classroom, is that even if you feel like you’ve screwed something up, that’s a success. That’s what we’re here to do.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
Vasquez communicates the reasoning behind her feedback approach directly to students, explaining her use of critical language as constructive consideration rather than cruelty:
My intention is not to have you walk away and never pick up a camera again. I believe that if you’re here, you want to be here. You like this art form, and you have stories to tell. My intention is to say, please, say something that’s positive, that gives the person a direction to fix it, address it… We’re really examining the social structure embedded within the image.
L. Vasquez, personal interview, October 28, 2020
Keyes echoes this idea by noting the importance of “build(ing) community through critique rather than breaking down an individual” (Personal Interview, January 8, 2021). That building process, however, does not come naturally, but through careful facilitation. Many instructors set clear expectations for how feedback should be structured, typically using a method that balances positive and negative critique. Specific strategies included a warm/hot and cool/cold share–offering one positive and negative critique of a piece–as well as the sandwich approach–placing all critical between positive comments:
We use the sandwich technique, so I start with something I appreciate that you did, something I think you should do to make it better, then I end with something that I liked as well. It’s not like I’m just gonna tell you “oh, that’s crap.” I’m always going to start by saying “hey, I appreciate you’re telling such a personal story. I think some of the assets you’re working with are very shaky. I think you’re going to have a problem because it’s overexposed. When you’re editing you should be thinking about this or this.” Then I end with the positive, “you’re on the right track, and I’m looking forward to the end.”
O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020
Critique formats were not presented as a suggested format students could use, but as a clear set of guidelines to follow when giving and receiving feedback:
You have to get one bit of warm feedback and one bit of cool feedback. And I usually want them in that order. Sometimes students will jump to the cool. And I find that when we start doing it, everyone in the class only wants to offer warm feedback. “Oh I really like this, and I really didn’t have any cool feedback.” And then I have to push them and say “nope, you gotta give cool feedback too.” Even if it’s just a tiny thing, like you didn’t think this line-reading is right. And then usually after a couple of weeks, the reverse happens, where it’s like “I like this one thing, but this was bad, and this was bad, and this…” and then I have to step in and say, whoa whoa, let’s also talk about what else is working here.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
This emphasis on participation speaks to the importance of feedback sessions less for those receiving feedback, but for those giving it. These discussions are opportunities for students to develop critical viewing practices and articulate technical and critical details through the language of critique.
Strategy 3: Feeding Back Frequently
Key to establishing a familiarity with using and receiving feedback is providing students with ample opportunity to practice. Many instructors underlined the importance of holding frequent sessions, typically either weekly or bi-weekly:
What good is to wait until the essay or film is done and then critique it? They’ll never read it. So I build it where I get a scene or a sequence or a rough cut, and we’ll all watch it, then another version of a rough cut, then a final. I built that into the course.
L. Vasquez, personal interview, October 28, 2020
Equally important is making sure each student has the chance to showcase their work:
When I can, I make sure we show all of the work in front of the class. The filmmaker is not allowed to speak at the beginning. And I really try to frame it as a chance for people to share what they’re feeling and noticing. So the people who received it know how their intent sort of landed with the audience in addition to providing constructive criticism.
J. Proctor, Personal Interview, September 16, 2020
The strategy of setting smaller technical goals and using assignment restrictions detailed in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively are key here in providing the class time needed to hold frequent feedback sessions that feature everyone’s work. The majority of Guerra’s video production assignments, for example, are :30 seconds long, a parameter that keeps feedback sessions short and prevents the students from feeling overwhelmed when attempting to critique a given piece. These assignments are also iterative, such that students are able to familiarize themselves with their classmates’ work. This incremental approach, particularly in classes geared toward more ambitious narrative or documentary projects, can be met with student resistance, many of whom don’t want to ‘spoil the ending’ or screen only a completed work. Despite this possible pushback, making feedback sessions a frequent part of in-class work serves two purposes for instructors, both closely tied to Freirean goals. The first is to demonstrate their value in helping students to improve their work by reflecting on each step of the production process:
They’ll get a whole lot of feedback coming from me and from their peers, and they’ll get that after each script or video segment that they produce. The idea is to always be getting a review and talking about what you’re making so they’re not alone with it. So they don’t just make something and say “ta-da!” And they’re getting pretty good now about talking about what they’re making, and trying to bring it back to the big picture.
K. Oppenheim, Personal Interview, August 24, 2020
Carefully crafting these check-in points was a common theme among many instructors. Keyes for example prefers students screen a single scene from a longer work rather than show a rough cut assemblage, as screening “the best students can do at the moment” provides better grounds for valuable feedback than a clearly unfinished work:
Smaller individual things we might watch in class, but anything large and narrative, I don’t want to throw that to the wolves that don’t know how to do it yet. A rough cut can be really vulnerable especially if it doesn’t have that music or the cleanup. If it’s just the stuff in sequence, it takes a lot of nuance to know how to give feedback for that.
O. Keyes, personal interview, January 8, 2021
The limitation of peer feedback is an essential part of structuring sessions. Instructors showed a careful consideration of where peer feedback could offer constructive value, and where the “nuance” of the instructors’ eye might be needed. Rather than expect students to provide deep critical reads, instructors instead used class sessions as a form of audiencing (Buckingham 2013). This audience perspective can open space to address questions of impact and intent so crucial for future media producers and communication professionals:
We still do warm and cool feedback, as well as another exercise where I’ll say “Claire, show your film, and then everyone write down what you think the argument was.” And then we go around and read out what they think the argument was. It’s another one of these things where sometimes you make a video and you’re like “oh yeah, it seems like everybody got it.” But sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes all 14 people in the class have a different argument written down.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
Second, sessions should also show the value of giving constructive feedback. As Oppenheim notes, frequent sessions should help students to build the language needed to “justify their own work and the decisions that go into them” (Personal Interview, August 24, 2020). Developing this critical language aligns with a process over product approach to production pedagogy:
I think that having critical feedback tends to be more important than what they actually learn. Learning to take feedback is something I really work on, which is really hard. So say the sequence isn’t working, I’ll ask them “do you see the issue? What are you trying to do?”
O. Guerra, Personal Interview, November 2, 2020
Echoing Guerra’s views, Vasquez emphasizes the importance not in achieving a desired end, but in understanding what students can do to eventually reach that goal:
I think it’s more valuable to have more critiques than a more polished video. I want that process. I think if anything sinks in, it’s the process, not the final product. That’s how I imprint as a teacher. In the end, they’re not going to watch the movie again anyway.
L. Vasquez, personal interview, October 28, 2020
In keeping with the idea of sessions as a form of audiencing, instructors also encouraged students to rely on their own knowledge rather than feel as though they had to speak from an expert point of view. This perspective shift can help swap in the formalist language of critique with considerations that might be front of mind for a general audience: how would a regular person encounter this work? Would you still watch it if you didn’t have to for this class? Would you understand it if you didn’t have the creator here to explain it to you?
The course is going well when a lot of people are speaking, and a lot of people have good ideas. And then the person is still free to choose. They can pick and choose the ideas they like. That’s when things are going well. It’s not going well when you have people just reading their ideas, you have two or so talkative students who like to criticize.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
Setting clear expectations around feedback and holding sessions frequently are keys here in unlocking dialogic potential. As Keating notes, feedback also connects dialogue to Freirean goals by pertaining to students’ own work and in showing the value their knowledge and perspective holds in aiding their peers.
Strategy 4: Scaffolding Feedback Sessions
In no case did instructors take a freeform approach to feedback sessions. Each provided specific guidelines as to who speaks, at what times, and in what form. Rather than an exercise of power, these measures are meant to balance voices in the room and pre-empt power dynamics that might arise during discussions. This facilitation work, Goodman notes, should be deployed in the service of classroom equity. “I think a good teacher knows their students well. They’re mindful of power and privilege in the classroom” (Personal Interview, October 29). Scaffolding strategies are often contingent on class size. For his typically 15-20 student production courses, Guerra “always (has) 2-3 people give feedback, then they’ll hear my feedback. They have 5-minutes to present, then 5-minutes to hear feedback from other students” (Personal Interview, November 2, 2020). Assigning specific respondents to provide feedback was a common strategy for ensuring all students engage in critical discussions:
We’ll take three questions, then it’s on to the next person. It takes a while, but it builds community. It’s something everyone has to do, both in giving the critique and responding to it. It doesn’t become one person who has thoughts on everything and four people you don’t hear from the whole class. It takes a lot of prep work, but what I find is once we do it the first time, the second time they have a model, and they kind of do that on their own. They’ll fall into that format.
O. Keyes, personal interview, January 8, 2021
Many instructors also forbid the producer from speaking until the end of the critique, a tactic meant to model how a general audience would respond to the work:
We watch the work, and we take about two minutes taking notes. I don’t let the maker speak. We talk about their work for ten minutes, and then they get a chance to respond at the end. That’s another part that’s more arts school, emphasizing that everyone is responsible for their own work.
A. Levine, personal interview, September 1, 2020
In implementing this same guideline, Keating speaks to the value of modeling reception inherent to the feedback session:
The philosophical reason is that the movie has to speak for itself. The more practical one is that everyone just comes in with excuses like “oh I couldn’t do this.” Or often they’ll turn the movie into something it wasn’t. Like for example, if everyone is telling you that a scene is funny. And then you jump in after the first person has said that, and you say “oh that wasn’t intended to be funny.” Then no one else will say they thought it was funny. But if suddenly three people all agree that scene was funny, then I know this is awkward, but you have to sit there and know that even though you didn’t intend it to be funny, that’s how it was received.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
Instructors carefully positioned their own feedback as a means of addressing the student/teacher power dynamic:
When we respond, we go in a circle. That includes me, so that we’re all on an equal footing. Because I don’t think I have any special insight into what the student’s argument is. And it is true that frequently the film studies students will have a more intricate account of the film.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
These strategies do not fully defuse the student/teacher contradiction, as instructors ultimately hold grading power. Proctor’s strategy (discussed in the previous chapter) of giving extra credit value to peer critiques suggests one method of addressing this imbalance. Another strategy offered later in this chapter is student self-critique, which can serve to redirect the critical lens developed through feedback discussions toward their own work. Even with these caveats, carefully scaffolded and facilitated feedback sessions offer important vehicles for students to not only share their voice, but to apply their unique perspective and knowledge to the benefit of their peers.
Strategy 5: Navigating Critical Discussions
Even with careful scaffolding, feedback sessions can often prove tricky to navigate both for instructors and students. As Levine explains, “I just try to stress throughout that critiques are messy, but they should be places where people can speak their mind” (Personal Interview, September 1, 2020). That freedom of expression comes when instructors cede authority in the classroom by allowing discussion to move in unexpected directions. More often, messiness emerges from students presenting works in progress:
A lot of times what it’s been for me has been someone using irony badly. Someone trying to satirize a behavior, and ending up seeming like they condone it. And they’re issues of representation: who gets to speak for who about who. Especially now they’re students half my age that are more sensitive than they might have been when I was their age, and rightly so. I’ve had students challenge me, and I just try to talk to people.
A. Levine, personal interview, September 1, 2020
Critical issues also can arise from the topics students pursue with their work. As Lewis and Jhally (1998) note, the issue with much production work is that students reproduce existing forms rather than challenging them in the works they produce. Citron & Seiter’s (1981) article Woman With a Movie Camera outlines a common example of this tendency, with typically male students producing class video projects steeped in misogyny. Many instructors indicated that this proclivity to reproduce harmful representations remains strong in their production courses. As Keating notes, the problem is often compounded by the technical skill of some of these works, such that feedback sessions often focus on the proficiency of form rather than issues in the content. A first strategy to address this issue was for instructors to pre-screen all student work before feedback sessions. This process helps to avoid, as Keyes terms, “throwing them to the wolves” in a typical feedback session by screening potentially problematic work. Instructors instead can engage students outside of class via a one-on-one critique session, where they have more control in framing issues constructively:
I have never gotten a student to change their idea by calling them sexist. If anything it might produce a double or even triple down… So I try to meet them where they are by saying “we actually see these tropes a lot.” Sometimes calling it stereotypes won’t work, but tropes, unoriginal, if I make it not about them being sexist, but that “oh the character’s suddenly so much more interesting when it’s a woman!” It’s kind of an inception thing. I know what a solution will be in advance, but I’ll guide them towards it.
O. Keyes, personal interview, January 8, 2021
Knowing when not to screen work in class is a crucial part of feedback facilitation. Many instructors tried emphasizing the message that “feedback is not personal;” however, they acknowledge that representational issues in a student’s work are commonly received among the class as evidence of the producer’s own sexism, racism, or bigotry. Reserving these conversations for a private context allows for more careful navigation around critical topics and to work out the issues of impact and intent that might lead to offensive content. A thornier issue arises when students either do not see or choose not to accept the presence of harmful representations in their work. Similar to Keyes’ stressing of originality in personal feedback, Vasquez formulates her critical critiques of student work in the language of creative expression:
I trick them into making sure they challenge representation. So how will we challenge that, how will you make something different and push against a system that has always represented women as sexual objects? How will you redefine a woman on your screen? Or how would you redefine a person of color, or a person of different sexual orientation through your camera. Just having those discussions with students who are just dying to produce actually helps them think about it.
L. Vasquez, personal interview, October 28, 2020
Using conventions also emerged as a means of challenging students to think through critical issues. Keating recounts a conversation with a student pitching a slasher-style film that hit at critical issues from a story development perspective:
I just tried to push the idea that (the film) still has to be suspenseful. And if it’s suspenseful, the protagonist has to be active. You can’t have your main character, in this case a female, just be passive. It’s politically bad and it’s dramaturgically bad. So I was trying to avoid imposing my politics by making those views in line with storytelling.
P. Keating, Personal Interview, September 1, 2020
On the other side of the spectrum, student work often probes sensitive areas of their background that make them particularly vulnerable to critique:
Like I had a student last year whose father died homeless. She’s incredibly passionate about (that topic). 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.
L. Vasquez, personal interview, October 28, 2020
These tactics speak to a recognition of the harm feedback sessions can inflict on students. From this recognition, instructors placed careful limitations on the scope of feedback sessions, and used their own expertise when necessary to navigate between students’ insensitivity to issues of representation and opening up vulnerability or even trauma in open discussions of their work.
Discussion
This chapter examines the feedback session within the specific context of a video production course. However, the strategies offered by instructors as how to enact feedback sessions to achieve authentic dialogue I believe are scalable far beyond this local context. In this concluding section, I want to generalize the findings to better illustrate their importance for those instructing theory-based, writing-focused, or any other communication-related courses.
First, feedback sessions do not work in isolation, but in close consideration with course goals, assignment parameters, and due dates. The importance of iterative work was a key theme among instructors, with instructors, for example, having students build up from project pitch, script, completed scene, rough cut, to final. These frequent check-ins not only provided more opportunity for feedback sessions, but made sure critiques could be immediately applied to the next version of the project. A similarly iterative process could be applied to research based courses, with students building research papers up from abstract, literature review, and method. Feedback sessions here matter, with student work up until the final should not stand apart as one-off projects, but have some connective thread that may be developed through regular feedback.
Second, feedback sessions require careful structuring. Setting clear guidelines around who gives feedback, what order they present it, and the expected tenor of that feedback all serves to formalize the process and build a more supportive classroom community. Working in the facilitator role, instructors should pre-screen all work. Should potentially offensive or controversial content emerge in this work, shifting from class critique to a one-on-one conversation with the student can be a key tactic in addressing difficult issues with the nuance required. Feedback sessions are more normalized in smaller, lab-based video production courses, where there is an expectation (and often hope) that students’ will have their work screened for their peers. Groups can offer this more intimate feedback even in larger classes. Instructors advocate for maintaining group assignments throughout the semester so as to give students the chance to build better familiarity with the intentions and expectations of each others’ work.
Finally, giving feedback should be treated as a skill in itself. Related to the process over product approach espoused by many instructors, building critical language serves the practical purpose of helping student producers break open the production process into its individual components. In this way, feedback models how to enact praxis in students’ own production practice, providing the language to assess their own work, to identify areas of improvement, and to communicate what actions are needed to address those issues.
These strategies, while valuable especially within the technicist environment of most production courses, still offer a rather narrow application of authentic dialogue. For one, the feedback sessions offered here are far more hierarchical in structure than the open, equal discussions Freire envisions. The mode of feedback–in person discussion with set speaking order–also runs into many of the issues Ellsworth (1989) notes in mandating student voice. The format also might reproduce power inequities among those who are most comfortable speaking in the classroom space versus those who are not (Bali, 2014). The ‘critical’ character of the feedback sessions discussed here also lacks much grounding in critical theory concerns. Technical notes or narrative structuring comments seemed to dominate most sessions. More difficult conversations regarding the politics of representation were often (I believe wisely) moved offstage to one-on-one conversations between the student and the instructor. I don’t believe these limitations are a natural ceiling to the critical potential of feedback sessions. As many instructors noted, building a familiarity with the language of critique–even critique set in a technicist discourse–takes time for students. Further integrating critical topics into feedback discussions will no doubt take even more, especially given the discomfort these topics often bring on. To that end, I see the strategies offered here–limited though they may be–as a significant step forward in re-imagining not only how students and teachers interact with each other in the classroom, but in how they serve to benefit both each other and themselves through those interactions.
