True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.
— Nikos Kazantzakis
I vividly remember, as a child, sneaking away my mother’s cassette recorder and making little “radio shows” with my brothers, talking about things that really only we cared about – friends, neighbors, family dramas. It’s the earliest that I can recall creating my own media. Since then I’ve had a bit of an obsession with it, for self-expression, sharing my thoughts and opinions with the rest of the world. Now, with the democratization of media access and lowered cost of equipment, anybody can purchase or borrow production equipment and make their own shows, podcasts, videos, films, magazines, and the like. I want to share my passion for media creation with students so they, in turn, can create their own means of self-expression and share that with the world. This is what I want students to ultimately walk away from my courses with: I want students to be cognizant of how the media functions, their responsibilities as media creators, and having the basic skill set to create their own media through an understanding of theory, composition, lighting, color, sound, and editing.
My role as a teacher, then, is to guide students to these skills and knowledge through their own exploration of media creation, theory, and literacy. I am not the wise sage standing in front of the classroom who is all-knowing and infallible. As an artist myself, I’m also always learning, and I consider myself to be more of a “traveler on the path” with them, who happens to have a little more knowledge and experience than they do. Students are, naturally, a varied bunch – some only need a bit of a push in the right direction, while others need significantly more guidance and reassurance. My role as that traveler is to make sure I’m assisting the students who need more of that counsel while also encouraging others with more confidence and skills to be focused and self-directed in their learning.
One of the best ways to cultivate this is through group work and learning. In Spring 2022, while teaching a basic video production course, I broke students into five groups that they stuck with over the semester. I tried to pair students new to media concepts and creation with students who have more of a background in the field so they can learn from each other as well as myself. Students were often sent outside the classroom to practice the equipment I was teaching them about – cameras, lighting equipment, audio equipment, and the like. I encouraged the more experienced students to guide the students who were newer, and for the newer students to “play” and be experimental with the equipment, knowing that if something went awry, they had people who could assist. I would stay in the classroom during this time, letting the students explore while being there to assist if something really bad happened, or if concepts were unclear. This gave my students a greater sense of autonomy, built their courage to use the equipment, and started to wean them away from always relying on me to solve their problems, increasing their self-sufficiency. In the field, students will not have access to me or their resources (particularly while shooting their final projects), and teaching them to help themselves (as well as learning how to learn) will greatly increase their chances of success in this discipline.
Another technique I consider useful is providing students with appropriate “buy-in”, or relevance to their lives. It isn’t enough to stress the importance of understanding media creation and literacy; students need to comprehend how these concepts fit into their personal perspectives.
A couple of years ago, I was an instructor assistant for a basic communications course, and I was walking the students through of a review for the cumulative final test. It dawned on me during the session that they weren’t quite understanding the concepts of semiotics coding. Luckily, this was also around the time that Childish Gambino’s This is America was released. I pulled up the music video, we all watched it together, and then I asked them to take a few moments to apply the concepts we learned in class to the symbology in the video. The expressions on their face made it abundantly clear to me that they were starting to understand – and this was because these abstract concepts were made clearer through something they were invested in. This taught me that students are eager and willing to learn, but traditional, teacher-centered approaches weren’t always the best solution and, in some cases, were actually more detrimental to learning. By shifting the focus to something the students were interested in, they picked up on the concepts quicker and incorporated them into their larger worldview.
To further elaborate on the above example, I incorporate clips from YouTube, as well as screening occasional full films as necessary, to explain points, encourage discussion, and learn skills through the application of media creation and theory through critique. Students get an opportunity to learn, once again, through their own vested interests, while it gives me an opportunity to connect to them through popular trends and films. This also provides them with valuable experiences of practicing critique and learning through the errors and successes of the filmmakers before them.
Through these experiences, I’ve also learned to shift my focus on assessment as well, using multiple modalities including group projects as mentioned earlier, replying to clips and films through an online discussion board, and scaffolding assignments to increase understanding of production skills.
I cannot ask students to create a short film without them first understanding how films are made and why they’re made using certain rules and concepts. I start them with a simple assignment at the beginning of the course – asking them to create a 1-2 minute video of their “typical day as a college student” – which serves as a means of assessing their current skill level and understanding of production. From there, assignments build on framing and composition, then a group workshop on lighting, an assignment on sound recording and production, and an assignment on editing. All of these provide a means of synthesizing and applying concepts learned through the course to their own work. Finally, the semester ends with a final film project that combines all of these concepts together in one assignment, allowing students to showcase their understanding of everything discussed during the semester. I firmly believe that scaffolding assignments in this way that leads to a capstone project allows the students the opportunity to think critically about media creation, consider how their work and use of techniques can influence audiences, and unify all aspects of the course in a way that makes sense to them.
I also enjoy building a rapport with my students, whenever possible, to understand what they enjoy, what makes them feel comfortable, and what they need or want to learn in order to succeed. This is introduced during the first day of class – I ask the students to pair into groups of two, interview each other, and then introduce them to me and their classmates. This allows all of us to begin to know each other, our motivations, and some of our backgrounds and likes. From there, I make a point to stress the importance of diverse thought and culture. Baked into my syllabus, and also discussed on day one, are the points that I will strive to do my best to use non-gendered language and preferred names as needed, and that they in turn will respect each other’s identities, race, body size, gender, and so on. I want my classroom to be a place where all students feel comfortable expressing themselves and their opinions without fear of isolation and judgment. At the mid-point of each semester, I also meet individually with students to ask them what they think of the course, if they have questions for me, and if there’s something they want to be covered (or reviewed) that we didn’t get around to discussing. This helps me tailor each semester just a little differently to meet the current needs of the students I have.
I’m also a big proponent of including diverse thought and media throughout the semester. I make a point to show clips and films from a variety of people and representations. During the Spring 2022 semester in my basic media course, for example, we watched Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Liev Schriber’s Everything is Illuminated, and Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar’s The Corporation. Each of these provides drastically different concepts, themes, and perspectives from a variety of cultures and people, and I believe it helped my students gain a better understanding of perspectives outside of their own, or what they’re normally exposed to.
As someone who both has white privilege and has a variety of disadvantages (I’m queer, visibly overweight, and disabled), I make it a point to ensure that students understand that they can be who they authentically are in my classroom, explore topics that excite and engage them, and get exposed to other ideas and values to better expand their own horizons. At the end of it all, my students will ideally understand media from both a global and personal perspective, as well as understand intimately how to create their own basic media projects to share their knowledge and ideas with the world. When students get to this stage, they become their own advocates for their experiences and troubles, and in turn, they could be the ones who begin to enact and influence widespread change.