Julie Wilson

CFP Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier: Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times

 Teaching Dossiers and Collections  No Responses »
Jan 052015
 

CFP Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier: Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times

Edited by Courtney Bailey and Julie Wilson, Allegheny College
 

The increasingly corporatized neoliberal university represents an aggressive threat to critical pedagogies and professors who resist the “safe spaces” of diversity discourse and actively address systems of privilege and oppression. On an institutional level, this threat manifests itself in amplified efforts to build brand value in a competitive market, policies designed to “protect” those brands, and increased reliance on capital campaigns in the face of austerity measures. As crystalized powerfully by the Salaita case, academic freedom no longer provides a sufficient counter-balance to forces of corporatization.

At the same time, professors committed to examining power and systemic inequality are increasingly likely to find their pedagogies challenged from below by students. On the one hand, these challenges issue from students with reactionary politics, while on the other hand they also come from students who have been traumatized by systems of oppression. Prominent debates over “trigger warnings,” for instance, speak to fundamental tensions we must navigate: how to teach about the brutal workings of systemic oppression in a context where neoliberal tenets of personal responsibility and privatization individualize suffering and its solutions in ever more insidious ways. Critical media and cultural studies scholars are poised to feel these tensions even more acutely, as we often teach discomforting material that is aimed to reflect and make present the very regimes we hope to disrupt through our critical pedagogies.

For this issue of the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, we hope to collect a range of essays that reflect on how we might navigate the myriad forces of neoliberalism impinging on media studies classrooms. How can we constitute our classrooms as spaces of resistance in the context of corporatized education? How do we meet, confront, and/or disrupt the neoliberal politics of identity that students bring to our classrooms? What are the specific challenges faced by critical media instructors today, and how can we productively address these challenges?

We welcome essays focused on specific topics (e.g., trigger warnings) and/or assignments, other pedagogical approaches/strategies grounded in particular case studies or contexts, or more theoretically-oriented contributions. Please submit a 250-word abstract for a proposed 1500-word essay and a 150-word biography to Courtney Bailey ([email protected]) and Julie Wilson ([email protected]) by February 16th.  Completed essays (including all images and links) will be due on April 17th.

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Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier CFP: Online Teaching in Film and Media Studies

 Teaching Dossiers and Collections, Teaching with Technology  No Responses »
Aug 202014
 
Editors: Murray Leeder (University of Calgary) and George S. Larke-Walsh (University of North Texas)
 

For the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier, we seek brief pieces on the subject of online teaching in film and media studies. At many institutions, online teaching is not just a prospect for the future – it is here, today. This dossier seeks to assemble articles from those who have braved this new pedagogical frontier and can speak of its benefits and difficulties. Our field carries particular challenges: how to teach film studies, for instance, without the ability to lead students through discussions of individual clips, how to make screening material available without transgressing copyright laws, and how to design meaningful assignments.

This dossier invites articles and multi-media presentations on all aspects of online teaching. In particular, we would like to see contributions that provide examples of assignments and student work.

Important issues include:

  • Why are universities and colleges turning to online pedagogy?
  • What are its benefits and deficits from the teacher’s side? The student’s side? The institution’s side?
  • How do we  make screening material available to students: online? On reserve at the library? Have them find it themselves?
  • What are the issues, copyright and other, involved with showing video clips and other media online?
  • How is the process of designing assignments different than for classroom courses?
  • What successful interactions have you designed for your online course?
  • How do you maintain student interaction in the absence of face-to-face communication, and approximate sense of community that emerges from the classroom setting?
  • How can we ensure student retention and engagement in online courses?
  • What can we learn through online teaching that can be incorporated into a more traditional classroom setting?
  • Hybrid/blended learning – the halfway house between classroom and online education.

We are particularly interested in having an essay from a student who has recently completed an online course giving their perspective on the platform. If you know anyone who might be appropriate, please put them in touch with us.

Submit a 250-word abstract for a proposed 1500-word essay, briefly describing the essay topic, and a 150-word biography to Murray Leeder ([email protected]) and George S. Larke-Walsh ([email protected]), by November 3. The completed essay (including all images and links) will be due on January 5.

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Sound Studies in a Liberal Arts Curriculum

 Readings for Undergraduates, Sound/Music/Radio  1 Response »
May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Jay Beck
 Carleton College
 
 

One of the difficulties of teaching Cinema and Media Studies in a liberal arts college is balancing student interest in production with the interdisciplinary focus of the liberal arts curriculum. In many ways the limitations of teaching film and television production at a small liberal arts college turns out to have pedagogic and career-oriented advantages for students. Unlike many professional film production programs at larger universities, the economic realities mean that if liberal arts colleges offer film production it is generally on a modest scale using available “prosumer” equipment. While this makes it possible for students to get the hands-on experience they need to become media makers it does not let them sub-specialize on the technical level. Therefore, in order to provide a critical breadth to counterbalance the limited depth of technology-dependent course offerings, most colleges place equal emphasis on developing the historical and theoretical understandings of cinema and media to augment their production areas. Additionally, in the Cinema and Media Studies (CAMS) department at Carleton College, we have cultivated a curriculum that places equal emphasis on developing sound as well as visual theory and practice.

This is possible because of the way our Cinema and Media Studies major developed in tandem with the emergence of Sound Studies. Previously a concentration, CAMS became a major in 2007 and has grown from an initial four majors in the first graduating class to twenty-nine newly declared majors in the class of 2016. Coincident with this growth has been the development of the field of Sound Studies and the publication of several of its cornerstone texts [1]. As CAMS has grown there has been a conscious effort to incorporate Sound Studies into the curriculum and to develop innovative assignments and teaching modules that redress the imbalance between sound and image.

The study of sound and sound practices has generally faced an uphill battle to be accepted in the liberal arts environment. Early Visual Studies texts from Roland Barthes, John Berger, Stuart Hall, Martin Jay, and Laura Mulvey found uses in cinema and media studies as well as in the correlative disciplines of art history, photography, painting, dance, and theater. Sound Studies, as an emerging field, also draws upon a similarly broad range of discourses – film studies, musicology, psychoacoustics, cultural anthropology, technology studies, audio engineering, voice studies, acoustic ecology – yet it still struggles to find purchase in most academic institutions. Curiously this is not because of budgetary or technological limitations; rather, it stems from the relative invisibility of sound discourses in higher education.

Even though many universities and colleges have been able to build film and media courses around prosumer recording and editing equipment – generally lower cost video cameras or D-SLRs and Final Cut – sound recording and production equipment often lag far behind. Despite limited studio facilities and production equipment in CAMS during its first years, sound practice became central to the curriculum. The use of Canon 5D EOS D-SLR cameras necessitated second-system sound units and students made the most out of two Marantz PMD660 recorders, Audio Technica 815B shotgun kits, and a Wenger sound isolation booth equipped with two Shure SM7As for voice-over work. In addition, an Audio Workshop course was developed using mini-disc recorders to create radio documentaries and journalistic reporting based around voice recordings.

This integrated approach to sound and image in the CAMS production curriculum led to a change in curricular focus and a growing interest in Sound Studies. A faculty member in the Music department developed a hybrid music studies and production course for CAMS, Sound and Music in New Media, based around Logic sound editing software. Additionally, a Sound Studies–Methods and Debates course was introduced that amplified the many topics within Sound Studies and connected them to other disciplines across the college. A final piece fit into place with the approval of the Weitz Center for Creativity in 2010, designed as an intermedial arts center with a special emphasis on collaboration. The building, itself renovated from an existing middle school near campus, featured new production spaces including a small recording studio, two production stages, a full-scale theater, dance studios, and 250-seat cinema.

The college’s decision to invest in these new facilities prompted the CAMS faculty to rethink the pedagogic goals of the major and to structure the curriculum around three broad areas: Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and Sound Studies. With the new building came an opportunity to purchase our first Zoom H4n digital audio recorders and Røde NTG2 shotgun microphones in 2011. These field audio recording packages – complete with boom, pistol grip, wind protector, and cables – were assembled for around $750 each, which is a fraction of what comparable kits cost five years earlier.  It became possible to introduce students to digital sound recorders and shotgun mics in the entry-level Digital Foundations production course, marking a major shift in the curriculum. In addition, readings on sound theory from Michel Chion and Robert Bresson were added to Digital Foundations to place audio recording into dialogue with the sound analysis module in the Introduction to CAMS film analysis course.

In order to complement an already robust Visual Studies platform the department decided to develop new courses to round out the Sound Studies curriculum. Rooted in both film history and film theory, we developed a new course, Film Sound Studies: History, Technology, Aesthetics, to examine the evolution of cinema through the filter of film sound. The course provides a view of the global development of sound practices from the silent era through contemporary multichannel systems and examines sound recording, mixing, and reproduction and their framing discourses in multiple national and transnational contexts. The Sound Studies–Methods and Debates course was modified to create the Sound Studies Seminar, a capstone theory course built around an interdisciplinary view of sound studies that serves as a counterpart to upper-level Cinema Studies and Visual Studies seminars. Each year topic modules in Sound Studies Seminar rotate to include issues such as sound space, animation sound, the voice, noise studies, phonography, multichannel sound, sound and genre, soundscape ecology, sound art, acoustic archaeology, mobile listening, and sonic phenomenology. And to round out the existing Audio Workshop and Sound and Music in New Media production courses, we introduced a new Sound Design class.

The Sound Design course, with an emphasis on recording, creating, editing, and mixing sound for picture, is a prime example of this interdisciplinary focus. The course can be taken without Digital Foundations as a pre-requisite because the goal is to draw students from across the college as well as from the major. Covering the basics of acoustics, microphone design, recording techniques, and editing and mixing strategies, the course is designed to attune students to sound’s ability to create space, develop characters, transition time, and construct narratives. Their first assignment – a basic audio montage using sounds recorded collectively by the class – asks students to build a narrative exclusively through sound. The second assignment, with its emphasis on sound for picture and Foley, asks students to build a soundtrack for a brief sequence from a silent film where all sounds are created and recorded by the students. This encourages students to think about the range of sound and image relations, including synchronism versus non-synchronism, onscreen and off-screen sounds, sound bridges, sound advances, sound space and reverberation, exterior and interior sound perspectives, and point of audition. Moreover, it asks students to consider how these formal elements supplement, alter, or contrast the visual details and the narrative trajectory. A third assignment engages with the concept of acoustic archaeology by using paintings from periods before the advent of sound recording technology and asks students to research the sound from the time and place represented. Taking R. Murray Schafer’s investigations of historical soundscapes in his The Tuning of the World as its theoretical foundation, the assignment asks students to examine our changing relationship to the sounds of our environment over time. Moreover, the assignment frees students from synchronization and gets them to think abut how sound can animate the still image and build a world through sound effects, spatialization, and temporality.

Building Sound Studies into the CAMS major lets students focus on developing critical thinking skills rather than just technological aptitude. The small scale, holistic method of an interdisciplinary liberal arts approach emphasizes the production of meaning by combining theory and practice across the curriculum. By fostering the study of sound and getting students to integrate sound into their projects as early as possible, the curriculum has developed a new sensitivity to sound practices in CAMS majors as well as students from across the college. The audio recording studio is used regularly by students from all disciplines and is staffed by students who have advanced through the CAMS Sound Studies curriculum. In addition the Sound Design course created a student-generated sound effects archive available for campus-wide use and the shared resources of the Weitz Center have resulted in greater collaborations with the Music, Theater and Dance departments. Overall there has been a vast improvement in thinking about sound in all projects – critical and creative – and the Sound Studies curriculum has made sound a focal point in several other areas across the college.

Notes

[1]  Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (New York: Berg, 2003); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012); and an impressive range of offerings from Oxford University Press including Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2011); John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, eds., The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013); Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013); and Karen Collins, Bill Kapralos, and Holly Tessler, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Interactive Audio (2014).

 

Jay Beck is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Carleton College. He co-edited Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, is American co-editor of the journal Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and his current book project is Designing Sound: Technology and Sound Aesthetics in 70s American Cinema.

 

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Teaching Film and Media Studies in Liberal Arts Colleges/ Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol. 2 (2) Spring 2014

 Teaching Dossiers and Collections  No Responses »
May 312014
 

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Teaching Film and Media Studies in Liberal Arts Colleges

Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol. 2 (2) Spring 2014
Co-editors: Elizabeth Nathanson and Carol Donelan
 
 

Table of Contents

Understandably Critical (of Neoliberalism) by Maurizio Viano
Teaching Production in a Liberal Arts Context by Paul McEwan
Sound Studies in a Liberal Arts Curriculum by Jay Beck
Collaborative Models for Engagement by Bryan Sebok
Flipping German Cinema by Karen Achberger
Local Truths, Tactical Pedagogies: Documentary, Ethics, and Service Learning by Chuck Tyron

 

Introduction
Elizabeth Nathanson and Carol Donelan
 

The economic recession, rising student debt, and high levels of unemployment have once again put into question the “value” of a liberal arts education. Given the bleak outlook for recent grads, repeatedly trumpeted in the popular press, it is difficult to ignore the claim that a liberal arts education may not be “worth it.” In the current popular mindset, the “value” of a liberal arts education is understood in economic terms, as a “return on investment,” with the price of the degree measured against the earning potential of graduates in the job market.

“I promise folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they can with an art history degree,” President Obama remarked recently in a speech to Wisconsin factory workers.  The President immediately qualified his statement—his intention was to promote the trades, not diss art history, and he later wrote a letter of apology to a University of Texas art historian regarding his “favorite subject in high school,” but the gaff reveals a deep-seated, seemingly unshakeable anxiety regarding the uncertain “value” (read: “market value”) of a liberal arts education.  Sure, you can get an art history-film studies-English-philosophy degree, but what can you do with it?

Faculty at liberal arts colleges are feeling the pressures of this moment. A “liberal arts college” is generally defined as a four-year institution, attended by students aged 18-21, with curricula “resistant to highly specific vocational preparation and insisting on a considerable breadth of studies” (Hawkins 1999, 23). Liberal arts faculty are not inclined to “value” the education we provide based primarily on the job-getting and salary-earning outcomes of our graduates, but anxious parents and students facing big bills have a right to ask.  And since they are asking: liberal arts grads, by their mid-50s, are employed at similar rates and make more money than those who studied in professional or pre-professional programs. Turns out, even when the economy is shaky, liberal arts grads are the answer to the age-old question, “What do employers want?”  In a 2013 survey, over three hundred employers were read the following definition of a liberal education—without identifying it as such: “This approach to a college education provides both broad knowledge in a variety of areas of study and knowledge in a specific major or field of interest.  It also helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as intellectual and practical skills that span all areas of study, such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.”  Seventy-nine percent of the employers endorsed “this kind of education” as the “best way for young people to prepare for professional and career success in today’s global economy.”

Liberal arts faculty, questioned by parents and students regarding the “utility” of the subject matter we teach, may need to fine-tune our message for the different audiences we hope to reach. By adopting a “both-and” rather than “either-or” response we can continue to champion our traditional understanding of the “value” of a liberal arts education to those who appreciate it as we do, while developing the case we might make to those who prefer to “value” education in monetary terms or seek more of a direct correlation between college-going and job-getting.

Film and Media Studies faculty are uniquely positioned to contribute to the conversation regarding the “value” of the liberal arts, given the hybridity of our curriculum, which tends to be situated between the traditional liberal arts and experiential or applied learning.  What case can we make to students and parents regarding the “utility” of a liberal arts education and majoring in Film and Media Studies?  How is our curriculum evolving in response to the different ways the liberal arts are viewed by parents, students and employers?  How—or to what extent—are we preparing students to be critical thinking “citizens” as well as skilled “professionals” in the job market?  This Teaching Dossier brings to light the perspectives of Film and Media Studies faculty who are grappling with the challenges and opportunities inherent in teaching and “valuing” Film and Media Studies in the liberal arts today.

The first two essays establish frameworks for discussion, exploring “Curriculum in Context.”

Maurizio Viano kicks things off by charting the ripple effects of “neoliberalism” on liberal arts education, wherein “the logic of free enterprise is creeping into every corner of human existence” and affecting faculty and student experience in Film and Media Studies.  In response to these developments, Viano highlights for our consideration two perspectives from outside of Film and Media Studies: the call to revive the generalist tradition of undergraduate teaching and the movement to create a “hybrid humanities.” Viano goes on to discuss how he and his colleagues at Wellesley College have responded to these ideas in their recent curricular and hiring decisions.

Paul McEwan engages the call to embrace the “generalist tradition” by requiring students in his film production courses to develop films drawing upon topics or concepts encountered in their general education courses.  As McEwan explains, such an approach yields films premised in substantive ideas and “helps to make the case that film and video production do not have to run alongside the liberal arts curriculum, but can be an integral part of it.”

The next two essays offer “Creative Solutions” for reinventing Film and Media Studies curriculum to accommodate the different ways it is “valued” today.

Jay Beck discusses the steady growth of Sound Studies in the Cinema and Media Studies curriculum at Carleton College.  Sound Studies, an emerging field, has faced somewhat of an uphill battle to be accepted in the liberal arts.  Curiously, this is due not to budgetary or technological limitations; rather, it stems from the relative invisibility of sound discourses in higher education.  By fostering the study of sound and getting students to integrate sound into their production projects as early as possible, the curriculum has developed a new sensitivity to sound practices in CAMS majors as well as students from across the college.

Bryan Sebok explores how a familiar model in Film and Media Studies, the singular “one (wo)man band” faculty member responsible for the entire core curriculum—critical studies as well as production—can foster an “orchestra of support.”  The collaborative model he describes entails engaging technical support staff as well as faculty from other departments, enlisting their collaboration and cross-listing their courses.  Crucially, it also requires a shift in thinking about students as “key collaborators” in faculty research and film production “rather than conceptualizing student labor as a burden requiring additional management efforts.”

The final two essays offer case studies in “Engaged Pedagogies.”

Karen Achberger has “flipped” her German Cinema course and now asks students to view micro-lectures online before coming to class.  Class time is devoted to collaborative learning, with student teams engaging the assigned films as active producers rather than passive consumers of knowledge.  By working collaboratively, thinking critically, and grappling with issues and problems specific to other cultures and historical moments, students are developing the skills they need to thrive in the global workforce.  Flipped German Cinema is but one example of the growing interest in and support for the Digital Humanities initiative at St Olaf College.

Chuck Tyron describes the institutional contexts and motivations for reinventing a basic film aesthetics course as a service-learning course on documentary ethics and production at Fayetteville State University.  The newly repositioned course skews away from a disciplinary model emphasizing film form and style.  Instead, students study weekly documentary films from the perspective of ethical practice and representation.  They then partner with community organizations to produce films serving the needs of the community while attending to the ethics of their own directorial practices.  The course helps students develop skills in critical thinking and gain real world professional experience—two objectives of liberal arts education.

 

Works Cited

Hawkins, Hugh. 1999. “The Making of the Liberal Arts College Identity.” Deadalus Vol. 128, No. 1: 1-25.

 

Contributors

Elizabeth Nathanson is Assistant Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College.  She teaches courses in feminist media studies, television history, cultural theory and documentary research.  She is the author of Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time For Mother (Routledge, 2013).  Her article, “Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the ‘New’ Pleasures of Fashion” appears in the anthology Gendering the Recession (Duke University Press, 2014). Her work has also appeared in Television and New Media and Framework.

Carol Donelan is Associate Professor and Chair of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College, where she teaches courses in film analysis, history, theory and genres.  Her research interests include archival film history and contemporary film genres.  She is the author of Electric Theater: The Emergence of Cinema in Northfield, 1896-1917 and has an essay on the Twilight Saga franchise forthcoming in Quarterly Review of Film & Video.

Maurizio Viano is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College, where he pioneered and currently co-directs the CAMS major and teaches courses in film history and European Cinema.  His research focuses on Surrealism, the Neo-Baroque, and the cinema of Raúl Ruiz and he is the author of A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice as well as numerous book chapters and articles on film.

Paul McEwan is Associate Professor of Media & Communication and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College, where he teaches both production and studies.  He edited a special section on “Teaching Difficult Films” for Cinema Journal in 2007 that included his essay on The Birth of a Nation. That film is also the subject of a BFI Classic volume he has recently completed, to be released later this year.  He is currently working on an annotated bibliography on film pedagogy for Oxford Bibliographies and is the author of a book, Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (2011) and a forthcoming essay on Griffith’s Intolerance for the Companion to D.W. Griffith.

Jay Beck is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Carleton College. He co-edited Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, is American co-editor of the journal Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and his current book project is Designing Sound: Technology and Sound Aesthetics in 70s American Cinema.

Bryan Sebok is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College, where he teaches courses that integrate film and media studies with production.  A working filmmaker, he has produced a narrative feature, Dance With the One, and is currently directing a feature documentary on the mobile food movement.  He has also published articles in Velvet Light Trap, MediaScape and Spectator.

Karen R. Achberger, Professor of German at St Olaf College, teaches courses in German language, literature and cinema.  “Flipping” her German Cinema classroom was made possible through a 2013 Digital Humanities grant funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and “Contextualizing Caligari” will be supported through a 2014 Mellon Foundation grant for “Digital Humanities on the Hill.”  She is the author of two books and 27 articles on 20th century German writers, especially the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann. She has published two translations of stories by the East German writer Irmtraud Morgner and is currently completing an annotated translation of Bachmann’s critical writings for Camden House.

Chuck Tryon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Fayetteville State University.  His research focuses on the transformations of movie and television consumption in the era of digital delivery. He is the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (2009) and On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (2013), both from Rutgers University Press. He has also published essays in The Journal of Film and Video, Jump Cut, Popular Communication, and Screen, as well as the anthologies, Moving Data: The iPhone and My Media and Across the Screens: Science Fiction on Television and Film.

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Understandably Critical (of Neoliberalism)

 Film and Television, Media Production, Readings for Undergraduates  No Responses »
May 312014
 

 

CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Maurizio Viano
 Wellesley College
 

 

The paradox in the images evoked by the first two bullets in this dossier’s call for proposals is so striking as to bear scrutiny: on the one hand, the “critical thinking citizen,” ideally formed by our teaching; and on the other, the “understandably anxious” parents and students to be persuaded by the case (sale pitch) we make for the value of a liberal arts education.  In the paradoxical haze of this predicament, are we allowed to have a dream—the dream of becoming “understandably critical,” aware of this:

Viano essay_Chomsky image(1)Indeed, becoming “understandably critical” would mean seeing through the fog of all democratic, republican and neocon smokescreens that in the past 35 years have occluded the common denominator which has led the globe and U.S. higher education to where we presently are: neoliberalism.

What is Neoliberalism?

In a 2009 New York Times column, Stanley Fish reports “reading essays in which the adjective neoliberal was routinely invoked as an accusation” but admits he “had only a sketchy notion of what was intended by it.”  Five years later, in the wake of a worldwide economic meltdown, confusion as to neoliberalism’s definition and basic effects is no longer possible: “Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time — it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit. Associated initially with Reagan and Thatcher, for the past two decades neoliberalism has been the dominant global political economic trend adopted by political parties of the center and much of the traditional left as well as the right” (McChesney, 7).  The steadily increasing bibliography on neoliberalism’s impact on art (Jump Cut 53), the so-called “creative industries” (ibid.) and, most importantly, higher education (Jump Cut 55 and Giroux ) is a sign that we are at last connecting the dots.  According to Fish, “the ‘historical legacy’ of the university conceived ‘as a crucial public sphere’ has given way to a university that now narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical.”  Here, let us chart neoliberalism’s ripple effects on cinema and media studies specifically.

Decrease in Majors

The number of students who might consider majoring in cinema and media studies but choose differently is rising.  A case in point is to be found at Wellesley College, where the Cinema and Media Studies program (CAMS) has to face the crushing competition of an interdepartmental major named Media Arts and Sciences (MAS). The latter’s curriculum emphasizes marketable assets such as programming for networked environments and web-connected database architectures. CAMS cross-lists quite a few MAS courses (e.g. digital imaging and design), but it is not enough.  Students and parents deem the study of cinema “impractical” while foundation courses in computer science ensure that the MAS major thrives.

Populism and Quantitative Reasoning

Just as a film’s value is ubiquitously measured in terms of box office figures, students valorize only the study of things sanctioned by the market. Fomented by the postmodern bias against the alleged elitism of film theory and art cinema, students would rather learn about popular cinema alone rather than accept our pedagogic plea that college is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand their horizons and learn about other modes of filmmaking and media production.  As the boundary between knowledge and fandom is eroded, even our majors’ resistance against watching foreign films can be chalked up to their populist fixation on a quantifiable market for which they dream of concocting the breakthrough pilot.

The Ideology of the Upgrade

The pervasive ideology of the upgrade hugely impacts our fields by creating the impression that only today’s media forms and post-CGI films are worth studying. Through reminders forcing themselves on our screen, the interpellation of the upgrade not only incessantly produces ‘natural’ needs and hierarchies, but also downgrades all that is historical—effectively defusing history’s relevance. Walter Benjamin’s hopeful dialectical image emerging from the conflation of historical vision and critical present is less likely to flash up on media commodities whose temporality is that of fashion’s apparel and whose logic is grounded in the ineluctability of scientific progress.

The Divide and Conquer of Identity Politics

The naturalization of capitalism has not only wiped potential alternatives from the radar; it has also eclipsed all rethinking of class in the global North’s knowledge economy, indirectly privileging the “easy” antagonism of identity politics.  The exclusive focus on immediately visible fractures and ‘natural’ alliances occludes the potential of a common struggle against an enemy whose visibility can only emerge by connecting the dots of political economy.  Furthermore, just as it over-determines taste, neoliberal ideology influences the students’ perception of a film’s politics.  Form is ignored; narrative and plot are all that matters. In fact, the ongoing  “Victim Olympics” sweeping campuses and determining students’ appreciation of films has redefined what politics is.

Dark Night of the Soul

Neoliberalism forces all humanities majors and professors to measure their worth against the market. On the Forbes‘ website, Peter Cohan suggests that the solution to the education crisis “could be as simple as eliminating the departments that offer majors that employers do not value,” concluding: “One thing is clear, academia’s effort to preserve its special exemption from the laws of economics is becoming too burdensome for many students, parents, and lenders to bear.” Put under pressure to account of our curriculum’s exchange-value, we risk internalizing the gaze of the “Big Other” (the market). This enforced ego fragility is compounded with the stress that new work patterns impose on the cognitariat, the labor force in the knowledge economy of which we are part and which our education produces.  Under the 24/7 regime of media connectivity, systemic ADHD and mental health problems become the norm.  In keeping with the prevailing scientism, these issues are entirely biologized, with little attempt at understanding the role that cultural, economic and socio-political factors might play in their formation.  Unequipped with the critical tools to understand the psycho-politics of what Italian philosopher Franco Berardi calls “the soul at work,” our students are vulnerable to the plethora of mental symptoms against which an “understandably critical” mind is an antidote.

Two Ideas From Without

A 2012 Harvard College report identifies problems with the teaching of the humanities in elite colleges.  Of interest here is the report’s acute perception that faculty overspecialization has lead to an excessive and dangerous narrowness in the scope of undergraduate courses. A possible way out might “profitably involve reaffirmation of the generalist tradition of undergraduate teaching” (30).  Insofar as the generalist combines many disciplinary interests in her/his person, reviving the generalist tradition also means valorizing Cinema and Media Studies, the interdisciplinary subject par excellence.  In small liberal arts colleges, with the humanities increasingly less patronized by students, we have the chance, indeed the duty, of showing how many tangents and ramifications film studies can produce. Instead of plumbing the depths of a specialist approach, our courses could emphasize the links between cinema/media texts and their many contexts. Insofar as the generalist approach enables an understanding of how the whole and its parts fit together, this pars pro toto teaching would encourage the absorption of the dialectical method by the student.

Toby Miller states that there are two humanities in the United States. “Humanities One resides in fancy private universities” and colleges and “tends to determine how the sector is discussed in public” (1). The second humanities, instead, is that of “state schools which focus more on job prospects.” Arguing that “the distinction between them […] places literature, history and philosophy on one side (Humanities One) and communication and media studies on the other (Humanities Two)” (2), Miller proposes to dynamite this opposition.  Critical of the neoliberal complicity between creative industries (e.g. video-games) and the military industrial complex, and eager to expose corporate Siliwood (the synergistic investments and profits of Silicon Valley and Hollywood), Miller argues that the humanities must not forsake their chance to sit at the table where valuable knowledge is produced and debated.  This is not achieved by aping the sciences and their methods, but by forging ahead in what he calls Humanities Three: “The two humanities must merge” under the aegis of media and cultural studies, the only inter-disciplines capable of ensuring “a blend of political economy, textual analysis, ethnography, and environmental studies such that students learn the materiality of how meaning is made, conveyed and discarded” (105).

Two Ideas From Within

Embracing the generalist approach, our two-semester film history requirement is abandoning the paranoid duty of chronological exposition and exhaustive coverage. We have moved towards a study of relevant constellations (e.g. Modernity/Modernism; Animation/Movement; Laughter) that combines reading theory, watching exemplary films, and asking the class to envision contextual and inter-textual bridges. The whole is done in a cross-eyed fashion—one eye trained on the story of film, the other on the generalist’s need—seeking links with other arts/media/disciplines.  This course also minimizes academic essay writing and asks students to produce knowledge through videographic essays. Precisely because we are “uniquely positioned” between the pre-professional and traditional humanities, stepping up the production component in all theory and history courses constitutes a tectonic shift in our discipline, one of the best ways to honor the “third way” proposed by Miller.

When hiring a CAMS faculty last year, we chose a new media theorist whose expertise in sound studies expands the notion of media beyond the screen-based. His new media courses straddle the philosophical reflection of Humanities One with the heuristic pragmatism of Humanities Two. In fact, in their multifaceted nature, these courses jut out towards the Social Sciences and intersect Computer Science as well (while adding the critical-political component often missing in them).  More importantly, they all implement that integration of theory and practice we have established as our distinctive trait. For example, in my colleague’s course on the Internet, the reading of theoretical texts is accompanied by small experiments aimed at demonstrating data flow from one machine to the other, thus enabling students to begin speaking and typing computer protocols.  If the neoliberal ethos asks you to use a computer as a consumer, his teaching counters such ideology by offering students the comprehension of how things work.  Connecting to a web server and experimenting with what is going on behind the scenes, students combine consumption with production, thereby upsetting the dichotomy.  In his words, “it is something like opening the black box.”

Locating and opening the black box gives a critical spin to the integration of theory and production,.  Indeed, such integration might make our unique position in the curriculum central to education in the small liberal arts college.  If wisely conjugated with a generalist approach and the digital articulation of theory and practice, a critical audiovisual literacy could aspire to become the “qualitative reasoning requirement” that some of us at Wellesley College feel should provide a counterweight to the quantitative reasoning requirement that was instituted some twenty years ago and that sealed the rising impact of a market driven knowledge.

 

Works Cited

Berardi, Franco. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. New York, Semiotext(e), 2009.

Cohan, Peter. “To Boost Post-College Prospects, Cut Humanities Departments,” Forbes.com, 5/29/2012, accessed May 19, 2014.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2012/05/29/to-boost-post-college-prospects-cut-humanities-departments/

Fish, Stanley, Neoliberalism and Higher Education. The New York Times, March 8, 2009, accessed May 19, 2014.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberalism-and-higher-education/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Giroux, Henry. “Neoliberalism, Democracy and the University as a Public Sphere.” truth-out.org, April 22, 2014, accessed May 19, 2014.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23156-henry-a-giroux-neoliberalism-democracy-and-the-university-as-a-public-sphere

Hess, John, Kleinhans, Chuck, and Lesage, Julia. “The war on/in higher education.” Jump Cut, No. 55, Fall 2013, accessed May 19, 2014.

http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/LastWordNeolibAttackEdn/index.html

Kapur, Jyotsna, and Wagner Keith, eds. Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

Kapur, Jyotsna. “Capital Limits on Creativity: Neoliberalism and its Uses of Art.” Jump Cut, No. 53, Summer 2011, accessed May 19, 2014.

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/KapurCreativeIndus/index.html

Kleinhans, Chuck. “‘Creative Industries,’ Neoliberal Fantasies, and the Cold, Hard Facts of Global Recession: Some Basic Lessons.” Jump Cut, No. 53, Summer 2011, accessed May 19, 2014.

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/kleinhans-creatIndus/index.html

McChesney, Robert W.  “Introduction,” in Noam Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.

Miller, Toby. Blow Up the Humanities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.

Working Group. The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future, 2013, accessed May 19, 2014. http://harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/Mapping%20the%20Future%20of%20the%20Humanities.pdf

Maurizio Viano is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College, where he pioneered and currently co-directs the CAMS major and teaches courses in film history and European Cinema.  His research focuses on Surrealism, the Neo-Baroque, and the cinema of Raúl Ruiz and he is the author of A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice as well as numerous book chapters and articles on film.
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Teaching Production in a Liberal Arts Context

 Creative Projects, Film and Television, Group Projects, Media Production  No Responses »
May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Paul McEwan
 Muhlenberg College
 
 
 

“What’s the most interesting idea you’ve learned here in the past year?”

A few weeks before students begin my Video Production course, they receive this prompt from me, in an email that spells out the requirements of the story pitch they must deliver on the first day of class. The written part of the pitch has to explain the idea, and then provide three possible plots that might convey that idea on screen. The best one of those three is the one they will pitch to their classmates, in a bid not for money but for time, since we work in groups of two or three so only the best pitches can get made.

Teaching at a liberal arts college, I can use the above prompt knowing that my students have taken a broad range of courses before they arrive in my classroom. Students at Muhlenberg use about a third of their total credits taking general education requirements, and these cover all areas of the curriculum, from the traditional humanities to social science and natural science. I tell them that good ideas for films can come from “philosophy, psychology, physics, and everything in between,” and recent experience has confirmed this hopeful view.

The prompt was a reaction to a frustrating situation in the first few iterations of the course nearly 10 years ago. Students could pitch decent stories (sometimes), but even halfway through the semester they could not tell me what their film was about without simply reciting back the plot. This was not just an intellectual exercise. Given the million and one adaptations to chance and circumstance that must occur as a film gets made, filmmakers who do not know what they are trying to say, or what the point of the work is, find themselves unable to make decisions about what to do next. The only way to make sure their work had a theme was to make them come up with that first.

By the time they arrive at college, nearly all students are capable of talking about the themes or ideas underlying artistic works on at least a superficial level, and most can go relatively deep with a little prompting. In the film studies courses I also teach, this is how we spend much of our time. Despite this, they are reluctant to think about their own work as having a theme, since they seem to think of that as a synonym for making a social issue film or being directly political, and that seems both limiting and intimidating. Many of them have of course made films that are explicitly political, and this is encouraged, but the sense that tackling a “big important issue” was a requirement to make a substantial film was a bar too high for most undergraduates. This is why asking them “what they wanted to say” did not work. It made the message too direct, like a call to action, while most of the serious films we watch in class are better described as observations or commentaries on some facet of human experience. Thus, starting with an “interesting idea” broadens the possibilities considerably.

The proposals vary widely, but certain themes re-occur, and of course some are more compelling than others. A common “most interesting idea” is an unusual condition they have learned about in a psychology class, and the students want to turn these into some kind of psychological thriller. While a couple of these have worked well, as I point out in the original proposal assignment the goal is not to act out the idea literally, but to use it as the foundation for a story. So a psychological condition could be read as social rather than medical, it could be a way to consider individual isolation, or it could simply be a metaphor that undergirds a narrative about healthy individuals. It need not be a story about a person with X syndrome, and should not simply be a story about someone’s descent.

One of our more ambitious films came from a short story that a student had read in Spanish class (films can be found here) [1]. She didn’t adapt the short story itself – just one of its conceits, that a story that at first seemed to be constructed in flashbacks eventually became one in which it was impossible to tell if the protagonist was in the present day imagining the past, or in the past imagining a future. For the rest of the semester, this fuelled endless discussions about what elements of our society could have been reasonably imagined by someone 100 years ago. Two narrative films inspired by ethics courses examined the question of what we owe long-term friends from whom we have grown apart, and what the difference is when you become the medical caretaker of someone you are dating and to whom you do not necessarily have a long-term commitment.

The latter film was one of the strongest our students have produced, and we ended up talking a lot about making our films non-exploitative. Many of our students have taken a course on the ethics of documentary making in which they spend a semester thinking about what it means to decide you are going to tell someone else’s story [2]. These are the kinds of intellectual linkages for which the liberal arts curriculum was designed, and film making offers students a way to process and share ideas they have encountered in a way that requires them to translate those ideas into a new form, and think about the act of translation itself. While these are intellectual goals that are not limited to the liberal arts, liberal arts colleges are uniquely situated to develop and nurture them.

Although film production and the liberal arts are an ideal fit in many ways, this is not immediately obvious when one looks at the range of production programs in the United States. Most of the elite production programs are at large universities, and most liberal arts film programs are focused on studies rather than production. On the surface this makes sense, given that larger universities have the resources and the space to offer what can be a relatively expensive program. Liberal arts colleges have generally developed from a great books model of teaching and learning, and while there are now obviously a great diversity of approaches and styles, there can also be a greater reluctance to embrace programs that seem practical and skills-based rather than more purely intellectual pursuits.

Despite this general hesitance when it comes to skills-based programs, liberal arts colleges generally do not have a problem training painters, actors, and musicians, as art-making courses have long been part of art, theatre, and music programs. It can be a bit more difficult to find a place for filmmaking, given the perception, mostly true, that it is more commercially oriented than other art forms. In our screenwriting courses, which are taught in collaboration with the college’s creative writing program, some of the creative writing students expressed concern that the pedagogy was too focused on selling a screenplay rather than simply the craft of writing, inverting what they are used to hearing in their other courses on poetry or fiction writing. Screenplays are unique as a writing form in that they have almost no social use outside of trying to get the films made. There is no non-commercial audience for a screenplay in the way that there is for other kinds of writing. Even plays, their closest relatives, are objects of scholarly study in a way that screenplays rarely are. Given that this difference is real and substantial, bridging the gap is an ongoing process. Our film students want to write screenplays that someone will make into a film, but our pedagogy has to recognize the fact that other students might see them as simply an exercise. We have to support broader pedagogical goals on our campus rather than just benefiting from them.

That sharing also helps with more practical budget matters. We do not have the resources of a larger school (or a large endowment), but by shopping carefully have managed to build an equipment closet with most of what we need. We have several hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment at this point, much of which is represented by a production studio with up-to-date television cameras and professional lighting and sound. This investment made sense to the college because the space is also used by theatre and dance and art students for camera-oriented courses. The space is now used much more than it was before, and our students can form collaborative working relationships with students from across the campus. For campuses with more limited resources, the rapidly dropping price of equipment means that you could start a production program for $25,000 or less, assuming you don’t already own sufficient computers for editing. If you do, the price is much lower. With that and perhaps $5000 per year for new gear and maintenance, you could grow your program slowly over a few years. If demand outstrips the supply of places in your courses, that will be a good problem to have. It helps to be able to make the case that film and video production do not have to run alongside the liberal arts curriculum, but can be an integral part of it.

Notes

[1] The story is “La Noche Boca Arriba” by Julio Cortazar, and the film was Doll Face, originally conceived by Joanna Whitney and made by her, Nicole Machrone, Lara Pollack, and Jake Ramsay. This, and the other films mentioned here, are available for viewing on the Muhlenberg Film Studies website at http://www.muhlenberg.edu/main/academics/film-studies/

[2] This course is Documentary Research, designed by my colleague Lora Taub-Pervizpour. It is a required course in the Media & Communication major, which many production students are completing. The rest of the students are drawn from Film Studies and other majors.

 

Paul McEwan is Associate Professor of Media & Communication and Film Studies at Muhlenberg College, where he teaches both production and studies.  He edited a special section on “Teaching Difficult Films” for Cinema Journal in 2007 that included his essay on The Birth of a Nation. That film is also the subject of a BFI Classic volume he has recently completed, to be released later this year.  He is currently working on an annotated bibliography on film pedagogy for Oxford Bibliographies and is the author of a book, Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (2011) and a forthcoming essay on Griffith’s Intolerance for the Companion to D.W. Griffith.

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Collaborative Models for Engagement

 Creative Projects, Group Projects, Media Production, Teaching with Technology  No Responses »
May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Bryan Sebok, PhD.
 Lewis & Clark College

 

Teaching film and media studies, including production, at liberal arts colleges offers unique opportunities and unique challenges that differ from other types of institutions.  Small class sizes and a focus on advising and mentorship afford a level of intellectual and creative engagement impossible at larger institutions.  Limited physical resources and a smaller faculty body in the subject area restrict the scope and scale of course offerings and limit the types of student projects created in classroom settings.  Many media studies programs in the liberal arts, including my own at Lewis & Clark College, have grown out of communication sciences programs housed in the social sciences, and remain focused on a wider and less specialized curriculum spanning rhetorical criticism, interpersonal communication, and socialization, along with media studies and production.  Professors teaching media studies in this context are, in a very real sense, “one (wo)man bands,” who are responsible for film and media theory, history, and production.  Here, I’d like to offer a few strategies for how to build that band into an orchestra of support for students interested in exploring media studies and production.

The orchestra begins to form via the recognition that collaboration, engagement, and involvement are necessary and inherently valuable.  Scott Carlson’s recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “A Caring Professor May Be Key in How a Graduate Thrives” reviews the Gallop-Purdue Index Report suggesting that College graduates “had double the chances of being engaged in their work and were three times as likely to be thriving in their well-being if they connected with a professor on the campus who stimulated them, cared about them, and encouraged their hopes and dreams…Graduates who had done a long-term project that took a semester or more, who had held an internship, or who were extremely involved in extracurricular activities or organizations had twice the odds of being engaged at work and an edge in thriving in well-being.”  The research suggests that liberal arts colleges do a particularly good job in this regard; engagement between faculty and students defines the small college tradition while offering a viable avenue to value creativity and institutional differentiation in a competitive academic marketplace.  So, if we all (presumably) care about our students and encourage their hopes and dreams, what are the best practices to turn that sentiment into a collaboration that will result in thriving alumni with strong ties to their alma mater?

First, a collaborative model of curriculum support and development is necessary to foster an atmosphere supporting students and faculty alike.  While we may appear to be going it alone, we must recognize that media support services staff at our institutions play crucial roles in technology maintenance, training, and development, and can be key collaborators in training students and faculty in software and hardware use.  Technology workshops offered by support services staff in conjunction with my own classes create a complementary atmosphere that aid student learning.  Staff initiated workshops and “showcases” featuring faculty who are innovating with technology in the classroom stimulate creative integration of technology into course and assignment design.  Technology upgrades should be executed after consultation with supporting staff.  Technology grants, institutional grants, dean’s office and departmental budgets should be tapped into in order to maximize monetary outlays for new cameras, sound, and lighting equipment.  Learning these new technologies alongside staff allows faculty-staff bonding and camaraderie that translates directly to the classroom.

Furthermore, collaborative course offerings allow students to build links between conceptual and practical skill sets while connecting experiences from courses across the social sciences and humanities.  Revisions to a media studies curriculum growing out of social science traditions should strive for efficiency by building links between theory and practice into each course and across the division.  In so doing, inter-departmental collaboration complements intra-departmental curriculum design and embraces the diversity of perspectives coming from the social sciences.  Courses in media studies can be linked to courses in political science, sociology, anthropology and economics through shared course projects, collaborative teaching, and team research.  I have had the pleasure of collaborating with my colleague, sociologist Robert Goldman, on a course designed to innovate new techniques to put big ideas into short media forms.  His expertise in advertising and critical theory complements my experience in short film production, movie trailer production, and film theory.  In this liberal arts context, students’ work in the arts serves to broaden their interests and sharpen their aesthetic skill sets, while their work in the social sciences connects patterns of human behavior and socio-cultural structures to film texts.  In each stage of coursework, a co-curricular and extra-curricular offering can complement the work being done in the classroom and afford students the opportunity to master techniques and concepts in more depth than in a single classroom.

Once a collaborative and coherent curriculum is established, extra-curricular and co-curricular offerings should work to engage students with professors.  One strategy to involve students in research and creative work is to incentivize students with internship, practicum, or independent study credit.  Students participating in these offerings should be able to apply credits toward graduation in the department, rather than solely as general elective credit.  Another is to apply for internal and external grants to pay students for their time and effort.  In so doing, students re-conceptualize the nature of their work as pre-professionals, often engaging more seriously than otherwise would be the case.  Demonstrating that student labor is valuable, and should be compensated, is crucial to building an enduring relationship over long-term projects.  With each creative and research project I undertake I involve my students in key collaborative positions.  For instance, for the past year and a half I have been directing a feature documentary about the mobile food movement.  Over the course of pre-production and production, I have worked with nearly two-dozen students.  Rather than conceptualizing such student labor as a burden requiring additional management efforts, I view their contribution as key collaborators who have demonstrated their competencies first in my documentary class, then in their own creative work outside the classroom in film clubs and internships, and finally each day on location.  I view each day shooting as an opportunity to present a module to my students on documentary technique, ethics, engagement, and executing a vision.  They have been trained in sound recording and camerawork in the classroom, and are able to provide key contributions in those areas.  Each day begins with a production meeting that identifies goals for the day, reminds the students of key framing and sound considerations, and links that day’s shoot to the broader project goals.  Each day then concludes with a summary of the accomplishments and challenges of the day while reflecting on the broader issues of documentary style, form, and ethics.  Students have ascended to roles as widely differentiated as project manager, sound technician, and social media manager.

Student experiences, therefore, are enriched by mentorship, engagement, and reflection.  I embrace every opportunity to involve my students in all aspects of my work both within and outside of my home institution.  For example, I am currently writing this entry at the Cannes Film Festival, where I serve as a mentor for students interning with businesses buying and selling media content.  Through the American Pavilion, students from around the world gain access to the festival via these internships.  Five of my own students are currently interning with companies ranging from Lionsgate to Archstone Distribution to Lakeshore Entertainment.  Their involvement enriches their Media Studies experience in the liberal arts, and is contextualized via mentor meetings with me.  I link their internships together and spend time asking them to reflect on the differences between distributors and production companies, and the structure of their companies, the division of labor therein, and how their business experience is integrated into their experience with media coursework.  The students go to screenings in the evenings and are exposed to global cinema on an amazing scale.  I encourage them to broaden their horizons by going to screenings from filmmakers they haven’t heard of, from nations around the world they may not have access to when they return to Portland.  They blog about their experiences, write reviews of the films, and share their stories with our home institution.  This reflective exercise serves to both afford the students the opportunity to process their experiences in detail and in real time while also promoting the department’s co-curricular dynamism to the broader institution.

Whether curricular, co-curricular, or extra-curricular, student-faculty collaboration builds bonds, enriches student experiences, and strengthens the links for alumni to the institution.  This process, though, must begin with faculty collaboration within and between departments and faculty-staff collaboration in technology acquisition, training, and maintenance.  The liberal arts environment should foster an atmosphere where collaboration is not only possible, but becomes crucial to long-term success for students and faculty alike.  Building an infrastructure for media studies and production means embracing students as collaborators, working with them over long periods of time as they work towards graduation, not as an end unto itself, but as a step in a lifelong chain back to the College.  It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes an orchestra to teach Media Studies in the liberal arts.

Works Cited

Blow, Charles M. “In College, Nurturing Matters.”  The New York Times, May 7, 2014, accessed May 15, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/opinion/blow-in-college-nurturing-matters.html?_r=0 

Carlson, Scott. “A Caring Professor May Be Key in How a Graduate Thrives.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2014 , accessed May 15, 2014. http://chronicle.com/article/A-Caring-Professor-May-Be-Key/146409/ 

 

Bryan Sebok is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College, where he teaches courses that integrate film and media studies with production.  A working filmmaker, he has produced a narrative feature, Dance With the One, and is currently directing a feature documentary on the mobile food movement.  He has also published articles in Velvet Light Trap, MediaScape and Spectator.

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Flipping German Cinema

 Film and Television, Group Projects, Social Media, Teaching with Technology  No Responses »
May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Karen R. Achberger
 St. Olaf College

 

Since 2007, educators are increasingly turning to a model of instruction called Flipped Learning where lectures and homework are reversed (or inverted): the lectures are viewed outside the classroom and homework assignments are done in class, usually in groups. In this decade of MOOCs (massive open online courses), the Khan Academy and other forums of online education, the advantages of “flipping the classroom” have been well documented [1] as the community of “Flipped Educators” continues to grow [2].

In the flipped learning model, information is conveyed to students efficiently and effectively through exported micro-lectures that can be viewed online at the students’ convenience, with the option of repeating, pausing, and freezing at will, thus obviating the need for extensive note-taking and eliminating the time loss due to technical glitches as a variety of media are seamlessly incorporated into easily digestible 5-10 minute bits of course content.

Presenting focused micro-lectures outside of class also frees up blocks of class time for higher-order student engagement with the course substance and critical methods of the discipline. Students collaborate creatively in small groups to solve problems, respond to questions, or compile evidence to support or refute claims made about the subject in question while the professor is available to move about the room and provide individualized feedback and guidance in response to each group’s ideas and questions. She has the ability to address the class from anywhere in the room and move from group to group, providing assistance or advice to individual students, learning teams, or the entire class. Students can also move around, either to share laptops, tablets, or other devices or to examine the work of other individuals or teams. They may work from multiple devices, sending content to projectors, or huddle near whiteboards, working out a plan or an analysis. Discussion is encouraged and often replaces explanation as the primary avenue to learning.

In the case of German Cinema, students have an opportunity to actively practice film criticism as they take a position on some of the more interesting questions and controversies of the discipline, gathering evidence from the films and their times to support their propositions. Teams of student film critics then debate one another on questions such as: Does the character Hutter exist as a separate individual, or is he part of the vampire Nosferatu? What elements of Murnau’s cinematography suggest the one or the other interpretation? Or, in examining the use of music in Germany’s first feature-length sound film, The Blue Angel, students are asked to uncover how the musical subtexts serve to characterize Lola Lola and Professor Unrat in a way radically different from that of the film’s narrative. They also examine how the music functions to foreshadow the protagonists’ eventual outcomes. Students are asked to gather evidence from the film and its times to support or refute the proposition that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), although ostensibly not a war film, is nothing if not a film about the Great War.

There are a number of ways to engage students creatively during the large blocks of class time freed up for active collaborative learning through the use of online lectures. My favorites have been those where students collaborate in small teams to support an argument with evidence from the films and their respective times, applying what they have been learning about the rhetoric of film and about Germany’s troublesome history in order to present their team’s position to the class and defend it together against opposing arguments. These class activities help students develop the ability on the one hand to collaborate and be a “team player” and on the other to make a good argument and support it with empirical evidence, two essential skills in today’s world, as our nation’s top organizations continue to model for us, from the teams of doctors at Mayo Clinic to the teams of statisticians at Google.

The following is a list of changes I have noticed in my flipped German Cinema classroom during the January 2014 Interim, along with some of the findings of flipped classroom studies reported online, with some overlap and in no particular order:

  • a shift from teacher-driven instruction to student-centered learning based on collaborative knowledge, discovery, and creation;
  • classroom is transformed into a group learning space;
  • students interact more in class;
  • more individual face-to-face time between student and professor;
  • students engage more deeply with content and practice skills;
  • students receive more feedback on their progress;
  • professors can devote more time to coaching students;
  • students get more help with procedural fluency if needed;
  • students become the agents of their own learning;
  • students take on more challenging projects;
  • students are more likely to ask for assistance;
  • more self-paced student learning;
  • more constant and positive interactions with teachers and peers during class;
  • more access to course materials and instruction;
  • more choice in how students demonstrate their learning;
  • more collaborative decision making with other students;
  • more engagement in critical thinking and problem solving;
  • more instructor attention to student interests, strengths and weaknesses;
  • a more democratized learning environment.

The “flipped classroom” may sometimes be likened to a “blended classroom” or a “MOOC.” Both models are becoming increasingly widespread in the academy and, like the flipped classroom, both serve to redefine and expand the group and individual learning spaces. “Blended learning” is the term generally used to designate the strategic combination of face-to-face and online learning experiences. Courses like the free MOOC offered by UCF and EDUCAUSE serve to assist faculty in designing blended courses and producing online materials for these. Blended courses, however, do not generally emphasize small-group collaboration on homework assignments during the class period. Similarly, the weekly online office hours, online tutorials, interactive user forums and group discussions included in some MOOCs are not comparable to the face-to-face interactions in the flipped classroom.

The interest in flipped classrooms, online lectures, screen-casting and the like at St. Olaf College does not appear to be a recent response to the proliferation of online courses and MOOCs. The move toward using technology as a pedagogical tool at St. Olaf seems rather to have predated the advent of MOOCs and online courses by over a decade. In 2001, the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) introduced the initiative “Teaching with Technology,” created a task force, and designated participating faculty as CILA associates. It became increasingly common for faculty to teach courses designed around digital materials available electronically online, initially course syllabi, readings and PowerPoint presentations.  The college continues to enhance its digital collections, especially in the humanities, as well as offer a number of “Let’s Get Digital” and “iPads in Teaching” workshops and Learning Communities focused on “MOOCs” and “Tools and Techniques for Online Learning.” To date, St. Olaf faculty have offered two Teaching and Technology Showcase presentations (in April 2013 and in May 2014), each with over 20 exhibits on a wide range of topics related to digital teaching and scholarship, from Moodle to MOOCs and beyond.

In keeping with national trends in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses, flipped classrooms at St. Olaf first appeared a few years ago in Chemistry and Statistics. Likewise, an eight-week ACM-funded pilot course first offered in summer 2013 involved online Calculus taught by faculty at St. Olaf and Macalester, not a MOOC, but a SPOC (small private online course). It is not surprising that evidence of the benefits of active learning over lecturing is strongest from the STEM courses.  A report in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the value of the flipped classroom focused on a Biology course and a recent meta-analysis of 225 studies of student performance in STEM courses provided strong evidence on the superior results of active learning over traditional lecturing, further validating educational models like the “flipped classroom.” In spite of the fact that student agency is nothing new, especially at liberal arts colleges, this kind of strong evidence on the different outcomes between active learning and lecturing is encouraging.

In an effort to move digital technology beyond the STEM disciplines, however, two recent Mellon Foundation grants have focused attention on the “Digital Humanities.” The Mellon Foundation “Tri-College Summer 2013 Digital Humanities Seed Grant” provided support for faculty at St. Olaf, Carleton and Macalester colleges to “use digital tools and methodologies to address questions and issues of interest to the humanities.” The funded projects focused on teaching, research, curricular development, or a combination of these areas. A few, like my German Cinema course, developed digital microlectures for flipped and online learning. While creating the digital lectures using ScreenFlow was initially the central focus of my project, flipping the classroom requires above all a new approach to teaching that promotes experiential learning and active student engagement in the classroom.

In late 2013, St. Olaf College received a four-year, $700,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for “Digital Humanities on the Hill,” to enhance research, teaching, and mentored undergraduate research in the humanities and related humanistic fields in the social sciences, fine arts and interdisciplinary programs through the use of digital technologies. In the case of “German Cinema,” this funding supports efforts during Summer 2014 to curate a collection of digital resources for students to better understand the German silent horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in the context of its times.

This digital collection will provide online access to authentic primary sources for students of German Cinema to use in their group and individual research projects. At the same time, students may also contribute to the digital collection themselves and thereby enlarge it through their own creations, e.g. translations, for those with adequate German proficiency, essays and critical commentaries or annotations of a source. As co-developers of materials, students play an active role in the production of knowledge and thereby serve to enlarge the collection by contributing additional resources for film scholars in future years.

Notes

[1] The University of Washington Library Guide provides extensive information about the flipped classroom. Edutopia lists five best practices for the flipped classroom model. The Chronicle piece made quite a splash when it appeared. The White Paper by Pearson lists the top motivations for higher education faculty to flip their courses. The New York Times‘ “Classroom lectures go digital” discusses flipped learning and online courses of Khan Academy. See also: Literature Review of flipped learning,  Dissertation 2012 weighing the efficacy of the flipped classroom model, and a recent meta-analysis of 225 studies shows “active learning increases student performance” in STEM courses.

[2] Since early 2012, the not-for-profit Flipped Learning Network™ (FLN), a free online community of “20,000 Flipped Educators,” serves to provide educators with the knowledge, skills, and resources to successfully implement the Flipped Learning model.

 

Works Cited

Berrett, Dan. “How ‘Flipping’ the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, accessed May 28, 2014.

http://chronicle.com/article/How-Flipping-the-Classroom/130857/

BlendKit 2014, a free five-week MOOC on Blended Learning, accessed May 28, 2014.  https://www.canvas.net/courses/becoming-a-blended-learning-designer

“Digital History: Teaching and Tools.” The University of Washington Library Guide, accessed May 28, 2014.  http://guides.lib.washington.edu/content.php?pid=477334&sid=3909645

Fitzpatrick, Michael. “Classroom Lectures Go Digital.” The New York Times, June 24, 2012, accessed May 28, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/us/25iht-educside25.html?_r=1&

“Flipped Learning in Higher Education.” Higher Education White Paper, accessed May 28, 2014.

http://flippedlearning.org/cms/lib07/VA01923112/Centricity/Domain/41/HigherEdWhitePaper FINAL.pdf

Flipped Learning Network, accessed May 28, 2014.

http://www.flippedlearning.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1

Freeman, Scott, Sarah L. Eddy, Miles McDonough, Michelle K. Smith, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Mary Pat Wenderoth. “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, accessed May 28, 2014.

http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/08/1319030111.DCSupplemental

Hamdan, Noora and Patrick McKnight. “A Review of Flipped Learning,” Flipped Learning Network 2013, accessed May 28, 2014.  http://flippedlearning.org/cms/lib07/VA01923112/Centricity/Domain/41/LitReview_FlippedLearning.pdf

Johnson, Lisa W. and Jeremy D. Renner. “Effect of the Flipped Classroom Model on a Secondary Computer Applications Course: Student and Teacher Perceptions, Questions and Student Achievement.” Dissertation University of Louisville, March 2012, accessed May 28, 2014. http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/05/08/1319030111.DCSupplemental

Miller, Andrew. “Five Best Practices for the Flipped Classroom.” Edutopia, accessed May 28, 2014.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-best-practices-andrew-miller?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+EdutopiaNewContent+%28Edutopia%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

“Teaching and Technology Showcase.” St. Olaf College, April 25, 2013, accessed May 28, 2014.

http://wp.stolaf.edu/it/teaching-technology-showcase-2

Topaz, Chad and Kristina Garrett, “Applied Calculus Online Course,” Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Summer 2013 and 2014, accessed May 28, 2014.  http://www.acm.edu/off_campus_study/Online_courses0/Applied_Calculus.html?utm_source=%2fcalculus&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=redirect

 

Karen R. Achberger, Professor of German at St Olaf College, teaches courses in German language, literature and cinema.  “Flipping” her German Cinema classroom was made possible through a 2013 Digital Humanities grant funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and “Contextualizing Caligari” will be supported through a 2014 Mellon Foundation grant for “Digital Humanities on the Hill.”  She is the author of two books and 27 articles on 20th century German writers, especially the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann. She has published two translations of stories by the East German writer Irmtraud Morgner and is currently completing an annotated translation of Bachmann’s critical writings for Camden House.

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Local Truths, Tactical Pedagogies: Documentary, Ethics, and Service Learning

 Creative Projects, Group Projects, Media Examples for the Classroom, Media Literacy, Media Production, Service Learning  No Responses »
May 312014
 
CJ_Final.indd Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
 Vol. 2(2) Spring 2014
 Chuck Tryon
 Fayetteville State University

 

This essay offers what was essentially a tactical response to both the devaluation of the liberal arts and the decline in funding for higher education. Specifically, I focus on how my colleagues and I redesigned Fayetteville State University’s (FSU) Introduction to Film and Visual Literacy course to respond to a changing technological, economic, and social landscape at FSU. To make sense of how to teach film and media in an era of declining resources, it is crucial to focus on the characteristics, needs, and even histories of the specific institutions involved. All colleges and universities face specific challenges and offer unique opportunities that may not be available elsewhere, making a tactical approach necessary.

FSU is a historically black university that has its origins as a normal school where students were trained to become teachers, most of them in liberal arts fields. This emphasis on teacher training resulted in our university’s film course being housed in the English Department because it was a requirement for North Carolina teachers, but this placement shapes how the course has fit into a wider curriculum, in part because students enter the course expecting training on how to use film and visual media in the high school classroom. Like many state colleges and universities, FSU faces significant budget cuts, especially to operating costs, a reduction in funding that was attributed to a declining economy. These challenges exist within a state political climate where the very value of a liberal arts education has been called into question. In interviews, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory has dismissed the value of liberal arts degrees and proposed that universities be funded not based on enrollment but on whether graduates can get jobs (Kiley 2013). While I am highly skeptical about this stance, both in terms of their value for promoting critical thinking skills and their ability to prepare students for a competitive work environment, it is well worth asking how liberal arts curricula can respond to this political and economic climate.

With that in mind, I began thinking rhetorically about how to reposition the course both in terms of my goals of promoting critical thinking skills and in terms of situating the liberal arts as a field that could prepare students for a wide variety of careers. Thus, rather than continuing to teach the class as a course focusing on the formal elements of film, I began thinking about how the study of film fits within a wider civic culture, one in which my students are or could be participants. As a result, I reframed the class to require that students not only study documentary storytelling but also to make their own documentaries as part of a service-learning project to ensure that students could use these critical thinking skills in a real-world context.

This effort to revise the Film and Visual Literacy course was based not only in statewide economic trends but also within a specific institutional context, informed by the work of education scholar George Kuh, in which high-impact practices, including service learning, were placed at a premium (Kuh 2008). Service learning is a practice that involves students performing community service as part of a graded assignment for a course. The project is something that is designed to meet specific community needs, and students are expected not only to engage in a community project but also to reflect on their experiences. Our university places tremendous emphasis on service learning because of the benefits to students, to the university itself, and to the wider community. Proponents have offered evidence that students who complete service-learning projects have higher retention rates, a major concern at FSU. For this reason, the service learning office had some funding available that could be dedicated to consumer-grade cameras and other tools, such as tripods, that may have been unavailable through other channels. Experiments with service learning and innovative uses of technology are also viewed favorably when it comes to promotion and tenure, even if there is relatively limited funding to support such projects.

Finally, the university’s core curriculum was changing dramatically. In the academic year 2012-13, I worked with colleagues in my department to significantly revamp our Film and Visual Literacy course to address this new core. Instead of a discipline-based model, students would now take core requirements that would provide them with various literacies or skills, such as information literacy, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and global literacy. One of the new requirements entailed taking a course in “ethics and civic engagement” (ETCE). Recognizing the important role that ethics plays in the documentary film, I saw this as a useful opportunity for providing students with a set of questions that would allow them to reflect on how documentary has been used to shape our interpretations of the world. Students would be expected to reflect on documentary both as consumers and producers of media. They would consider the ethical implications of specific filmmaking choices while also recognizing that films—including documentaries—can have a profound effect on the world.

As a result of these expectations, the course is structured around two major assignments: a five-page paper on documentary ethics and a five-minute documentary on a local community organization. To frame these assignments, the class would watch one documentary per week that could be used to address ethical issues, using Bill Nichols’ (2001, 13-15) formulation for describing how documentary filmmakers should treat both the people they film and the audience for the film: “I speak about them to you.” This formula, as many teachers of documentary will know, proves tremendously pliable in looking at everything from Morgan Spurlock’s condescending depiction of working-class people in Super Size Me (2004) to the playful manipulations of identity in Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). But in teaching these films, it’s also important to remind students that documentaries invariably entail some form of what John Grierson calls the “creative treatment of actuality” and that most documentary filmmakers should not be expected to maintain complete objectivity (Aufderheide 2007, 2-3), but instead are free to convey a point of view about the world.

In practice, these discussions of documentary ethics can grow out of relatively subtle directorial choices. One of the cases I invariably address is a key scene in Steve James’ Hoop Dreams (1994), the brilliant documentary that follows two Chicago as they pursue their goal of having a career in professional basketball. In one scene, Bo, the father of Arthur Agee, one of the two players, is seen in the background buying drugs while his son plays basketball on a playground nearby. As Nichols (11) points out, the filmmakers agonized over whether to include the scene, in part because of the risk of incriminating Bo legally or embarrassing the family. But the Agee family actually insisted the scene be included to show Bo’s struggles with drugs and his eventual recovery. This discussion often provokes further inquiry for many of my students, even those who might normally be reluctant to participate in class. Because Hoop Dreams taps into so many of my students’ concerns about the world—poverty, racial bias, competitive sports—many of them independently do further research on the experiences of the two teens at the center of the film and they are quick to recognize the film’s subtle politics.

Once students have begun reflecting on these ethical issues, I then introduce the documentary project. Each semester, my classes partner with a local community organization—in spring 2014, we worked with a local chapter of the American Red Cross—to document some of the services that organization provides. A representative from the organization will speak to my students early in the semester, and I then form groups of students. The first stage of the filmmaking process is a proposal, in which groups describe how they plan to make their film. My students and I discuss in detail how their filmmaking choices—even details like framing a shot or musical cues—might have ethical implications. I then provide students with several weeks to shoot their videos. Once they have finished filming, they are required to submit a rough cut of the film about twelve weeks into the semester. Both the community organization and I view the rough cut and make suggestions for changes. I then schedule a screening party for the last week of class, inviting not only members of the community but also department and college administrators, a technique that ensures students will feel an additional layer of accountability for their work. The project officially concludes with reflection papers written by each student about their experiences with the project.

Creating videos as part of a service-learning project is not new. However, this project functions as a calculated response to shifting institutional dynamics. It helps to provide students with professional and critical thinking skills that go well beyond video production. Students are required to craft memos and other professional documents with concrete audiences, giving them vital professional experience, and the final product—a short video—can have dramatic real-world consequences, a detail that ensures that students will reflect on the ethical nature of their interactions with the world, even when they are forced to come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems. In this sense, the course brings together two highly pertinent objectives for higher education in the liberal arts: it provides valuable professional experience even while ensuring that students must use critical thinking skills to produce a short documentary that depicts others respectfully and ensures that their stories are used in a meaningful way.

 

Works Cited

Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

“Definition of Service-Learning.” Colorado State University, n.d. http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/service_learning/definition.cfm.

Kiley, Kevin. “Another Liberal Arts Critic.” Inside Higher Ed, January 30, 2013. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/30/north-carolina-governor-joins-chorus-republicans-critical-liberal-arts#sthash.zriv2vRw.dpbs.

Kuh, George. “High-Impact Educational Practices.” Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

 

Chuck Tryon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Fayetteville State University.  His research focuses on the transformations of movie and television consumption in the era of digital delivery. He is the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (2009) and On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (2013), both from Rutgers University Press. He has also published essays in The Journal of Film and Video, Jump Cut, Popular Communication, and Screen, as well as the anthologies, Moving Data: The iPhone and My Media and Across the Screens: Science Fiction on Television and Film.

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New Approaches to Teaching World Cinema/ Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol. 2(1)

 Teaching Dossiers and Collections  No Responses »
Feb 032014
 

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New Approaches to Teaching World Cinema

Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol. 2(1) Winter 2014
Co-editors: Diane Carson and William Costanzo
 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction
William Costanzo and Diane Carson
 

At a time of accelerating globalization, when our students’ movies and their lives are increasingly shaped by transnational flows of media, politics, finance, technology, and cultural values, introducing them to world cinema is more important than ever. Yet the challenges facing us as teachers remain far-ranging and complex.

Which films, regions, periods, and movements should we focus on? What textbooks, paratexts, and other resources should we use? How should we address the problem of coverage in a one- or two- semester course? How do we overcome the obstacles of access, subtitles, or cultural differences? How can we best incorporate relevant issues reflected across time and countries? How can we adapt our courses to changes in the field? These are among the pressing problems foremost in our minds as we design a new syllabus or prepare to meet a class, yet they are often minimized or missing from our scholarly publications and conference presentations.

This dossier seeks to place such issues front and center. It highlights promising, innovative ideas from experienced teachers who take different approaches to world cinema, approaches that reflect significant developments in scholarship, pedagogy, theory, and current trends in global film production.

The essays offered here represent a range of theoretical perspectives, institutional settings, and course levels. The authors teach the gamut of students from general undergraduates to graduate film majors in schools ranging from Western Washington University to the University of the West Indies. Their pedagogies are grounded in the issues and debates that characterize our profession, pedagogies based on teaching films both from traditional canons and from the newest frontiers of global cinema.

What our six contributors share, among other beliefs, is a commitment to student-centered learning, to expanding their students’ film experiences, deepening their understanding of the world encompassed or excluded by the world’s cinematic texts, and giving them the wherewithal to make their own discoveries. It is no accident that so many of these essays cite Dudley Andrew’s term, “an atlas of world cinema,” which suggests an analogy between teachers and field guides: offering students different maps of the world, helping them trace the global flows, the crisscrossing paths of influence and power, furnishing them with exploratory tools rather than with encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain, inviting them to struggle with the unfamiliar instead of making everywhere feel just like home.

In the lead essay, Michael Talbott confronts a central problem of teaching world cinema with a simple but effective strategy. By placing a question mark at the end of his course title, he opens worlds of possibilities for those of us who have been struggling with contradictory texts, confused canons, and unwieldy syllabi. After a quick survey of colleges and textbooks that define world cinema in wildly different ways, he proposes an approach that makes this “terminological instability” the main subject for our students. He invites them to explore along with us the historical shifts in uses of the term, its various meanings around the world, and the factors that motivate these meanings. In this way, students learn that definitions of world cinema can depend on when, where, and why it is applied. Talbott describes practical classroom projects that accomplish these ambitious goals, projects that anchor students’ research in specific films, filmmakers, and movements while giving them far-ranging opportunities for building and testing broader theories. It is this focus on the questions surrounding “world cinema as a critical category” that gives “a continuous through-line to the course.”

Shekhar Deshpande and Meta Mazaj take up the challenges of balance and inclusion. What place in our curricula can we give to films that are overshadowed by the blockbusters dominating world markets? Deshpande and Mazaj begin with a clever and engaging use of Gravity (2013) to establish, in both literal and figurative terms, their argument about Hollywood’s global aspirations and those “muzzled other voices” represented by the Inuit fisherman whom Sandra Bullock briefly contacts from her troubled space station. A web-link gives us access to the fisherman’s perspective (a video made by the director’s son) that is obscured and eventually erased amid the big-effects adventure of an American astronaut in orbit. Their essay seeks to recover the muted voices by offering conceptual tools to help students map world cinema in all its dynamic complexity. Their three-point cinematic compass registers the many shifting centers of filmmaking activity, each with its own histories and cultural perspectives, while it measures the interplay of aesthetic movements and geopolitical orientations. Deshpande and Mazaj illustrate these intricate ideas with examples that many students will find engaging and provocative. Their links connect us to short videos like “Aningaaq” (the Inuit film), Caju and Castanha’s performance in Chacun son cinéma (a Brazilian send-up of the Cannes industry), and a Coen brothers short (a Texan watches a Turkish film, Climates, and finds “a helluva lot of truth in it”) that will enliven and enlighten almost any classroom.

Addressing “ideological problems of cultural imperialism and the attendant racial and cultural self-alienation of non-white peoples” at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Christopher Meir recenters “the traditionally American/Eurocentric cinematic canon at both the macro/curricular and micro/course design levels.” Resisting homogenizing tendencies “inherent in the design of omnibus ‘world cinema’ courses,” his university’s introductory film analysis courses validate non-western cinema by highlighting the aesthetic strategies as well as the social and political contexts of Caribbean cinema. Similarly, courses devoted to cinemas of Africa, India and Latin America “emphasize national and regional specificity.” This pedagogical enterprise offers an alternative to teaching “the ‘norm’ in individual classes and in terms of larger curricular design,” warning against ghettoizing non-European and non-American cinema as well as cautioning against monolithic treatment of non-western cinema.

By contrast, Jeffrey Middents, who teaches a single-semester “National Cinema Study” course, reevaluates his upper-level undergraduate course with an eye to including more research work.  “More interested in teaching a general methodological approach to national cinemas,” Middents solves the problem of ever-expanding content combined with the need for “more serious engagement with the research process” by shifting the “pedagogical approach back to student-centered learning.” “Applying different methodological and historical approaches to the cinema writ large,” illustrating his goals with his own approach to Mexican cinema, he guides students’ case studies with each student “gaining expertise in another country’s cinematic tradition” while also learning that “the research process itself for each country is unique.” This approach to national cinema leads students to discover “the intersections and disjunctions that make up the real cacophony of global filmmaking.”

Equally committed as our preceding authors to guiding students to recognize “the personal relevance of global films,” Matthew Holtmeier asks students to connect film content directly to a current event with “the larger goal of this assignment . . . to discover something new about what a student already knows through an unfamiliar global text.” His essay takes us through the four stages of his assignment, showing how students work to relate personal/cultural connections between their experiences and those depicted in a film. Through a specific example (and links to others), he details ways “the connection between the global film and the current event mutually enriches our understanding of both” while also communicating the contemporary relevance of texts to the students.

And finally, equally concerned with the cinematic representation of real events, Eralda Lameborshi uses a comparison/contrast approach, taking two films depicting the same historical moment in order to “emphasize the heterogeneity of the regions they narrate, and [to] complicate narratives by decentralizing dominant historical and cultural accounts and placing them in conversation with marginal ones.” She thereby urges students to “consider the positions of the audiences, the directors, and the producers,” knowing that there is “power in this ability to collect and reconstruct knowledge about histories and cultures, and it is crucial to analyze these junctures in world cinema classrooms.” Choosing director Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) and Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001), she illustrates Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading in the context of Eastern European film. Lameborshi’s strategy, and our other contributors’ approaches, transform the film studies classroom “into a space where humanities students can see the omissions and inclusions, the amplified and the voiceless, and thus, gain a better understanding of the stories films tell.”

All of our authors have been mindful of the benefits of electronic publication, especially the ability to leap with a mouse click to related texts in a variety of media. In this dossier, you’ll find many useful web links to film clips, scholarly articles, course syllabi, sample assignments, and popular websites. We believe that all teachers of world cinema can gain from the explorations and analyses modeled by our contributors, who urge us to reexamine our conceptions of the field, expand our visions, and strengthen our classroom practice.

Contributors

William Costanzo is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Film and has taught at Westchester Community College for more than forty-four years. A graduate of Columbia College and Columbia University, he has written six books on writing and film, including Great Films and How to Teach Them (NCTE, 2004) and The Writer’s Eye: Composition in the Multimedia Age (McGraw-Hill, 2007). Dr. Costanzo’s latest book, World Cinema Through Global Genres (2014), has just been published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Diane Carson is Professor Emerita at St. Louis Community College and past president of the University Film and Video Association. Her latest book, written with Cynthia Baron and Mark Bernard, is Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (Wayne State, 2014). She has contributed to and edited several anthologies on John Sayles, on acting, and on multicultural media. She has received the SCMS (2008) and the UFVA (2010) Pedagogy Awards for her commitment to teaching.

Shekhar Deshpande is Professor and Chair of the Media and Communication Department at Arcadia University, where he held the Frank and Evelyn Steinbrucker Endowed Chair from 2005-2008. He teaches a broad variety of courses in film theory and analysis, critical theory, cultural studies, and world cinema. His writings have appeared in Senses of Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, Seminar and Widescreen. He is the author of the forthcoming Anthology Film and World Cinema (Continuum, 2014), and co-author, with Meta Mazaj, of New World Cinema (forthcoming by Routledge, 2015).

Matthew Holtmeier is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Western Washington University. He received his PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, with a dissertation focusing on world cinema, contemporary political  movements, and the production of subjectivity in film. At Western, he teaches a  number of world cinema courses, such as Introduction to Film Studies with a  global component, Postwar Global Film, and World Cinemas and Contemporary  Political Movements. He is also currently developing an article that has been accepted for the anthology Teaching Transnational Cinema and Media: Politics and Pedagogy (editors Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett) titled, “Understanding  Context, Resisting Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing Transnational Relations,” with co-author Chelsea Wessels.

Eralda L. Lameborshi is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stephen F. Austin State University and a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University. Her work focuses on world cinema and post-1989 Eastern European film. Other areas of interest include film theory, postcolonial theory, and contemporary literatures of immigration, migration, and exile.

Meta Mazaj is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught world cinema in both large lecture classes and smaller seminars, and most of her courses in the history and theory of cinema include world cinema as either a primary focus or a component of the course. Her articles on Eastern European Cinema, Balkan cinema, “small” and marginal cinema have appeared in Cineaste, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination. She is the author of National and Cynicism in the Post-1990s Balkan Cinema (VDM Verlag, 2008); co-author, with Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford St. Martins, 2010); and co-author, with Shekhar Deshpande, of New World Cinema (forthcoming by Routledge, 2015).

Christopher Meir has taught Film Studies at UWI, St. Augustine since 2008, where he has taught Indian Cinema, designed the department’s courses in African Cinemas and Latin American Cinemas and helped to lead the curricular shift towards non-western cinemas. He has also published an article on film education in the Caribbean in The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas (Mette Hjort, ed., 2013) and written several forthcoming pieces on Indian and South African cinemas.  He is the author of Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts (2014, Manchester University Press), the co-editor of Beyond the Bottom-Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies (2014, Continuum).

Jeffrey Middents is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC, specifically focusing on late 20th Century Latin American fiction and film.  His film-oriented courses cover a wide range of concepts, including national cinemas, genre, the auteur, stardom, film criticism, and short films. His published scholarship includes the book Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru (Dartmouth, 2009) and essays on documentary aesthetics in Chile, Peruvian director Luis Llosa’s films made under producer Roger Corman, the concept of “Latin American Cinema” in the 21st century, and the racial complexities of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His current project is an auteur study of Mexican/transnational director Alfonso Cuarón.

Michael Talbott is a Lecturer in global cinema at the University of Vermont. He was previously an Adjunct Professor of Film Studies at Moorpark College and has regularly taught Contemporary World Cinema. Also a PhD Candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, his dissertation is titled Familiar Difference: Film Festivals, Film Funds and Contemporary World Cinema. He is the winner of a 2010 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Student Writing Award for his essay “A Global Language for World Cinema: The Twin Aesthetics of North-South Coproduction.”

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