Intensive mode screen production: an Australian case study in designing university learning and teaching to mirror ‘real-world’ creative production processes

ABSTRACT

Since 2014 an experiment in the delivery of ‘intensive’ mode and ‘blended’ learning and teaching in screen production has been conducted at an Australian university. It was designed to investigate if a teaching situation that more closely approximates the intensity and urgency of ‘real-world’ screen-production was achievable and/or desirable in a university context more accustomed to a weekly tutorial and workshop model. Implications of this restructured ‘intensive’ teaching model on the student experience, and staff research-time are discussed in this paper. Five years after first being implemented, the project recently won a national teaching award and has been considered a pedagogical success. This paper also considers some limits to this success within the university context.

KEYWORDS:

• Screen production pedagogy
• intensive-mode teaching
• blended learning

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Correction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the work of Luke Robinson who provided a major service in collating the statistical data and assisting in reporting that was necessary to acquit the internal Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Grant that enabled this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tom Murray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9587-643X

Iqbal Barkat http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5304-1357

Karen Pearlman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5301-3882

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version

Notes

1 This project was conducted as part of a Macquarie University Teaching Delivery Grant, 2014.

2 Drawn from 2014 published Macquarie University Unit Guides for MAS212 and MAS213.

3 For both redesigned units, the intensive week was run in the first week of the two-week mid semester break; this follows the norm in Australia since units taught in intensive mode tend to be either offered in the breaks between semesters (Stead and Haddow 2009, 1–5) or in the mid-semester breaks (Curry, n.d., 1–3). There were some differences with respect to how the content was covered in the intensive week for the two redesigned units, and refinement of content continues in successive iterations of the units. Adjustments are made to the tasks, and also time allocated for the tasks, in order to continuously improve teaching and learning experiences, maximise efficiency in use of resources and in response to changing professional practices.

4 There were unfortunately some issues with the design and collection of the second redesigned unit’s ‘Post-Intensive Surveys’. After the ‘Post-Intensive Survey’ was completed a number of students on the unit contacted the convener of the course to say that they gave fours and fives in response to some of the questions because they thought it meant an ‘Agree’ or ‘Strongly Agree’. When the convener raised this issue with the student body she found that eight or so students believed that they might have filled in the survey incorrectly. There are nine ‘Post-Intensive Surveys’ with a high proportion of fours and fives. It is quite clear from the comments on five surveys that these fours and fives were supposed to be twos and ones (and vice versa). For the final tally these five surveys have had their responses inverted. There are four other surveys where it is too difficult to tell if a mistake has been made or not and the results of these four surveys have been kept as they are. The second redesigned unit’s ‘End of Semester Survey’ did not suffer from this confusion, so we are confident in the results it delivers. Therefore the end of semester survey is relied upon where possible, but discrepancies between the second redesigned unit’s ‘Post Intensive Survey’ and the ‘End of Semester’ survey could be open to many possible interpretations.

5 See caveat regarding the accuracy of the MAS213 Post-Intensive survey discussed in footnote #4.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded through a Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Grant with Dr Tom Murray as CI. IRIS Project ID: 9201400070.

Notes on contributors

Tom Murray

Dr Tom Murray is a documentary writer/director and lecturer. His research interests include voice and authorship in documentary, historical storytelling and colonialism, folklore, myth, decolonisation and anthropology. He has written on screen research practices for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Education and is writer/director of award-winning feature screen and audio documentaries including Dhakiyarr vs the King (2004), In My Father’s Country (2008), Love in our Own Time (2013), and Douglas Grant: The Skin of Others (2017).

Iqbal Barkat

Dr Iqbal Barkat is a digital artist and filmmaker. He lectures in screen production at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is a proponent and practitioner of community and participatory arts. He co-authored Screen Media Arts (OUP, 2009) which won the Tertiary Teaching and Learning Category at the Australian Publishing Awards. His project Terrorist/Apostate (2017/18), a hybrid theatre/digital media work that explores the outsider and Islam, has been performed at Parramatta Riverside Theatres and Blacktown Arts Centre in Western Sydney. He is currently working on a documentary film research project which explores a primary school community in Western Sydney.

Karen Pearlman

Dr Karen Pearlman writes, directs and edits screen productions. Her current research inquires in to feminist film histories, distributed cognition and creative process. Karen’s 2016 film, Woman with an Editing Bench, won the national ATOM Award for Best Short Fiction, the Australian Screen Editors’ Guild (ASE) Award for Best Editing in a Short and 6 other film festival awards. Her 2018 documentary After the Facts was also honoured with an ASE Award for Best Editing, after its premiere at the Sydney International Film Festival. In addition to a range of academic and journalistic publications, Karen is the author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing (Focal Press, 2nd Ed: 2016).

Luke Robinson

Luke Robinson is a PhD candidate in the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW (Australia), and a video artist working with Move in Pictures. He is the treasurer of the Sydney Screen Studies Network and teaches at UNSW, AFTRS and UTS. Luke has presented on teaching courses in film studies and is coediting two books, one on affect and sound and the other on Alfred Hitchcock. Luke's research interests are classical Hollywood film, film sound, theories and politics of visibility and invisibility, aesthetics and politics of fascism and film, and film studies pedagogy.