JCMS Teaching Dossier

Not Another Brick in the Wall: The Audiovisual Essay and Radical Pedagogy

JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (3)
Edited by Catherine Fowler, Claire Perkins, and Sean Redmond


Table of Contents

Part One: Liberating Writing

Bridging the Theory/Practice Divide Through Audiovisual Essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin

Relative Radicalism: Creating Formally Experimental Assignments Grounded in Argument by Vincent Longo

Culture as Nature: Rethinking the Audiovisual Essay as Pedagogy by Robert Letizi

Part Two: Authenticity and Empowerment

Authenticating Assessment through the Video Essay—a Pilot Case Study by Sean Redmond and Joanna Tai

Best Practice in the Inclusion of Video Essays in the School Curriculum by Travis McKenzie

Part Three: Creativity and Pedagogy

Audiovisual Essays as Empowering Pedagogical Tools for Students of Film Practice by Sian Mitchell

Videographic Exercises and Radical Pedagogy in the Classroom by Catherine Fowler


Introduction

Catherine Fowler, Claire Perkins, and Sean Redmond

The audiovisual essay has become a central pillar in the way that film, television, and media scholars publish their scholarship, affording an exploration of the ways in which digital technologies offer new modes of carrying out and presenting film and moving image research. An ever-increasing range of technologies now enable scholars in these fields to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds (Grant 2014). The audiovisual essay is also used increasingly in schools, colleges, and universities, in the arts and humanities, as a rich and invigorating “non-standard” form of course assessment and mode of creative and intellectual enquiry. The reason for this development is fourfold:

  1. Applied knowledge and understanding is seen to foster the best learning outcomes;
  2. Assessment logo-centrism is seen to fail many students, particularly those with little cultural capital from low socio-economic backgrounds;
  3. In a highly mediated modern world, where screen presentations occur in all walks of life, the audiovisual essay is seen as an incredibly important transferable tool;
  4. It is born out of a recognition that learning and understanding is not a closed book and that the audiovisual essay fosters resourceful, open learning.

In this teaching dossier, our aim is to explore how school and university teachers and scholars from a range of secondary and tertiary contexts engage with and experience these pedagogical assumptions when teaching with the audiovisual essay. We begin from the premise that this format is uniquely situated to explore the concept of pedagogy itself. In the late 1980s, David Lusted argued that “knowledge needs to be conceived as produced in exchange,” with “all agents in its active production conceived as producers” (1986, 5). Thirty years later, students across a wide range of educational levels and contexts have the skills and technology to be literal producers of digital content—in control of “the gesture of making” that, for Vilém Flusser, constitutes a kind of thinking with one’s hands (2014).

How, then, can the audiovisual essay be understood as a strategy of radical pedagogy that has the potential to powerfully disrupt conventional patterns of knowledge transmission? How does “thinking with one’s hands” challenge the priorities and values that underpin a traditional humanities education by offering up new forms of cultural capital that resist logocentrism? In the context of teaching, these lines of enquiry extend into numerous pragmatic questions. How might the use of the audiovisual essay improve students’ educational experience and learning outcomes? How does this form work with current educational priorities for “authentic” assessment items within the arts and humanities? Do students view the audiovisual essay more favorably than written or examined forms of assessment? And how can this learning format be best explained, assigned, and assessed?

This dossier aims to fill the current gap in research on the use, value, and impact of the audiovisual essay on learning and teaching by considering how the format can function as a uniquely empowering and resistant tool within the arts and humanities. In line with the questions above, the dossier is organized into three sections.

In the first section, Liberating Writing, contributors working from diverse contexts all consider how the audiovisual essay can constitute a radical break from the centrality of writing in academic practice. Drawing from their own experience of creating over one hundred examples, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin first present a highly practical set of guidelines for how to develop an audiovisual essay in a mode that does not begin with a pre-scripted text. Recommending instead that creators go straight to the physical process of moving around fragments of image and sound based upon loose ideas and choices, they show how the pattern and structure of the piece can emerge as a “thought process” about screen media that genuinely uses that media’s own language, thereby bringing about an affective work that cannot be reduced to a text-based summary.

In the next essay, Vincent Longo discusses a somewhat different, multimodal approach that he takes with his students at the University of Michigan. Arguing for the pedagogical benefit of exploring the overlap between multimodal composition and the audiovisual essay, Longo explains the strict design and learning goals of a hybrid-style “motif assignment,” employing a three-part script that asks students to think systematically about how the best combination of words, images, and audio can demonstrate their argument.

Writing returns as central to the use of audiovisual essays in the first section’s final essay by Robert Letizi, as he insists upon the relationship between audiovisual essays, literary essays, and cinematic forms such as the essay film. Letizi wrestles with the affordances and hazards of teaching digital topics to a generation who have grown up, by turns, expressing themselves through and deluged by audiovisual media. By drawing attention to the ways in which, for our students, the audiovisual is second nature, he is able to argue that it is writing that has become “defamiliarized and disarticulated.” As such, Letizi’s strategies sit somewhere in between Álvarez López/Martin and Longo: audiovisual expression is the main objective, but students begin their reflective and critical journey through writing, recording their impressions to screening material in a detailed and systematic way.

A concern with how the audiovisual essay relates to written assessment is carried over into the second section, Authenticity and Empowerment. In the first essay, Sean Redmond and Joanna Tai consider how, as an assessment item, the form fosters authenticity in terms of both “real world” relevance and creative criticality. Outlining a pilot study that examines how third year undergraduates at Deakin University, Melbourne, took up and responded to an audio visual assignment with accompanying exegesis, they show how and why students overwhelmingly found the praxis-led task to be a more critically valuable and transferable—more authentic—format than the written essay.

In the next piece, Travis McKenzie offers a view on the authentic possibilities of the audiovisual essay from a secondary school perspective. He shows how Media and English students in years 10–12 are empowered by the format, not only to create a final product that is of a high standard but to plan, collaborate, seek feedback, and revise their work in a way they do not for written assessment.

The final section of the dossier focuses on themes of Creativity and Pedagogy. Sian Mitchell argues that the audiovisual essay can make an intervention in a film production context, in which striking the delicate balance between the teaching of creative and theoretical aspects is an ongoing issue. First, through film analysis, students become aware of how formal and aesthetic choices have implications for the socio-cultural impact of films. Second, students are tasked with research, analysis, and reflection, via the creation of an audiovisual essay built around the notion of “subtext.” For Mitchell, creative practice pedagogy is enriched by audiovisual essay tasks, which have proven valuable for the enhancement of screen literacy and critical thinking. Finally, and linking back directly to the issue’s key theme, Catherine Fowler reflects on how introducing exercises with video editing into her French new wave unit animated her classroom and transformed the potential for radical pedagogy in the seminar space. Explaining how the process of editing gives the sense that the film text is open to everyone in the room despite their knowledge, she shows how the exercise brings the notion of control—by both the filmmaker and the teacher—into question. This effect gives rise to a tangible sense in which student and teacher genuinely work together in producing knowledge, transforming relationships to both learning and teaching.

References

Lusted, David. “Why Pedagogy?” Screen 26, no.5 (1986): 2–14.

Flusser, Vilém. Gestures. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2014.

Grant, Catherine. “[in]Transition: Editor’s Introduction.” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. 1, no.1 (2014).


Teaching Biographies

Co-Editors

Catherine Fowler is an Associate Professor in Film at Otago University, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the art and film axis of influence, feminism, and film and European cinemas. She has taught audiovisual essay workshops to high school students. With Claire Perkins and Andrea Rassell she has made an audiovisual essay focusing on the long take in cinema which was published in [in]Transition journal.

Claire Perkins is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She researches primarily on independent and indie screen cultures and contemporary “quality” television, with a focus on the gendered discourses of each. She is the author of American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and co-editor of six collections including Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and Transnational Television Remakes (Routledge, 2016). In 2017, she was guest editor (with Sean Redmond and Tessa Dwyer) of a special issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies that included the audiovisual essay Dead Time, made with Catherine Fowler and Andrea Rassell.

Sean Redmond is Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has been a media and screen educator for over twenty-five years, including being Chief Examiner of the NEAB A Level Media Studies syllabus (1999–2001) in the UK, which championed the critical and creative autonomy of students. He is the author of fifteen books, is a curator and installation artist, and guest edited (with Tessa Dwyer and Claire Perkins) an edition of the video essay journal [in]Transition, on “The Poetics of Eye Tracking”: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/theme-week/2017/36/poetics-eye-tracking

Contributors

Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic and video maker based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain). Her work has appeared in MUBI Notebook, LOLA, and De Filmkrant, and in books on Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel, New Portuguese Cinema, Bong Joon-ho, and Paul Schrader. Her website is: cristinaalvarezlopez.wordpress.com.

Dr. Robert Letizi is a lecturer at Monash University. His research and teaching interests encompass digital media, technology and aesthetics, ontologies of the image, and film sound. He is one of the leading proponents of audiovisual essay practice and study at Monash in two capstone units: The Audio Visual Essay and Film and Screen Studies in the Digital Era.

Vincent Longo is a Doctoral Candidate in Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He received the University’s Outstanding Research Mentor (2017) and Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (2018) awards for his work teaching audiovisual essays and archival research to undergraduate students. In addition to other published and forthcoming work about multimedia theater, New Hollywood authorship, and archival studies, he has published another essay on audiovisual pedagogy in Screen. His dissertation explores the role live performance in large metropolitan movie theaters played in shaping celebrity culture, the norms of spectatorship, and film production during the Hollywood studio era.

Adrian Martin is an arts critic based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain) and Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University. He is the author of eight books on cinema, including Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). His ongoing archive website of film reviews, covering forty years of writing, is at filmcritic.com.au.

An educator and published writer, Travis McKenzie has been working as an English, Media and Art teacher for sixteen years. He has a deep commitment to creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking and believes stories will save the world. A published author and writer for the AEU News magazine, Travis explores themes of posthumanism and artificial intelligence in his fiction, and reflects on his teaching in his column, The Less I Know. Currently leading the 7-10 English and VCE Arts & Technology Professional Learning Communities at Fitzroy High, Travis is actively engaged in the facilitation of High Impact Teaching Strategies across a wide range of subjects and year levels. Travis is on the education board of Australian Teachers of Media and in 2018 worked with the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority to refine the criteria used to assess students creative folios. This year he is developing a whole-school literacy policy and sees multimodal analysis as a key part of teaching and assessment.

Sian Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer at SAE Creative Media Institute and Festival Director of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. Her research interests include contemporary and historical screen exhibition, Australian women’s screen practice and audience engagement. Her work has appeared in Historic Environment, Peephole Journal, the National Film and Sound Archive, and AFI Research Collection.

Sean Redmond is Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has been a media and screen educator for over 25 years, including being Chief Examiner of the NEAB A Level Media Studies syllabus (1999-2001) in the UK, which championed the ‘critical and creative autonomy’ of students. He is the author of 15 books, is a curator and installation artist, and guest edited (with Tessa Dwyer and Claire Perkins) an edition of the video essay journal, [in]Transition, on the Poetics of Eye Tracking: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/theme-week/2017/36/poetics-eye-tracking. Sean’s video essay work, The Ear That Dreams: Eye Tracking Sound in the Moving Image, can be found here:  http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2017/09/07/ear-dreams-eye-tracking-sound-moving-image

Joanna Tai is Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University. Joanna is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is co-editor of Developing Evaluative Judgement in Higher Education: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work (Routledge). Her doctoral work on peer learning won the Association for Medical Education Europe (AMEE) inaugural PhD prize in 2016. She has a background in health professions education. Her research interests include student perspectives on learning and assessment in a digital world, peer-assisted learning, feedback and assessment literacy, developing capacity for evaluative judgement, and research synthesis.


About the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier

JCMS and TeachingMedia.org have formed a partnership to develop a quarterly feature called the JCMS Teaching Dossier. The goals of this partnership are to foster critical reflection on media studies teaching and pedagogy and to engender serious discussion of pedagogical issues via an active online platform. Topic ideas for Teaching Dossiers will originate with input from the SCMS Teaching Committee and will be approved by a representative of both JCMS and TeachingMedia.org before being disseminated as calls for submissions.

Each Teaching Dossier will be overseen by a pair of editors. The editors will craft a call for submissions and shepherd submissions from acceptance to publication, as well as write an introductory essay for the Dossier.

Each Teaching Dossier will feature 4-6 essays on a similar pedagogical topic. Each essay should be between 1300-1800 words and written in scholarly prose appropriate for professional journal publication. Authors are also encouraged to take advantage of the online platform and utilize links, images, and multimedia in their posts. Citation format should be Chicago.

Submissions will be solicited via open calls, as well as targeted invitations. Those wishing to submit an essay for a Teaching Dossier should provide a 300-word abstract of the proposed essay, describing the essay topic and how it connects to the Dossier topic, as well as a 150-word teaching biography highlighting relevant courses taught. Even in the case of invited submissions, the approval process will be competitive, and only the best proposals will be accepted.

Once proposals are accepted, authors will have approximately two months to complete their essays. Essays will be submitted to the Dossier editors, who will then put the essays through a rigorous editorial process, which may include blind peer-review editorial board oversight. Authors may be asked to conduct revisions on their essays, and the editors may decline to include an essay in the Dossier if it is deemed to be substandard or insufficiently revised according to editorial demands.

Once final drafts of the essays are approved by the editors and representatives of JCMS and TeachingMedia.org, the Teaching Dossier materials will be submitted to TeachingMedia.org at least one week in advance of the anticipated posting date.

Contributor Guidelines

  • Submit your contribution as a word doc to issue editors.
  • Embed all hyperlinks.
  • Your document should be single-spaced. Separate paragraphs with a hard return, and do not indent the first line.
  • Please use parenthetical citations only. No footnotes or endnotes please.
  • Bold subheadings.
  • Send images separately as JPG files.
  • Clearly indicate where you’d like images and videos inserted. Provide captions as necessary.
  • We cannot upload movie files directly into posts. Please provide a url for all videos you’d like to feature in your post.
  • Include your bio at the conclusion of your post after the list of references.

Editors

Christine Becker, co-founding editor, Department of Film, Television and Theater, University of Notre Dame.

Julia Himberg, managing co-editor, Department of English, Arizona State University. Online tutor on the base the Teaching Media community.

Anthony Nadler, co-founding and managing co-editor, Department of Media and Communication Studies, Ursinus College

Erin Wiegand, web editor, Department of Arts, Design, and Social Sciences, Northumbria University

Julie Wilson, co-founding editor and managing co-editor, Department of Communication Arts and Theater, Allegheny College

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply