This opening chapter sets the theoretical foundation for Critical Media Production Pedagogy (CMPP), rooting critical pedagogy, critical media literacy, and production/software studies concepts. Beyond providing an overview of the Freiren concepts that provide the structure of this research, I pay particular attention to the handful of works that have looked to apply critical pedagogy within production instruction. These works look to place CMPP in a long lineage of pedagogical research, and, by showing the limitations of this earlier work, justify the need for this project. First, I want to attend to some questions of relevance regarding the importance of media production instruction and what a re-theorization of its teaching practice might hope to accomplish.
Why does media production matter?
Writing some three decades ago, Sholle & Denski (1993) claimed that there is arguably no site that offers more pedagogical potential than the media production classroom. Having experienced all manner of Communication courses as both student and instructor, I could not agree more. For one, production activities offer a hands-on means of engaging with the media that simply isn’t available in a large lecture or seminar course. Many students, like myself, came to Communication and Media Studies out of an interest in multimedia texts. Engaging with shows, films, songs, or images only through classroom discussions and written papers runs counter to this interest. Production activities, by contrast, allow one to understand media through media. For Morrell et al. (2013), placing students in the role of media producer provides a new perspective from which to understand their position as media consumer:
Students become critical consumers rather than passive ones when they go a step further and learn how to break down and analyze an image, video, or advertisement through words, colors, object positions, and settings in the classroom. When they next discuss the effects of media on their lives, their worldview changes and grows into new perspectives about popular culture and consumerism (p. 20).
Bringing media production into the classroom also connects school activity with the outside world (Alvermann & Hagood, 2000). Most students, particularly those at the college level, are producing multimedia content, be it through personal Instagram or Snapchat stories or through more ambitious YouTube, Vimeo or TikTok projects. A classroom focus on production allows students both to hone their production skills and, more critically, apply that understanding toward a more thoughtful participation in digital and media environments (Coiro, 2003).
Media production is also a socially engaged activity. Group work is not awkwardly mandated as with many presentations or written assignments; it is a necessity. A typical video project is by nature a collaborative (though often undemocratic) process, requiring a coordinated effort to script, shoot, and edit (Buckingham, Grahame & Sefton-Green, 1995; Sabal, 2009). The creative side of production projects requires similar collaboration, with group members pooling ideas regarding shot selection, dialogue, or story details in the moment to produce a final project. Production projects also focus attention outward to the spaces and communities outside the classroom or even campus. As Goodman (2003) notes:
Taking a video camera into the community as a regular method for teaching and learning gives kids a critical lens through which they can explore the world around them. It helps them to defamiliarize the familiar taken-for-granted conditions of life. This approach to critical literacy links media analysis to production; learning about the world is directly linked to the possibility of changing it.
(p. 3)
The direct engagement with community ideas and issues is a hard one to replicate in the confines of a classroom or through the mostly private process of writing a paper or taking a test. I should acknowledge some of my own biases regarding this last point. The multimedia projects I’ve undertaken as a student have been the ones that best pushed my comfort zone, challenging me to work in teams, to learn others’ perspectives through interviews and offscreen conversations, and to engage directly with spaces as I attempted to capture them. It’s no coincidence that these projects are among the ones I’m most proud of, and that the experience of making them has remained so fresh in my mind even in the decade or so since I was an undergraduate. I see a similar level of engagement when I send students out to create their own projects, a sense of being in the world that is hard to replicate with an essay. With all that said, I don’t mean to make a value judgment by claiming production assignments are ‘better’ than traditional written ones. When implemented thoughtfully, both forms offer great pedagogical benefits. The aim of this project is to call much needed attention to the largely overlooked benefits media production offers as a teaching tool. So why is it that production assignments are so rarely used in classes? Exploring that question requires that we take account of the historical context that has placed media production in such a limited role in most departments.
How is media production practiced at the moment?
How has media production traditionally been used in Communication courses? In large part, the answer is not at all. As part of a related quantitative methods project, I analyzed thousands of course descriptions obtained through communication department websites and course catalogs, documenting the number of media production courses—operationalized here as courses dealing with video, audio, or image editing or production—available in 53 communication departments in the U.S. These 53 were selected among the 58 departments that offer PhDs in Communication, meaning they were the most likely to be producing future communication professors (I was unable to locate course descriptions for the other five programs). Given this influence, I wanted to understand how these vanguard programs implemented media production within their own curricula.
Of the 2,308 classes I analyzed, production related courses comprised only 314, or 11%, of total courses. Where production classes are implemented, they are often treated as ‘professional’ or skill-building courses, a distinction marking them as discrete from ‘critically’ oriented classes. Further, only 4% of total classes qualified as implementing praxis, that is combining critical concepts and production skills. While it is perhaps difficult to judge the full context of a course by a one paragraph description, these findings do speak to a departmental imperative on splitting production from the rest of the curricula.
Sholle and Denski (1993) trace this separation back to the beginnings of Communication departments in the mid-20th century. Curricular decisions to separate liberal-arts focused critical thinking from professionally-oriented skills like media production derived in large part from competing departmental missions: one to undertake academic media effects research, the other to train students for jobs in professional media. Separating production and theory courses also splits instructors into “applied” and “academic” backgrounds, a professional/PhD tension that further erodes the possibility for overlap between the two (Sholle & Denski, 1993). Applied and academic are some of what Denski (1991) refers to as “distancing dichotomies,” the most significant of which is the split between theory and practice (pg. 8). As he explains, “The force with which this dichotomy has attached itself to media production curriculum in general has worked to silence critical academic inquiry into the greater social and political implications of media production practices” (Denski, 1991, p.10).
This long-standing linking of media production with professionalism has created what Masterman (1997) calls the “technicist trap,” reducing classroom instruction to a set of purely technical operations that reproduce existing conventions (p. 46). Cameras, audio recorders, and other equipment are to be learned via step-by-step instruction, with the intent of preparing students for TV and film industry jobs. Equating technical skills as professionally relevant creates with it the opposing category of “non-technical” skills, set in contrast as non-pragmatic or purely academic (Sholle & Denski, 1993). Through this system, “students are generally led to perceive the critical and theoretical content of these courses as required for advancement to the ‘real’ meat of the major, and treat them as a hurdle to be gotten over” (p. 73). In Communication departments, and in universities at large, pressure to produce job-ready skills for students continues to increase in tandem with tuition, student loan debt, and the profit-driven goals of most colleges (Giroux, 2011; Suoranta et al., 2004). In this context, the practical skills that production courses offer “may be popular with students and provide great vocationally-oriented optics for publicity and recruitment materials,” yet they also risk “marginalizing the liberal arts tradition of ‘learning by thinking’—a critical and theoretical approach” (Boulton, 2016, p. 88).
Separating theory and practice along the lines of technical production and conceptual discussion courses may seem a necessary compromise for many departments. Few faculty are equipped to teach both media theory and production (Boulton, 2016; Sholle & Denski, 1993). Further, classroom spaces themselves are designed to cater to one or the other course, making it hard for instructors to imagine mounting a production assignment in a lecture hall or holding a critical discussion in a computer lab (Apple, 2003). Students as well seemed inclined to choose one or the other, especially as the pressure to accumulate job-ready skills continues to rise (Davies, 1997; Freire & Shor, 2003; Sholle & Denski, 1993). Put simply, splitting production and theory classes makes practical sense. It’s also created numerous pedagogical issues affecting not just production classes, but across the curriculum.
What is the problem with standard media production pedagogy?
Freire’s (1970) description of the banking model of education, in which teachers deposit knowledge into students’ (assumedly empty) minds, offers an apt depiction of ‘standard’ media production pedagogy. The emphasis on practical skills and technical proficiency establishes a “how-to” approach, where “only through emulating, and failing to achieve, professional practice can students fully understand the complexity of media production” (Grahame, 1991, p. 149). While the how-to approach frames itself as value-neutral, such instruction serves to reproduce existing representations baked into standard production practices, leaving unchallenged critical questions of meaning-making (Buckingham, 2013). As Higgins (1991) notes, an uncritical or value-neutral approach is itself a kind of politics, one that “results in the promotion of the dominant mode” (p. 19).
A banking approach to media production based in ‘how-to’ logic also obscures valuable critical questions of ‘what’ or ‘why.’ The use of certain narrative tropes, stereotypical representations, or conventional production decisions are taught in the language of best practices, ensuring that students are never given the opportunity to critically reflect on these actions. Dewey (1938), writing well before the advent of the video production course, captures the consequence of this approach succinctly: “What is taught is thought of as essentially static. It is a finished product, taught with little regard either to the ways in which it was originally built up or to changes that will surely occur in the future” (p. 5). Learning, as Dewey observes, is an experiential process. Setting all critical reflection in one space and all practical action in the other never allows students to connect the two, to understand the value of theoretical concepts in everyday practice. So while communication students may have lessons in photo ethics in a lecture class and learn how to use a DSLR camera in a lab course, the opportunity to experience the use-value of critical ideas in a meaningful context never occurs. How then do ethical issues of representation matter not just in principle, but in the moment when you hold a camera up to the world and capture your own representations?
The banking approach also hinders opportunities for valuable collaborative, team-based learning that activities like video projects might afford (Sabal, 2009). Instead, this top-down model silences students—in particular women and persons of color—who are often alienated in production courses by an emphasis on technical competency and a recycling of patriarchal representations and narrative tropes from the film and television ‘canon’ (Orwin & Carageorge, 2001). Separating discussions of representation from production courses, as Green (2013) notes, also serves to diminish their value. “Because they are taught as ‘theory,’ film students and professors alike often see the topics as unrelated to practice, not to mention dry and boring” (p. 31). For Apple (2003), technology is one of the key drivers in asserting ‘how to’ logic over the ‘why’ questions of critical inquiry. The new technology, in this way, “transforms the classroom in its own image, the more a technical logic will replace critical political and ethical understanding. The discourse of the classroom will center on technique, less on substance” (p. 454).
Despite its ‘top-down’ orientation, the transmission approach is so pervasive in many media production classes because it is enforced from all directions. The large production class I instructed for five semesters as a Master’s student was constructed as a crash course for students, whirling them through the basics of video, audio, and image production in order to advance them to upper-division classes. Instructors, given only a week to cover a topic as huge as photography, crammed in as much content as possible. My fellow T.A.s, many of whom had no background in media production, just tried to stay above water, relying on tutorials and rubrics to handle their teaching duties. And students–facing pressure from parents, instructors, peers, and loan collectors–were rightly worried about acquiring the kinds of hard skills they’d been told lead to high-paying jobs. At no point was the time or interest available to discuss why we were working on these particular types of projects, the parameters we set around good or bad work, or the value these production skills might hold outside of job skills. There was no space left for reflection, only action.
What alternatives are available?
Reimagining the role of media production must go beyond, as Boulton (2016) characterizes, “ginning up production courses with theory” or vice versa (p. 88). The depth of the dichotomy between production practice and critical theory requires a much more careful rethinking of the role both play in the classroom. To this end, critical pedagogy provides not just a useful critique of media production pedagogy with the banking approach, but a viable alternative. For Denski (1991):
A critical pedagogy of media production, in its meta-questioning of instructional practice, leads one to view the media classroom not only as an individual site of instruction, but as a cultural arena, i.e. as a site of cultural struggle in which various sociological and ideological struggles ar continually being played out.
(p. 4)
Meta-questioning is perhaps the most crucial aspect of critical pedagogy, and it’s for this reason that I draw primarily from Freire’s (1970) work. Freire’s (1970) pedagogical lessons lack specificity, a point of frustration for many (Bragg, 2007; Ford, 2016). Yet the value of Freire’s (1970) ideas lies not in specific teaching strategies, but in rethinking what and for whom we are teaching. I want to walk through some of the key elements of Freire’s (1970) pedagogical concepts, in the process using them to recast possible approaches to media production.
For Freire (1970), a first step out of an oppressive, banking approach requires a resolution of the student-teacher contradiction, in “reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (p. 59). Teachers no longer impart facts to their students in a transmission-style model, but engage with them in dialogue. Through dialogue, students and teachers bring their own cultural and experiential knowledge to bear in the classroom. As Fassett and Warren (2006) note:
Dialogue is not a matter of negotiation and not a process of friendship building, though both may occur; it is a process of sensitive and thorough inquiry, inquiry we undertake together to (de)construct ideologies, identities, and cultures.
(p. 54)
So how might critical dialogue function in media production classes? The first step must be to address power hierarchies within the classroom, be that the instructor who knows the ‘correct’ way to use the software, the student who uses technical proficiency to assert a more powerful role, or the software itself that asserts its own educational agenda. Rather than centering class around how to accomplish a task (for instance, to edit a video), a dialogue-based approach should focus first on media production’s larger societal role in making meaning. As Buckingham (2013) outlines:
Students may be able to learn by doing; but if they are not enabled to reflect upon what they have done, it will be impossible for them to generalize from their experience to future situations. In this respect, then, learning has to involve a dialectical relationship between doing and analysing—or, to put it in media education terminology, between ‘practice’ and ‘theory.’
(p. 133)
Having students reflect on their past experience with media might start with asking about former production projects they’ve worked on. Even if these projects are far from ‘professional’ level productions, students’ experiences making everything from photo albums to Instagram stories provides a helpful basis on which to reject the banking-style framing of teacher-as-expert versus student-as-blank receptacle (Buckingham, 2013). Dialogue must also address their experience as media consumers, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of our media viewing habits and recognizing the social basis of all judgements of taste and value, especially our own (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 2005). These conversations, as Wink (2005) notes, should move both students and teachers to “often uncomfortable places of learning and unlearning” (p. 48), honing in on the way issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality are represented and perpetuated through media texts. For hooks (1994), “Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process” (p. 21). Engaging in difficult issues of representation requires an openness regarding the experiences and values that comprise instructor’s relationships to the media. As Hall (1991) reminds, “You have to position yourself somewhere in order to say anything at all” (p. 18). Critical dialogue must push students and teachers to identify hegemonic values in the world around them, specifically by identifying the ways in which these values and beliefs affect their own lives.
The key for a critical media production pedagogy is to tie these conceptual discussions to the everyday practice of making media. For Fassett and Warren (2006), oppressions such as racism, sexism, and homophobia are not given to us fully formed, but are created and sustained through our own mundane acts of communication. Media producers have an outsized role in this perpetuation of representations and ideologies. Dialogue in the media labs should reflect on the privilege and responsibility creators have in everyday production decisions to either reproduce existing representations or work toward alternatives.
From this personal perspective, students use the classroom space to embark on their own process of inquiry. In opposition to the banking model, this problem-posing method of education “bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of men as beings who are authentic only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation” (Freire, 1970, p. 71). From posing the problem, students then move to overcome it through praxis, or a movement between theory and practice. Wink (2005) describes praxis as a cycle, shifting from the naming of the problem, to critical reflection on that problem, and on to actions to overcome the problem.
Action may take many forms, including–most notably for the purposes of this study–the act of producing media texts. More important here is that action (or practice) isn’t seen as an end goal, but rather the completion of the cycle. Often students must return to the beginning of the cycle, reconsidering action through additional reflection on and revision of the problem and only then devising new modes of action. As Fassett and Warren (2006) outline, “Without action, what good is theory? Without theory, how might we take informed action? Both reflexivity and praxis connote process—an important reminder—and neither is a destination or end result” (p. 51). Through a process of action and reflection that utilizes both theory and practice, students–particularly those from culturally marginalized and economically disenfranchised backgrounds–can challenge dominant ideologies and transform the world via their own voice (Darder, Baltodano & Torres, 2003). For Sholle & Denski (1993), praxis is the key “transducing” element in closing the distance between theory and practice in media production coursework:
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) that takes place in the interaction among three agencies: the teacher, the learner and the knowledge that they together produce.
(p. 143)
What Can Critical Media Literacy Offer?
Though Freire and other critical pedagogues like McLaren (2003), and Giroux (2003) don’t specify a subject area in their work, their ideas were largely conceived with literacy acquisition in mind. In particular, Freire’s early 1960s work in rural Brazil teaching reading and writing skills to indigenous students has entered the realm of lore, representing an idealized version of where, to whom, and to what end critical pedagogy should work. For instructors like myself working outside of traditional literacy education and with students that don’t fit such generalized conditions of ‘oppressed,’ this formulation of critical pedagogy can make its concepts seem incompatible. To this end, critical media literacy (CML) offers a useful interpolation of critical pedagogy approaches into media education. As Kellner & Share (2019) explain, “This critical pedagogical approach to literacy offers the dual possibility of building awareness of media domination through critical analysis and empowering individuals to create alternative media for counter-hegemonic expression” (p. xiii). Critical analysis and alternative media production are cast here as two sides of the praxis process. Transformation thus comes from movement between the two: critically understanding media representations and producing works that challenge them.
CML also helps articulate some of the specific goals to which a critical media production pedagogy should strive. First, it expands the core literacy goals of reading and writing beyond rote skills and toward the more complex facilities of critical understanding and self-expression. Reading the media thus starts with an understanding of its powerful role in constructing the world and orienting us to the various social, economic, and political positions that we occupy within it (Alvermann & Hagood, 2000, p. 1-2). CML draws heavily from Frankfurt School concepts, specifically the role of mass broadcast technologies like television, film, and radio in producing false consciousness among viewers by reproducing dominant cultural values (Morrell, 2008). Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony is useful in documenting how these reproductions are often received as ‘common-sense’ beliefs. Critical literacy should push students to denaturalize these beliefs, making present the normative values around class, race, gender, sexuality offered through media representations (Kellner & Share, 2019). Given the wide range of cultural perspectives, our reading must take into account not just the text, but the reader and the context in which it is read. ‘Writing’ in critical media literacy then acts as a means of speaking back to social forces, offering the opportunity for a democratic reconstruction of education and society (Kellner & Share, 2007). Morrell (2008) in particular highlights media production and other ‘writing’ techniques as central to CML’s ultimate goal of negotiating or challenging media representations through student-made counter/alternative texts: “Critical literacy, therefore, is necessary not only for the critical navigation of hegemonic discourses; it is also essential to the redefining of the self and the transformation of oppressive social structures and relations of production” (p. 5).
Second, CML highlights the need for multiliteracy skills, or the ability to create texts across a range of audio, visual, and multimodal forms. Writing with media should not be seen as a replacement for traditional text composition or as a gimmick to court students’ interest (Buckingham, 2013; Hobbs, 1998). These skills offer ways both for students to understand our increasingly media-dominated culture and to participate more fully in it:
When students learn to critically read and write with images, sounds, multimedia, and print, they deepen their critical thinking skills and develop their identities as responsible and empowered global citizens. The challenge to critically understand media texts, as well as the power to create and disseminate alternative messages, is the essence of critical media literacy (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 55).
The key for many CML scholars is to situate multiliteracy skills as means of understanding and challenging cultural norms. As Alvermann (2017) warns, “failure to reflect critically on the contexts in which a pedagogy of multiliteracies exists (or any pedagogy, for that matter) can lead to unquestioningly reproducing the cultural values of the most powerful, often at the expense of the students we teach” (p. 101). It’s an outcome that doesn’t seem far removed from many of the media production classes I’ve encountered, with skill production always outweighing critical discussion. The context of the digital spaces in which students acquire multiliteracy skills are highly different from traditional classrooms. A critical approach that works within these spaces should consider the issues that arise from these specific contexts in order to orient discussion and other critical reflection activity. A CML mode should enact a praxis-informed approach that moves organically through reading, writing, and understanding multimedia texts.
Finally, CML connects media education with community action. Students, especially at the college level, largely engage with the world through media (Coiro, Castek & Quinn, 2016; Morrell et al., 2013). A critical understanding of how messages are constructed and how their participation matters in these digitally and visually oriented contexts is a vital means of identifying how they locate themselves within these spaces. But, as Morrell (2008) notes, “Acquiring the critical language to deconstruct media narratives is important, but not enough. Students as agents of change must also develop the skills of digital filmmaking, web design, and musical production to name a few” (p. 158).
The role of change agent is a particularly powerful one, as students enter their own communities, bringing their own knowledge and experience of these spaces to bear on the work they create. Jenkins et al. (2009) and Ito et al. (2011), have spoken to the need for participatory action within media literacy, with students using multiliteracy skills to become active members within digital environments. Approaches such as youth participatory action research (YPAR) and critical participatory action research (CPAR) build further on students’ active role as change agents, imagining the classroom as a site through which to engage praxis-oriented and community-based work. Students, in dialogue with teachers, reflect on an issue affecting their community, collaborate on an action to address the problem, and work to implement it in the community. CPAR’s focus on teaching practices–the way classroom discussions are structured, the process by which each phase of the project is undertaken, the ways tools are used to achieve project goals–elaborate on the Freirean goal of shaping the classroom space into one in which participants/students can thrive and achieve transformative goals (Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon, 2013).
Morrell et al.’s (2013) work with students in Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood in particular exemplifies this praxis-based, community-oriented approach. Students, largely from Black or Latinx and working class backgrounds, began class sessions by discussing their own representations in the media, particularly how young, urban, persons of color like them are often assigned the stereotypical role of ‘gangbanger.’ Equipped with cameras and recorders, students then went out to capture a different set of representations drawn from their own experiences, documenting their neighborhood and the people that lived in it through visual montages, interviews, group discussions, and personal reflections. Working back at school, they then edited together the footage into short films shown at an event open to the entire neighborhood.
Morrell et al.’s (2013) project represents something like an ideal for what CML education could look like. And, similar to Freire’s (1970) work in rural Brazil for critical pedagogy, it’s also hard for me to imagine replicating anything like it with the often privileged, non-local college students I typically encounter in my classes. Yet the framework of the project I think outlines perfectly how critical consideration works with production practice to create something greater than the sum of their parts. Critical discussion emerges from the organic context of personal representation. What is a problem we perceive in media representations and what can we do about it? The technical process of learning and using production equipment is not just an act of skill-building, but a means of directly addressing the problem. Questions of representation thus become grounded in the real practice of framing a location, deciding how much of an interview to keep in, or what narrative elements to focus on over others. This work further adds up to a tangible product, something made with and for others.
Conclusion
Morrell et al.’s (2013) approach, along with the many others offered in the critical pedagogy and critical media literacy research reviewed here, offer an exciting alternative view of how critical media production pedagogy might operate in the classroom. Rather than a transmission approach of walking students step-by-step through the technical aspects of media production, these approaches start by questioning dominant media texts. Locating the common-sense values embedded in media helps build understanding of both how sexist, racist, classist and other oppressive representations are reproduced in culture (Kellner & Share, 2019) and how our own consumption of these texts affects our understanding and position in the world (Buckingham, 2013). Students then use this critical understanding to produce ‘alternative’ texts, employing video, audio, or other multimedia means to challenge hegemonic representations (Kellner & Share, 2019). Together media analysis and production function as theory and practice: reflection on the problem and action to address it.
Yet for all the ways it seems like media theory and production practice should work symbiotically in the classroom, this “dialectic relationship between doing and analyzing” rarely emerges (Buckingham, 2013, p. 133). My own attempts to bridge this theory/practice gap have mostly amounted to shoehorning theory into media production, a tactic that is typically dismissed by students who often treat calls for critical reflection as interruptions from more pressing work. Reflecting on her own experience teaching media production students, Zanker (2007) experienced a similar pull back into the technicist trap: “How can I engage students in critical and political economic analysis without being viewed as a puritanical kill-joy when they just wanted to get back to their production tools” (p. 42).
So why do media theory and production practice so often seem so incompatible? The issue I believe is a lack of theorizing of media production practice itself. For all the methods critical pedagogy and CML provide to consider student voice, teacher authority, media content, and social forces, the process of teaching media production skills—the practice of using editing software, the technical details of operating recording equipment—is never given much thought. Making a video is simply offered as a finishing activity, a way to inscribe critical lessons into a concrete object. This secondary role I believe has two consequences. First, it ignores the production process as a site of critical attention. As Grahame (1991) notes, the “process” assumed here “implies a single integrated procedure focusing on and resulting in a finished product” (p. 147). Yet the steps that lead to a finished product are rich sites of meaning-making, with each production decision laden by a set of often hidden value systems and logics that led it to be made in a particular way. Skipping over the process of how a piece of media came to look or sound the way it did misses the crucial connection between practice and meaning. Second, it assumes that alternate texts can mount a worthwhile challenge to dominant media. Such a challenge, however, can only be possible when accompanied alongside the skills needed to create a work that could reasonably hold up against a popular (and likely professionally produced) one. At the collegiate level where I am focused, this need to develop professional level skills is especially important. Production projects are not just one of many possible expressions of student voice, interchangeable with an essay or a presentation. The skills these students learn will carry into their professional lives, where the media they create has the potential to reach huge audiences. From positions within media institutions, the creation of alternative or counter hegemonic texts can have enormous cultural impact; however, it takes serious production skills to access these spaces and make content capable of having such an impact.
I believe both oversights here are partially to blame for the low-status of media production among many educators. Without emphasizing production chops, activities are at best little more than opportunities to play around with cameras and computers (Buckingham, 2013). At worst, they are antagonistic to the critical mission of media education by encouraging students to unproblematically reproduce what they’re used to seeing (Lewis & Jhally, 1998). Likewise, focusing too much on production skills results in the transmission approach to production training outlined earlier, leaving students with no room to understand how or why meaning is constructed through media production, or how they might use skills to create their own meanings. Such an approach places media production on the level of vocational training, a distinction many university educators dismiss as unfit for liberal arts curricula.
For educators to avoid critical questions while teaching media production practice does not constitute a neutral stance. As Freire (1970) emphasizes, all educational practice is political. Neutrality is in itself a political stance, a choice to ignore the ways in which standard production practices perpetuate hegemonic representations and beliefs. Sexist, racist, classist and other oppressive representations don’t simply appear in media or culture; they emerge from a set of practices set in a cultural context (Fassett & Warren, 2006). Understanding these practices both from a technical and critical level allows us to change them, providing true possibility for alternate texts to emerge and make an impact. Achieving this potential must first address how the transmission approach dominant in current media production instruction hampers critical thinking. This isn’t just a matter of balancing out time between lecture and lab segments of class, or any conception that makes media theory and media production discrete. To follow Grahame’s (1991) conception, a CMPP process must theorize the production process itself, articulating how the practice of picking up a camera, editing a scene, or re-coloring a photo may act as modes of critical engagement.
The resources cited in this chapter have been valuable to a degree in thinking through how to teach critical concepts with and through the production process; however, they lack the currency and specifics needed to formulate how a CMPP approach might operate in media labs today. The following chapter will outline my approach to fill this need.
