Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
Against the Global Right Vol 5 (1)
Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
“The educator also has the duty of not being neutral”
(Paulo Freire and Horton, 1990: 180).
I have never understood teaching to be neutral. When I began my masters program, my expectation was that my teaching would be political in content, that is, I would teach about feminism, about oppression, and about social justice movements, and I would weave these concerns into a variety of classes on different topics. In the subsequent two decades, I have certainly done such teaching, perhaps sometimes to the dismay of students who were not expecting to encounter critical race theory in their large “Introduction to Television” lecture class. But my journey through graduate school also reshaped my thoughts about the form of my teaching and laid the foundations for grappling with pedagogy beyond the level of content, a process that has only intensified for me as we increasingly confront the inadequacies of the managerial university in the face of accelerating rightwing authoritarianism around the globe.
My grappling with pedagogy’s form was inspired by the classes I took and those I taught as a graduate student in an underfunded, non-flagship public university. Working alongside others to design meaningful curricula for largely “non-traditional” undergraduates led me to the writings of the Brazilian activist, educator, and philosopher, Paulo Freire, whose vision of pedagogy has impacted my own in ways both subtle and overt ever since. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci and others, Freire crafted a theory of anti-authoritarian pedagogy, rejecting a “banking” model of education that positions the teacher as an expert dispensing information in favor of “reconciling the poles of the [teacher-student] contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (Freire, 2005: 72). He called for and practiced a pedagogy that met learners where they were, drawing from the contexts of their lived experiences, while also creating structures for the dialogic production of new knowledge. Our classes attempted to build upon our students’ everyday lives and to support student-centered learning while also engaging with works like Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class.
An experiential form of learning was also modeled in a graduate seminar I took that integrated feminist media theory and practice. Team taught by theorist Patricia Mellencamp and video artist Cecelia Condit, the course brought together “theory” students from the English department with film production students from the art school to encourage peer-to-peer learning and intense dialogue that reconfigured the “teacher-student contradiction” while engaging pressing political questions. Through this seminar, I came to understand that the hands-on processes of making and doing were critical to my understanding of feminist activism and to my production of theory. The class also demonstrated the labor and generosity involved in collaborations across difference, as students and teachers actively engaged in methods unfamiliar to them, learning from and teaching one another. We were integrating critique and making in an often-difficult process that was improved by this very difficulty, tipping toward the liberatory.
The courses I have taught during the last twenty years at USC are sometimes quite conventional in form, shaped as they are by the needs and pressures of the university. Still, I’ve carried the lessons gleaned from graduate school close to heart and began designing more experimental classes near the turn of the millenium, a process that accelerated following September 11, 2001. These experiments in pedagogical form began in small ways, incorporating peer-to-peer learning, substantive group work, and exercises in media production. The most atypical experiences sought to match course form to course content in very intentional ways. For instance, a small undergraduate class in “Digital Media and Learning” launched in 2007 asked students to co-create the course by planning readings, activities, and shared outcomes through collaborative dialogue, research, and debate. Beginning with the implicit question “What is education for?”, the seminar investigated various theories of education (from Maria Montessori and John Dewey to Freire and David Buckingham) that modeled constructivist or progressive educational practices. As they investigated different philosophies of learning and interrogated their own educational pasts, the students simultaneously evaluated and used various digital tools and platforms while working with an alternative public elementary school to support local teachers’ interests in integrating media production into their classrooms. The process was sometimes chaotic and messy but also generative. I saw my role in the class both as a facilitator who created a space for guided experimentation and also as a learner alongside the students as they introduced me to new tools, techniques, and modes of inquiry. Rather than framing the seminar as a “service” exercise that delivered knowledge or resources to others outside the university, the course asked students to investigate the varied purposes of education in a democracy by creating collaborative experiments in learning, by exploring education at multiple scales, and by questioning their own motivations for learning.
In the 2016 and 2017 fall terms, I utilized a similar method to develop a graduate seminar, “Activism in the Digital Age,” a class meant to directly engage our current political environment and to provide students with organizing and activist tools for use within and beyond the university. In merging form and content for this class, students both examined histories of activist media and undertook collaboratively conceived and designed activist projects. The course began with brief surveys of media activism in the second half of the twentieth century, including guerilla TV, AIDS activism, and early cyberfeminism while students simultaneously began to discuss possible topics and issues that might serve as the focus for the class’ efforts in organizing.
The syllabus originally planned for the exploration of four student-selected social issues, with different student groups leading each module. In the 2017 seminar, the course took shape as Donald Trump and his administration were moving to dismantle DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and, during our first few meetings, class members settled upon DACA and immigration as our singular focus for the term. This shift led us to jettison aspects of the original course syllabus, and students quickly embarked on a research phase seeking to learn more about DACA, sanctuary cities, and immigration policy. We also interviewed various groups on campus involved in providing support for those affected by changes in DACA and broader immigration policy shifts. While we initially thought we would stage a campaign to clarify and enhance USC’s role as a sanctuary campus, our conversations with DACA students and with USC faculty involved in the campus immigration clinic and task force refocused that idea. Our central action for the class became a campus media campaign in support of a permanent DREAM Center at USC. The campaign sought to motivate a range of USC students to contact the president and provost about the Center and to educate the broader campus about the issues at hand. The class produced a targeted media initiative with a dedicated website and social media accounts, fliers, stickers, and a short documentary, collectively framed as #FightOnforDACA, a play on USC’s sports mantra “Fight On.” The class members included seven MA, MFA, and PhD students from Cinema and Media Studies, Animation, English, and Communication. They came together with a diverse set of skills including web design, video production, research and writing expertise, and work on previous activist initiatives. We also benefitted greatly from our teaching assistant, Charlie Furman’s, organizing experience on numerous previous national and local campaigns.
This recounting makes the whole process sound easier and more seamless and successful than it actually was. Our cohort included no students directly affected by DACA (although some were international students). We argued about aspects big (Should DACA be our focus, particularly since its framework tended to reinforce a narrative of “good” vs “bad” immigrants? Who should we target with our proposed actions?) and small (Should we use the Trojan mascot in our campaign? What font looked best?) The pace of the class moved quickly, responding to shifts in both national politics and university policies. We launched the campaign near the end of term, having given perhaps too much time to our research, messaging, and creation phase and too little to our actual roll out which coincided with final exams. In the end, the campaign generated only a few hundred student letters and played only a small role in generating support for DACA students on campus. Nonetheless, I think the class was successful on some fronts. It created a space for students to stage an organizing campaign from beginning to end, while modeling a sustained and iterative exchange between the theories and praxis of activism. We continually cycled back and forth between practical and theoretical writings about social justice organizing and activist tactics, testing the claims of what we read through the sometimes rushed, sometimes tedious activities we were also undertaking. As we read together Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, we also experienced the feelings she describes as characteristic of undertaking diversity work within a university, a frustrating yet tangible process of “scratching at the surface, scratching the surface” (Ahmed, 2017: 138). We were very mindful that our push for institutional change could easily by coopted by the university’s bureaucracy and were also aware that the steps we were undertaking were imperfect at best, tiny scratches upon walls of indifference and institutional inaction. Nonetheless, we took inspiration from Freire’s observation that “Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope” (Freire, 2005: 92). As one student commented in a conversation after the course ended, “In a time when I often feel paralyzed about the state of the world and what I might do in it, the class helped me see that we must deliberately create shared if imperfect spaces for agency and change.” Pedagogy could have worse outcomes.
Course materials: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/ctcs585/index
#FightOnforDACA campaign site: https://fightonfordaca.org/
I offer my gratitude to the numerous students how have collaborated with me in these experiments in pedagogical form over many years. Particular thanks are due to my fellow travelers in the fall 2017 CTCS 585 class — Eli Dunn, Charlie Furman, Alex Hack, Sasha Kohan, Teddy Lance, Bill Russell, Paromita Sengupta, and Evan Tedlock — and the various USC faculty and IDEAS students who spoke with, advised, and helped educate us. Please see the online materials for more information. I also wish to acknowledge USC’s Media Arts + Practice Division, the FemTechNet collaboratory, Cathy Davidson, and Jentery Sayers for their own inspiring commitments to remaking pedagogy’s forms. Finally, I recognize that my experimentations with pedagogy derive in no small part from my privilege as a tenured professor able to teach small classes in a research university.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
Freire, Paulo Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Ramos. New York: Continuum Books, rev. edition 2005.
Freire, Paulo and Myles Horton. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Tara McPherson is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. The content of her courses varies widely, from “Stars and Celebrities” to “Television Theory” to “Learning in the Digital Age,” but all of her courses center issues of race, gender, and other vectors of difference. Her most recent writing about feminist pedagogy and activism appeared in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (edited by Jentery Sayers, Routledge University Press, 2018), while she reflects upon building practice-based and collaborative environments for learning and research in her contributions to Applied Media Studies (edited by Kirsten Ostherr, Routledge University Press, 2018.)
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