JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (3)
Not Another Brick in the Wall: The Audiovisual Essay and Radical Pedagogy
Vincent Longo
What does it mean to be a radical audiovisual essayist, pedagogue, and educator? Within the field of media studies, the radical aspect of this audiovisual mode is often portrayed as its promised disruption of traditional rhetoric and form, emphasizing logo-centrism, explanation, and argument—elements most commonly associated with writing pedagogy and the field of English. However, no matter where one stands on the poeticism versus explanatory debate, anchoring audiovisual essay pedagogy in the modes of argument and teaching resources supplied by English and writing studies should not necessarily be seen as anti-radical nor even antithetical or antagonistic. In fact, multimodal composition—a subfield of writing studies and English—has nearly identical aims to the audiovisual essay in media studies. Multimodal composition seeks to use style, form, and multiple media to produce scholarship that is not reproducible in print form (Kairos Style Guide). The only crucial difference between our fields is that our object of creation and study here—the audiovisual essay—is only one type of multi-modal text, which also includes blogs, social media, PowerPoint, website design, and printed media (Silver 2019, 220).
Embracing the similarities between multimodal composition and the audiovisual essay allows audiovisual educators to draw upon multimodal composition research, which provides assessment models that do not simply expand text-based assessments into different media or rhetorical situations (Gallagher 2014; Penrod 2005; Sorapure 2006), as well as models for understanding how multimodal composition skills transfer into other disciplines and classes (VanKooten 2016).
Multimodal scholars have also conducted revealing longitudinal studies. Because the institutionalization of audiovisual essays as a widespread form of assessment is ongoing and typically implemented in only a few classes at any particular university, the field of media studies lacks the ability to trace students’ development as multimedia composers through different classes and their university tenure. However, this is not the case with multimodal writing, as one such study by Naomi Silver reveals. Part of a larger, six-year study conducted at the University of Michigan that traced the development of 169 undergraduate student writers from 47 majors before, during, and after university training using surveys, interviews, e-portfolios, and thousands of pieces of writing, Silver’s study analyzed the means by which students become multimodal composers by examining multimedia e-portfolios (Gere 2019, 10–13; Silver 2019, 240). One of Silver’s conclusions is particularly critical for audiovisual pedagogy and assignment design. Silver notes that asking students to change modes/media can lead to rhetorical regression. Her research indicates that students who demonstrate fairly advanced rhetorical awareness and usage in traditional writing demonstrate only early stages of rhetoric and argumentation when designing e-portfolios. This regression occurs even with students who explicitly acknowledge the argumentative possibilities and roles of multimedia in their interviews (Silver 2019, 233).
This finding suggests—as Silver notes—that metacognitive development and composition skills often develop unevenly. On the level of pedagogy and assignment design, however, I would argue that it also demonstrates the need for educators to explicitly facilitate students’ thinking about the connections between form, content, and argument, since they will largely not enact the affordances of their chosen medium/media in service of their argument even if they are hypothetically cognizant of its potential. While other researchers have suggested non-argumentative editing exercises for neophytes to consider the possible effects created by the audiovisual form, such approaches crucially disconnect form from the rhetorical situation (Keathley and Mittell 2016, 6).
This essay outlines the pedagogical design and learning goals of an assignment used in a large lecture class at the University of Michigan to facilitate explicit student consideration of audiovisual essays’ radical argumentative potential. My hope is that educators will be able to incorporate this assignment—or adapt several components of its design and learning goals—into their own classes.
Course Overview
The motif assignment is part of the 100-level media analysis course Introduction to Film, Television, and Media (previously known as Art of Film), which acts as the gateway course to the titular major at the University of Michigan. One hundred to 250 students enroll in FTVM 150 each semester, 20% of whom become media majors. Since 2017, the course has three required, major audiovisual assignments. The first two assignments help build the technical, conceptual, and rhetorical skills needed to complete the third assignment, which is a capstone project. The students’ capstone projects then compete in a public end-of-semester festival.
The course assignments are designed to decenter issues of medium specificity and champion the applicability and transferability of audiovisual literacy to multi-disciplinary students (Longo 2019). In other words, we use the form to teach, reinforce, and ideally (though not necessarily) expand students’ understanding of the conventions of college-level humanities argumentation and communication. This adaptable, not radical, model is based on written scripts and encourages, but largely does not require, students to break away from purely written methods and consider the argumentative place of form and image. Each of the three assignments are thesis-based, and require students to produce an original argument about a media text shown in class. Students create these arguments first as written scripts, which for the first assignment and capstone project resemble a traditional essay, whereas the motif assignment’s script resembles an outline that can be audiovisually adapted. (Document 1 and Document 2 show two standard “scripts” for the first and capstone visual assignments.) In each case, form is never assessed in isolation of its role in the argument (Document 3).
FTVM 150 is deliberately designed as a gateway into audiovisual scholarship for students of all backgrounds and skills; students can develop as rhetoricians who scratch the surface of the audiovisual medium’s possibilities, while more advanced, risk-taking students can attempt to radically decenter traditional argumentation and explanation.
The Motif Assignment
The motif assignment is most explicitly geared toward students’ exploration of the creative and poetic possibilities of audiovisual form. (Document 4). The assignment asks students to make an original argument about the impact of a specific motif with regard to issues of identity (defined broadly) in a text screened for class, accounting for several imposed rhetorical and stylistic requirements. In slight but productive contrast to the course’s overall mantra, form-based argumentation is required and imposed by the assignment design as follows.
First, the audiovisual assignment requires that all verbal explanation, argumentation, and annotation occur as on-screen text. Students are asked to begin their essays with a clear and concise thesis, which can contain as many words as necessary. For the remainder of their work, however, students are limited to no more than seven on-screen words at a time and are encouraged to use less. Students must also include an epigraph consisting of a short quote from the media text, which thematically highlights their argument. This element was adapted from an excellent assignment by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell (2016, 20–1). Before working in the video editor, the students create an outline which begins with a draft thesis and then details their main points and evidence along with their plan to produce their argument audiovisually. (Document 5 shows a student’s highly detailed, visual outline for the motif assignment. The last page describes his draft thesis.)
The seven-word requirement is somewhat arbitrary though practical and pedagogical. The idea was that the limit be shorter than the average sentence (some estimate 12–17 words) to disrupt a typical dependence on explanation. A similar effect could be created with larger or smaller counts though one too large would allow students to simply transcribe their essays onscreen and would be difficult for viewers to read. If sentences are too short, students lose the opportunity to consider and experiment with making meaning from the combination and juxtaposition of verbal explanation, image, sound, and especially the placement, timing, font, and frequency of text. The goal is to decenter explanation rather than remove it completely. Eliminating explanation runs the risk of students treating this assignment like a technical exercise or, at worst, an unwinnable way to produce an argument, since they believe overwhelmingly that audiovisual media functions as technical polish and argument supplement (Silver 2019, 231–3; Longo 2019, 10–11). Limiting the words provides the students with a familiar mode of communication from which to build until they further develop as audiovisual essayists (and multimodalists) by continually grappling with the radical possibilities of the form.
To similar effect, creating an outline first is designed to reinforce certain elements of the written essay, while helping students simultaneously consider the relationship between words, images, and audio. The outline dictates a clear classical essay structure in the development of students’ audiovisual work—beginning with the introduction and thesis and ending with a conclusion. Conversely, though I have argued elsewhere for the benefit of having students adapt written essays into audiovisual pieces, the outline provides the experience of “hybrid-style” production (Longo 2019, 7–8). Most often used by more advanced practitioners, producing an audiovisual work in a hybrid-style involves determining point-by-point and section-by-section how the best combination of words, images, and audio demonstrates their argument. By using the minimal outline, students cannot simply map audiovisual content onto their written text (or vice-versa) and must grapple with this advanced approach.
The last requirement is perhaps the most challenging because their choice of motif indirectly dictates the pacing and audiovisual construction of their essay. Students must include footage of every instance of their motif—no matter if it appears three times or three thousand times—though each example need not be equally addressed. This limitation affects not only the students’ choice of clips, but also their pacing, editing, and choice of visual effects. Producing a ninety-second to three-minute video about a motif that only appears in three crucial scenes, for example, would require students to include other footage to fill the time, or, among other choices, slow the clips to analyze them in detail. Conversely, a motif appearing several hundred times would require a combination of fast-paced editing and multi-screen.
While this assignment dictates student consideration of and experimentation with the technical, temporal, and aesthetic qualities of the medium, it is also designed to teach audiovisual research and rhetorical strategies. Focusing on motifs not only emphasizes the concept’s general importance in media analysis, but is also a strategy to encourage close, repeated viewing within a video editor. Since a portion of the assignment grade is determined by the inclusion of all motif instances, students must view the text carefully several times and edit together each clip, allowing them to continually consider their motif’s role within media text. Conducting this collection within the editing system also demonstrates its capacity as a research tool for inspecting and manipulating clips and juxtaposing evidence typically separated within the media example. Lastly, requiring all instances of the motif has a rhetorical effect by demanding that students address outliers and demonstrate that the argument accounts for every instance in the text and is not a misleading sampling.
The motif assignment successfully requires students to build their technical skills and consider the argumentative and aesthetic role of the audiovisual medium. As evidence of this, I present here two student essays, one by math and physics major Jakob Sheridan and another by FTVM major Lia Baldori. Despite greatly divergent reliance on text and explanation, both are exemplary models of this assignment and more generally provide strong models of the audiovisual form’s argumentative possibilities.
Producing publishable work like this is neither the benchmark of an “A” nor the goal of the course, which is to develop students as media analysts and audiovisual essayists. Thus, if we aim to use the audiovisual essay form as a method for developing student audiovisual literacy rather than only as a form of assessment for other learning goals (e.g. media history or analysis), media studies must take at least two actions.
First, we must properly scaffold our assignments. It is especially crucial that this “radical” essay be the second assignment in the course, and, more broadly, not represent the ideal or only method of audiovisual essay construction. Videos with complicated, poetic construction disadvantage technically nascent students who need time to develop editing and analytical skills. Making this the second assignment allows students a low-stakes opportunity to explore new argumentative, research, and presentational methodologies that may not be suitable for their current skills, knowledge, or argument. The capstone project, in contrast, is open to all types of arguments and audiovisual construction because students need to learn to assess the best methods for their skills, knowledge, argument, audience, and medium.
Second, audiovisual essays must become repeated, revised, and required assignments spread across a class (and many different classes) rather than a one off or optional assignment. This will require educators and institutions to assign the form more frequently and build resources and infrastructure for scholars both in and outside of media studies to capably and responsibly assign audiovisual essays. Only then will the form become more prevalent across curricula and at every stage of the university. Only then can measurable student development occur that we can study and trace longitudinally.
References
Gallagher, Chris W. 2014. “Staging Encounters: Assessing the Performance of Context in Students’ Multi- modal Writing.” Computers and Composition 31 (March): 1–12.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. 2019. “Introduction.” In Developing Writers in Higher Education: A Longitudinal Study, edited by Anne Ruggles Gere, 1–20. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kairos, n.d. “Kairos Style Guide.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Accessed July 17, 2019. http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/styleguide.html.
Keathley, Christian and Jason Mittell. 2016. “Teaching and Learning the Tools of Videographic Criticism.” In The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, edited by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, 3–23. Montreal: Caboose.
Longo, Vincent. 2019. “Essay Production as Media Production: Methodologies for Creating and Teaching Audiovisual Essays.” Screen 60 (3): 1–12.
Penrod, Diane. 2005. Composition in Convergence: The Impact of New Media on Writing Assessment. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Silver, Naomi. 2019. “‘My Writing Writing’: Student Conceptions of Writing and Self-Perceptions of Multimodal Compositional Development.” In Developing Writers in Higher Education: A Longitudinal Study, edited by Anne Ruggles Gere, 217–46. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Sorapure, Madeleine. 2006. “Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions.” Kairos 10, no.2 (Winter). Accessed July 17, 2019. kairos.technorhetoric.net/10.2/binder2.html?coverweb/sorapure/index.html
VanKooten, Crystal. 2016. “Identifying Components of Meta-Awareness about Composition: Toward a Theory and Methodology for Writing Studies.” Composition Forum 33 (Spring). Accessed July 17, 2019. compositionforum.com/issue/33/meta-awareness.php.
Vincent Longo is a Doctoral Candidate in Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He received the University’s Outstanding Research Mentor (2017) and Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (2018) awards for his work teaching audiovisual essays and archival research to undergraduate students. In addition to other published and forthcoming work about multimedia theater, New Hollywood authorship, and archival studies, he has published another essay on audiovisual pedagogy in Screen. His dissertation explores the role live performance in large metropolitan movie theaters played in shaping celebrity culture, the norms of spectatorship, and film production during the Hollywood studio era.
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