I’m pacing the narrow aisle in our department’s rather cramped, windowless production studio, looking over students’ shoulders in an effort to monitor their process. All twelve of them are running the same program—Adobe Premiere—and completing the same task. Having spent the first half of class working in groups to plan out and shoot scenes for a short film, they’re now in the crucial process of editing everything together: sequencing clips, adding transitions and titles, tweaking lighting levels and audio channels. I occasionally break their concentration to check in on their progress or help them through a technical issue.
Though the students and the studios have changed, this “pacing through the production lab and peering at screens routine” is one I’ve done for almost a decade. Because of my professional background in production, I’ve mostly been assigned to teach these sorts of production classes as either a T.A. or instructor. I feel comfortable in these spaces, and I do get a sense of satisfaction even in these moments where I’ve got nothing to do but pace around. Unlike the sea of disinterested faces I’m likely to encounter in a typical university lecture or seminar, these students are fully engaged in the course material. As they drag video clips into place to create their final videos, they’re also gaining valuable multiliteracy skills by learning to read, write, and comprehend video and other visual media content (Jenkins, 2009). In line with the university’s goal of “expanding career development opportunities” (UMass Amherst, 2020), video editing practice also offers the sort of ‘job-ready’ skills that students increasingly demand (Boulton, 2016). Plus, students like it. Working with cameras and editing software is often an easier sell to students than writing research papers (Zanker, 2007; Hobbs, 2010; Boulton, 2016).
Yet I’m also aware of all the things that aren’t happening in labs like this one. For all the value of the technical production skills students may be building, we’re passing right by a number of critical issues. Reviewing the footage from a group in the back of the lab, I see that the video they’ve made leans heavily into the Hollywood gender trope of the nagging girlfriend. Another plays same-sex attraction for laughs. Production classes tend to be majority male, an anomaly given the predominantly female demographic of our department. Even when paired in groups with women, men often take the lead in production projects by leveraging their “greater technical expertise” (Orwin & Carageorge, 2001). Though these power dynamics aren’t instantly recognizable through the interactions of these groups, I see it in the final videos they submit: in their choice of protagonists, the genres they choose to emulate, the fixation on violence. Now in the editing stage, I notice that, despite devoting no teaching time to narrative structure or editing conventions, these students are reproducing something pretty close to a typical Hollywood-style film. Premiere itself has mostly taken this instructor’s role from me via its built-in tutorials that walk students through how to turn their raw footage into a ‘professionalized’ final product (Swerzenski, 2021). Many others seem to have internalized these filmic conventions to the degree that reproducing conventional editing, narrative, and other production styles is fully automatic.
Labs like this one don’t have to act as these sorts of ‘reproduction’ labs where students practice how to recreate culturally dominant tropes and representations. In theory, these classes can offer spaces in which to unsettle or even resist these ‘standard’ practices. Video editing and other production activities offer a tactile method of understanding how meaning is constructed within video texts (Buckingham, 2013; Morrell, 2008). From this understanding, students can use production techniques and software to expose the ‘common sense’ beliefs underpinning many multimedia texts and pose critical questions: Why is it the same character representations and narrative tropes are continually repeated by the media at large? And why is it that we feel drawn to recreate these tropes in video projects like this one (Hall, 2003; Share, 2009)? While these questions are common in the lecture space, in production labs they become practical concerns rather than conceptual considerations. As creators of their own content, students can use critical understanding and production tools like Adobe Premiere to challenge or negotiate standard representations through the creation of their own alternate texts (Kellner & Share, 2019; Morrell et al., 2013). So how do we use editing tools to not just produce forms we’ve already seen, but to create new works that represent our own voices and stories? Crucially, such critical questions aren’t purely theoretical. Issues of representation, narrative construction, and meaning-making emerge organically from the grounded process of producing media.
Critical concepts in this space hold great consequence, in theory at least. It’s in practice where things get complicated. As in most production courses, our lab is on a time crunch. The prospect of taking additional time to discuss representation in film would shave valuable minutes off students’ editing process, and likely cause them to resent rather than engage with critical concerns (Boulton, 2016). Even given more class time, technical skills tend to take heavy precedence over theoretical discussions (Apple, 2003). Sitting in a space designed for doing—specifically in front of a giant computer screen loaded with complicated editing software—it’s hard to make room for reflection. So for this lab class, I stick to my usual approach: checking in with individual students, addressing technical and critical skills where I can, and letting them do their thing. Twenty minutes later, our lab time is up, and it’s on to the next video project.
From my own experience teaching labs like this one, I also know the very real challenges of trying to position video editing and other production activities as modes of critical thinking. There are few resources that articulate how a critical approach to media production teaching might work. Those that do usually lack the detail needed to explain how such an approach would realistically function in this sort of lab setting. The aim of this project is to sketch a more complete framework for what I call critical media production pedagogy. Such an approach as I imagine it offers the opportunity not just to inject theoretical concerns into production labs, but to ground concepts in practice through the sort of tactile interaction with media that discussions and reflection papers cannot offer.
I want to begin by defining the term critical media production pedagogy more thoroughly. First, what is media production? To produce media can encompass a huge array of different activities, from illustrating a story with markers and paper to coding a website on a state-of-the-art computer (CDM, 2020). My use of media production in this project focuses on its common academic and professional usage: as the process of creating video, audio, and visual texts via digital means. In keeping with this framing, my use of the term media text throughout this research will refer to video, visual and audio works created through these production processes. In keeping with this framing of media production, my use of the term media text throughout this research will refer to video, visual and audio works created through these production processes.
Second, what do I mean by critical? As Ashton (2010) notes, the term critical has grown to take on a range of meanings, particularly in the university classrooms to which I am devoting my focus. The demand for college graduates to possess “critical thinking skills” operationalizes critical as a sort of flexible problem-solving ability: how to increase sales, handle difficult customers without incident, or effectively teach a maximum number of students (2010). By contrast, my use of “critical” throughout this project connects to its use in critical theory and, by extension, critical pedagogy. Within the critical paradigm, meaning is socially constructed, a belief that rejects positivist or empirical notions of meaning as fixed to a concrete truth or reality (Giroux, 2003; Tracy, 2013). A critical approach to media production acts not as a set of best practices to ensure efficiency or technical competence, but as a political process, one embedded with a set of socially constructed values, beliefs, and conventions. As Fassett and Warren (2006) elaborate, “Critical does not simply mean locating and naming the bad, the incomplete, or oppressive in a given instance, but also means considering the possibilities, hoping for and imagining something better” (p. 14). The project for a critical media production pedagogy must take both the negative and positive aspects of the critical approach, uncovering how oppressive or ideological forces impact our viewing and creation of media texts, as well as imagining new production practices that reject or negotiate these forces. Finally, the pedagogy I am most interested in implementing derives from critical pedagogy, in particular the framework outlined by Freire (1970). I’ll elaborate on some of critical pedagogy’s core concepts and how I’ll plan to implement them later in the following chapter.
The scope of this project is limited to critical uses of media production within college-level Communication and Communications-adjacent departments such as Media Studies, Journalism, and Film Studies. For this reason, my use of the terms “educator” and “instructor” throughout this project will refer to individuals instructing university-level media production courses in Communication-related departments. I do not use the term professor, as many project participants are non-PhD or non-tenure track faculty (I’ll speak more to the dynamics between PhD credentials and professional experience in the following chapters). College-level media production classrooms, of course, are not the only spaces where educators are using media production critically or otherwise. Nor are these the only spaces in which I hope ideas about how to expand production activities might reach. However, narrowing my focus to just media production’s usage in Communication classrooms allows me to use my own experience teaching in these spaces, as well as to avoid issues of tech access and K-12 curricular concerns that are simply too complex to address in this limited study. Further, I believe there is a lack of recognition in the responsibility that Communication educators have in our role of producing producers. As future advertising, public relations, or communication professionals, the undergraduates taught in these spaces will create works with the capability of influencing culture at a mass level. Bridging critical ideas with production practice thus has the potential to affect not just students in the classroom, but the potentially huge audiences those students will reach with their work.
Finally, what is the role of critical pedagogy in this project? Though more specific than “critical,” critical pedagogy too has been deployed in a range of contexts, such that its meaning is often diluted (Ford, 2016). My use of critical pedagogy will draw on Paulo Freire’s educational theories, culled primarily from his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (translated and published in English in 1970). Central to Freire’s thinking is imagining the classroom as a space in which students and teachers work co-intentionally to build understanding of the world and undertake actions meant to improve it. My use of Freire will focus on four concepts key to achieving this higher goal: challenging the transmission model of education, resolving the student-teacher contradiction, establishing authentic dialogue, and taking transformative action. The aim in melding critical production and media production in this project is to argue for the symbiotic quality of their blend. My argument is two-fold: 1) media production provides a means to actualize critical pedagogy ideals; 2) critical pedagogy offers a framework through which to open up technical production processes to critical concerns.
The idea of blending media production through critical pedagogy is by no means a new one. In the following literature review chapter, I’ll overview the many scholars and educational thinkers that have theorized this concept long before me. I’ll ground critical pedagogy, its roots in critical theory, and the key tenets that inform my research. I then draw from critical media literacy and software studies to bind these concepts with media theory and production. Finally, I point to the shortcomings of pre-existing scholarship on blending critical pedagogy and media production, which I argue lack experiential knowledge of the media production teaching process. This blindspot fails to account for the tactile challenges instructors face in incorporating critical pedagogy ideas into practice. It also leads to a lack of theorizing on how media production as an educational practice–the act of learning production software, using audio and video equipment, producing media works for audiences–can better serve critical and critical pedagogy ideas.
Chapter 3 will describe my own approach to addressing these issues, which involved interviewing media production instructors teaching at the college level regarding the challenges they face and strategies they employ in blending critical concepts and technical production training in their classrooms. My aim is to provide pragmatic resources for instructors looking to implement critical media production pedagogy approaches in their own teaching. I also want to highlight the work being done by these instructors, much of it not recognized beyond their home institutions. In compiling the diffuse expertise of media educators implementing critical concepts in their approach to media production teaching, I hope to draw together a range of teaching approaches to better demonstrate the practice of a critical media production pedagogy. Chapters 4-7 offer findings from this research, and follow a consistent structure: taking a Freirean concept, highlighting the difficulties in enacting the concept in the classroom, and providing strategies offered by instructors for overcoming the issue. I rely heavily on direct quotes as well as teaching artifacts such as syllabi, assignment descriptions, and grading rubrics provided by instructors to convey their approaches.
Chapter 4 is framed around Freire’s (1970) notion of the transmission model of education, wherein the teacher as holder of knowledge transmits knowledge to the student receiver. The transmission model remains the standard approach for most production courses, where the need to develop students’ technical proficiency with production equipment and software overwhelms critical goals. Falling into the “technicist trap” as instructors note, is often the result of a myriad of pressures: from institutions focused on building job market ready skills, from students eager to pick up the camera and go, and from instructors themselves who feel their own worth as determined by their technical expertise (Masterman, 1997). I then highlight how instructors have worked to overcome the technicist trap in their own teaching, with strategies such as taking a process over product approach, lowering technical learning expectations, and questioning production tools and processes.
Chapter 5 examines the student/teacher contradiction, or the power dynamics between students and teachers inscribed through the transmission approach. I identify assessment practices as a key site of upholding the teacher/student contradiction in production classrooms. Despite efforts to bring critical concepts into production courses, the teaching goals, assignment parameters and grading rubrics used in these classes more often place outsized value on technical proficiency. These tendencies pull production pedagogy back into the technicist trap, and exacerbate classroom power dynamics by privileging one form of knowledge over others. Instructors offer their own guidelines for addressing these power dynamics in their course materials, among them setting careful restrictions on assignment parameters, distributing equal point values to critical and technical elements, and including reflection or creator’s statements as a regular aspect of production projects.
Chapter 6 explores Freire’s concept of dialogue, the mechanism by which students and teachers, speaking as equals, share their knowledge and experiences as a means of building new understandings. Here I highlight the use of the feedback session, a teaching strategy identified by instructors as an effective way to foster authentic dialogue in production courses. Sessions are not without their difficulties. Not all students may feel their perspectives to have value in these dialogues. Feedback–either overly negative or trivially positive–can also work against the goal of building new understandings. Drawing from their own experience running these sessions, instructors overview a number of methods for overcoming these issues, including using frequent check-in assignments built around feedback sessions, scaffolding sessions to determine when and to whom students give feedback, and adopting a facilitator role to navigate difficult topics without suppressing student voices.
Chapter 7 draws on the notion of transformation, a goal built on Freire’s (1970) conception of the classroom as a space in which to both “name the world” as well as change it (p. 76). Naming and changing are achieved through praxis, a cyclical movement from reflection on a problem to an action meant to address it, cycling back to further reflection. I equate transformation/praxis as an outcome of critical pedagogy to the outcome of media production coursework: students’ creation of media texts. Setting expectations for students to create critical or transformative works is, as many instructors note, a lofty goal, one hampered by students’ desire to reproduce preexisting media standards and tropes as well as the need to balance critical and technical goals so that the texts students create can have transformative value. With these challenges in mind, instructors offer a number of teaching tactics, including modeling different modes of production to challenge hegemonic standards, creating assignment parameters that build critical ideas into the project, and emphasizing students’ responsibility as media producers in shaping culture.
I conclude by assessing what I hope are a set of easily applicable strategies that instructors can use to enact critical media production in their teaching practice. In the year or so I’ve spent interviewing instructors, analyzing their transcripts and artifacts, and compiling findings, I’ve already begun to employ many tactics relayed by these instructors to my own teaching. That I’ve been able to re-approach issues that have plagued me for a decade teaching production courses I think speaks to the value of compiling these previously isolated pockets of teaching knowledge together. My hope is that these strategies can prove valuable beyond my own experience, both to those teaching production who wish to take full advantage of the critical opportunities these courses hold, as well as those teaching media and Communication courses that don’t incorporate production. Both venues offer valuable sites in which to deploy these activities as a powerful means of binding critical concepts into practice.
