To the frustration of some educators and theorists, Freire never offered specific guides as to how his pedagogical ideas should be implemented in classrooms (Keesing-Styles, 2003). Against this prescriptive approach, his philosophy offers what Sholle & Denski (1993) call a meta-questioning of pedagogical practice, a tool kit by which instructors and students can reorient the classroom to their own needs. I recognize that this project, with its emphasis on specifics and concrete action, might on its face seem to run counter to Freire’s pedagogical vision. Yet examining specifics, I argue, is an integral part of the meta-questioning process needed to formulate critical media production pedagogy, be that in understanding how transmission logic is reproduced through the technicism of standard production instruction, or in recognizing what aspects of the production process can translate into critical reflection and transformative action. The previous chapters have dealt mostly in the specifics, documenting through instructors’ words and teaching materials the issues and opportunities they encountered. In this conclusion, I want to move from specifics to a more generalizable—and I hope more widely applicable—reading of these findings. To begin, here are the five overarching strategies employed by instructors for enacting critical media production pedagogy:
Set a critical tone: The transmission model of education is deeply ingrained in standard approaches to media production via a technicist approach, wherein training on equipment, software, and other technical tools becomes the prime (and often only) educational focus. Disrupting the technicist model requires instructors to name it. Early class discussions that locate these logics in production processes are crucial in denaturalizing technicism as the ‘standard’ convention. Through early tone setting activities, instructors offer critically-oriented approaches to production meant to demonstrate their value over the technicist model. Screening works that challenge traditional production modes, reflecting on how critical approaches inform their own work, and assigning projects that allow students to inductively find their own value of ethics, representation, and social impact in their own making processes all aim to reinforce this critical tone. Production technology too must be deployed strategically, with the understanding that many forces–including production software itself–might reify the technicist approach.
Do less: A primary driver of the technicist/transmission approach to media production is a need—often reinforced by instructors, students, administrators, and industry figures—to hit certain technical benchmarks. This demand to develop job-market ready skills serves as the justification to focus fully on software and equipment training at the expense of any critical considerations. Instructors counter this technicist pressure by lowering technical learning goals. Against the transmission logic of needing to build maximum proficiency with production equipment or software, smaller assignments use a process over product approach to contextualize production practices. Focusing on specific editing techniques or software functions allows students to reflect on the meaning-making qualities of their choices. In place of time typically spent on training, instructors built specific venues for critical reflection time including class discussion, screenings, and reflective essays. Limiting technical goals also is key in making students who might feel overwhelmed or intimidated by technical aspects of production courses feel included in these spaces. Finally, doing less does not amount to leaving students unprepared. It instead shifts the technicist goal of technical proficiency to one of technical self-efficacy, building in students a context of and comfort with production tools such that they can continue to develop these skills on their own.
Value other knowledges: The transmission/technicist logic is often enforced not openly by instructors, but less directly through assessments, assignment parameters, or in-class critique. Instructors actively worked against this tendency through discussions, screenings, and personal reflections on positionality that modeled the value of non-technical knowledge, in particular how concern for ethics, identity, and culture were embedded within the production process. They also featured student voice, most notably through feedback sessions that invited students to utilize their experiences and diverse expertise to the benefit of their peers. Assessments were designed to give point value to non-technical topics, with written reflections and self-evaluations going further to embrace authentic assessment modes. Instructors also showcased the usefulness of production in developing non-production skills, including as a critical analysis tool for deconstructing media texts and an interpersonal tool for building collaborative skills.
Facilitate and structure: A key difficulty in enacting CMPP is in how instructors integrate critical concepts into production courses. Too heavy-handed an approach often triggers student resistance either by castigating their tastes or thrusting critical topics upon them without their assent. Going too hands off leaves the standard transmission/technicist model to take hold. Instructors struck a balance by imagining their classroom role as facilitators, putting considerable attention into structuring feedback sessions, creating inductively critical assignments, and nudging students toward critical reflection via one-on-one meetings. This facilitation approach allowed critical topics to emerge organically from classroom production work, situating considerations of representation in the concrete context of students’ production practice. Avoiding a top-down mode to implement critical concepts, specifically through a lecture-based sage-on-the-stage mode, also has the practical benefit of freeing up instructors to devote time elsewhere. Devoting additional time to student feedback in particular helped instructors to build a closer understanding of students’ work, such that discussions around critical topics could be better tailored to their purposes.
Temper transformative goals: Though the media production process does offer a concrete means of transformative action not available in most classroom contexts, the potential impact of that transformation was something instructors were careful to temper.. Though most students will not become Hollywood directors, many will enter media industries in which the work they produce can reach and influence wide audiences. Instructors spoke directly to that responsibility, as well as students’ choices in upholding existing representations or challenging these representations through their work. Bringing in industry guests, creating connections with local and community media organizations, and speaking to their own industry backgrounds worked to help students think through their future trajectory. A tempered approach to transformative action is also based in praxis, moving between critical considerations of ethics, representation, and positionality and technical skills meant to communicate their intended message clearly and creatively. It also gives the time necessary for students to build both the technical and critical skills necessary for transformative works, particularly through the sorts of iterative projects and feedback sessions that move them frequently between action and reflection. Advising also helps students navigate difficult topics and points them to opportunities through which to develop and showcase their work. Related to a process over practice approach, transformation is treated in CMPP as a long-term project, with classroom work mostly serving as a space for students to encounter and experiment with concepts on the way to future works with potential transformative impact.
The strategies offered here aim to help instructors use media production in their classrooms in ways that support rather than drown out critical goals. In the year and a half since I began this project, I’ve personally adapted many of these strategies into my own production teaching. Relating back to the lab experience I shared in the introduction, they’ve been most valuable for me in helping re-imagine many aspects of the production instruction process that I had long taken as an inevitable. For example, I described my students as “locking in” to their editing work in Premiere, such that trying to pull their attention away from the screen to discuss critical topics was bound to be treated as an interruption. This observation, however, was based too heavily on a binary view of media theory and practice as discrete activities. I’ve instead come to design production projects themselves to better incorporate critical elements, such that the in-lab work does not require a critical/theoretical interruption on my part: students work through critical ideas while staying locked in to the task. I’ve also found more natural seams in the production process than I had previously imagined, places where critical issues no longer feel shoehorned in. I’ve also learned to find more natural pivots to critical reflection, in particular in class feedback sessions that position critical concepts not in the abstract, but within the context of students’ own work.
I’ve also learned to take a more reasoned, and hopefully long-term view as to the learning objectives for production courses. The process over product approach that instructors have advocated throughout this project has in particular has proved difficult for me in teaching practice. A great sense of the accomplishment I feel as an instructor is in seeing the work students produce, a drive that inevitably leads to over-emphasize technical skill development in the service of creating an impressive final product. Recognizing this impulse in myself has helped considerably in thinking more strategically about how I structure production coursework, such that my classes don’t eventually veer into a technicist mode.
Beyond the instructors interviewed for this project, I also want to point to several resources that have proved essential during its development. First is the University Film & Video Association (UFVA), which provided a platform through which to workshop many of the nascent ideas for this project. Specific UFVA groups, most notably the Gender and Diversity & Inclusion Caucuses, provided both valuable teaching resources and a source of interview participants. Second is EDIT Media, the UFVA-connected initiative founded by production faculty that aims to center issues of equity, diversity and inclusion in teaching media. EDITs Student and Teacher guides were integral in illustrating what a critically driven approach to media production might look like in practice. Their teaching resources also serve as the model for what I see as a possible next step of this project: translating these strategies into teaching activities and resources available for production instructors and others integrated in integrating production into their teaching (a prototype is available in Appendix C).
This project works within the narrow scope of college-level media production courses. This focus I felt was necessary in articulating the overlooked value of these sites, and in working through the complex dynamics in actualizing their critical potential. While I see these findings as offering a great deal in terms of enacting critical pedagogy aims through media production instruction, they cannot be said to be “an ideal venue” for critical pedagogy as Denski describes. Instructors here largely implemented an institutional approach to balancing theory and practice, in particular working in as much critical material into the confines of a skills focused production course as possible. As a consequence, instructors mostly maintained the power structures of the transmission model, including a top-down orientation to their teaching as well as an elevated emphasis on technical skills enforced through lab activities, project parameters, and assessments. Critical material here is also limited by these technical confines, amounting often to a ‘process over product’ reflection on production choices rather than a deeper questioning of power structures that have produced these choices. These reflections can lead to deeper critical considerations; however, they do not in themselves constitute critical work in the Freirean sense.
Rather than charging production instructors to find more inventive ways to squeeze theory into practice, a more significant means of addressing this issue would be to make this sort of praxis-based work the norm across the curriculum. Most obviously is to flip the focus and make a case for theory based instructors to integrate more production. This project must stay in the CMPP spirit as outlined in this project: implementing production assignments not as add ons, but breaking open production itself. Keating’s Video Essay course provides one way forward, with video editing skills serving as more of a media analysis tool rather than the other way around. Production assignments also don’t need to be technically demanding, especially with smartphones and built in webcams on laptops providing accessible and user-friendly means of production. Many of the assignments offered by instructors could be readily adapted to theory-based courses, providing a hands-on mode of engaging with theoretical concepts without putting too much classroom attention on the tech.
Another consequential shortcoming of these findings is their individualized focus. While thinking through group work dynamics, holding regular feedback sessions, and providing opportunities for students to teach each other all fit within the Freirean need to give student voice, experience, and knowledge value, this collaborative work is geared most toward solo or small group projects. The collective, community based praxis of critical pedagogy and critical media literacy work is missing here. While some of the instructors here have taken steps to have students produce work through classwide collaboration or for community partners, more could be done in this direction.
Speaking with community partners regarding how students’ production work could be of benefit outside the classroom offers one possible mode of expanding CMPP’s scope. As a method of transformative action, production is a natural vehicle for service learning. Many instructors interviewed for this project include collaborations with local nonprofits and social justice organizations in the structure of their courses, with students developing video, graphic design, or social media resources in class for these groups to use. Service learning oriented projects also build students’ understanding of important social issues affecting their community, and can demonstrate how their work can have value as a means of public good. However, much like the seemingly natural synthesis between critical pedagogy and media production, blending service learning with media production also brings with many complications that require closer scrutiny. Speaking with community leaders about how these projects could better serve them, as well as how students and instructors’ desire to do good through production work often does more harm than good, I believe can lead to more mutually beneficial service-learning oriented production courses. Documenting student perspectives would also be beneficial in formulating how this sort of collaborative and community based production work can support their interests and learning objectives.
The institutional approach instructors articulated here–often lacking rigorous focus on critical issues of power and representation–may run up against the boundaries of what critical media production pedagogy is capable of at this moment. Boulton’s observation about production often being all students can handle in a single class resonated for most of the instructors interviewed for this research. So while the strategies they provide offer a number of innovative ways to synthesize media theory and production practice, these instructors are still working within the confines of a single semester-long class, as well within the narrow standards of how production courses operate within Communication departments. Opening up the full praxis-based potential of CMPP will undoubtedly require broader institutional reform.
One venue for this work is graduate schools, in particular the Communication PhD programs that train future professors in the field. Making sure these programs integrate media production into their curricula could help reduce the dichotomy between media theory and practice that is later reproduced in the departments these PhD grads feed into. Programs such as the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Emergent Technologies and Media Art Practices program offer one way forward, building media study and creation into both coursework and dissertation requirements. Training more PhDs with production knowledge is important here not just to meet the continued demand for media-making oriented courses, but in ensuring scholar-makers have faculty status needed to affect departmental goals. Having the power to shape the curriculum is a direct means through which to reject a theory versus practice binary that reifies the distancing dichotomies between faculty, students, and subject matter in much Communication pedagogy. Normalizing CMPP-oriented courses throughout the curriculum also allows for the type of iterative work so many instructors here advocate for, providing students with the time to blend critical media and production skills over multiple classes. Empowering production instructors as full faculty also ensures they can work with students as advisors, such that intro or intermediate level production classes can serve as launching pads for deeper thesis or capstone projects. A second venue is in tenure requirements and other academic assessment measures, many of which do not value production-oriented projects. Acknowledging works beyond published articles as documentaries for tenure cases and elsewhere is a step in the right direction. However, the less quantifiable outcomes of CMPP work such as student showcases, community service work, and additional ways in which instructors connect departmental missions with the work students create also deserve recognition.
This project from its inception has been a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. That these findings make no explicit mention of the pandemic was—particularly at the time in which I conducted the majority of interviews in late 2020—a product of my belief that things would return to some degree of normal. Too much fixation on how the pandemic had shifted instructors’ teaching seemed to me as doomed to date these findings. Writing now in early 2022, when (for the time being at least) teaching on campus has returned to something like normal, I feel this caution has largely proved out. Like most of the instructors interviewed for this project, I am back to pacing through production labs and sending groups out to film projects. Yet the pandemic has re-shaped my thinking on CMPP in several key ways.
First, these two years have seen many concepts previously limited to production courses become universal teaching concerns, including how to position a microphone, set good lighting, and use audiovisual content to communicate a message. Media literacy scholars have long called for schools to better reflect the media environments students inhabit outside the classroom. That shift ended up happening overnight, mostly to the detriment of critical goals. The technicist drive so present in production teaching became a ubiquitous concern, with instructors putting their pedagogy in the hands of learning management systems and software that reinforce a transmission model of education (Swerzenski, 2020). To this end, I see CMPP concepts as more valuable than ever in helping instructors across subject matter integrate production technology with intention: denaturalizing technicist logic and deploying it to the benefit of critical goals.
Connected to this point, the pandemic has also highlighted for me the crucial interpersonal and collaborative element of production classes in ways I did not initially consider. Having been one of the few instructors teaching both online and in person throughout the pandemic, I was able to see firsthand the importance not just of the in-person format, but of a format that gave students the chance to share ideas, create together, and see the products of their collective work. Emphasizing the social aspect of learning is a key benefit of a CMPP approach, one which offers a way out of transmission approaches not just to production teaching, but lecture-based coursework as well. To this end, I hope the ideas articulated throughout this project can prove adaptable for media instructors of all sorts, serving dialogical goals of supporting student voice, creativity, and empowerment across Communication curricula.
