Mapping Contemporary Cinema: blending critical pedagogy and research-based learning in undergraduate curriculum design

ABSTRACT

This article describes a project titled Mapping Contemporary Cinema (MCC) that forms part of the final year undergraduate curriculum in a film studies programme at a UK Russell Group university. The project is a distinct and innovative synthesis of critical pedagogy with research-based learning and is here considered in the light of Gert Biesta’s educational thinking. The article first glosses the concepts of critical pedagogy and research-based learning, and how they relate to Biesta’s work. There follows a description of the setting up of the project and an account of its development and execution between 2011 and 2017; this description continues to call on Biesta and is interspersed with discussion of practical and theoretical issues stemming from the blending of the two approaches. The article concludes that critical pedagogy and research-based learning are complementary and share commonalities, especially a concern with generative learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• film studies
• research-based learning
• student research
• agency
• qualification
• socialization
• subjectification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The discipline remains successful. In the UK student numbers on film studies and related courses rose more than fivefold between 1997 (around 3,000) and 2007 (around 16,000), with 75 universities offering degree programmes in film studies by 2009.

2 For a fuller account of the development of the discipline see Grieveson and Wasson (2008), Polan (2007) and Bolas (2009).

3 For further details of the wider initiative see http://www.thinkingwriting.qmul.ac.uk/ideas/researchbasedapproach

4 There is a clear focus on Western cinema here, and the teaching of the modules acknowledges this, with discussion of the canon, identity and the politics of dominant cinema(s), a major component of a critical pedagogical approach. Following a number of new appointments, and a conscious effort to ‘de-colonialize’ the curriculum, in the near future MCC will also expand to include contemporary Indian cinema (with courses taught on this topic from 2016) and contemporary Chinese cinema (with courses taught from 2019).

5 Because of the slow process (with a minimum of two years, and often longer, for a piece of work to be produced and then move through the editorial board and be published on-line) at the time of writing the website still does not have any accounts of French films; reflecting the development of the project overall, the work published so far is primarily US with some accounts of German and Russian films now appearing.

6 We found correspondences with MCC and an initiative shared between the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the School for the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University, especially in the activation of the concept of critical pedagogy and the project’s re-appropriation of ‘entrepreneurialism’ to describe political engagement and student activism (see Lambert 2007, 53).

7 The short guides can be found here: http://www.mcc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/?category_name=short-guides.