Practice Pedagogies in Screen Media Practice Research and Education

This issue of Media Practice and Education is a joint issue with Screenworks, focused on Practice Pedagogy, co-edited with Lucy Leake, Plymouth College of Art. Screenworks is the online peer-reviewed publication of screen media practice research, supported by the Moving Image Research Group and the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England, UWE Bristol.

Pedagogy as a term has often been considered synonymous with the act of teaching – teaching styles, teaching methods, schemes of work and learning outcomes, but it is much more than this. Alexander explains ‘ … teaching is an act while pedagogy is both act and discourse’ (Hall, Murphy, and Soler 2008, 3). This definition of pedagogy allows praxis, the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, to become central to learning. Pedagogy essentially becomes a discourse. It is about working alongside students and/or colleagues in a way that allows lived experience to be at the heart of learning. Pedagogy is used here to describe an educational ethos that encourages co-created practice, learning through play, and learning from each other. It brings learning to life.

Our global call for practice asked for projects which responded to one or more key themes around practice pedagogy. These included:

• Pedagogy in Practice, and Pedagogy as Practice

• Pedagogy as risk-taking and experimental practice

• Action research ad learning with your learners

• New ways of knowing: Learning in the margins

• Learning through doing

• Practice-research led teaching and pedagogy feeding into research

Practice Pedagogy champions experiential learning, where practice is central. Teaching a subject specialism is just one aspect of this pedagogy, and the practice of that specialism, the practical tests, experiments and action research, the ‘learning by doing’, and the discourses arising from this, become key. This kind of pedagogy may ‘change the tutor’s role to be a “facilitator of learning” … [but the role of the tutor] is not diminished as a facilitator but remains powerfully educative’ (Orr and Shreeve 2018, 74). Practice pedagogy is grounded in collaborative enquiry, which can lead to individual confidence-building, creative risk-taking, and experimentation. A co-constructed curriculum can become an achievable reality for both student and teacher. ‘True co-construction of curriculum is a very sticky place to be for all participants but can be transformative. In this kind of co-construction the students make decisions about what and how subjects are studied as well as being active participants in learning’ (Orr and Shreeve 2018, 74).

What comes through all the practice research projects in this special edition is that practice pedagogy is a reflective practice. It is participatory and discursive, and allows students and teachers to learn from the experience. Without exception, the projects in this edition have set up a dialogue of exchange and collaboration among tutors, students, subjects and peers. The discourses entered into here support the theoretical assertion that knowledge is not found but constructed, and, particularly in these projects, is co-constructed in and through practice and discourse. As the collaborators in these projects took on the role of participants, co-constructors of knowledge, and co-learners, they created a space for real critical thinking, self-reflection and self-actualisation. Not only that, but there is a sense of real engagement coming through these projects. As Gauntlett observes ‘people are generally happier, more engaged with the world and more likely to develop and learn, when they are doing and making things for themselves, rather than having things done and made for them’ (Gauntlet 2018, 227).

From the selection of works published on the Screenworks version of the joint special issue, we are delighted to introduce our first submission, Playing With String by Rachael Jones and Charlie Fripp. This practice research project emerged as an experimental film, in response to a 60 second film challenge on the theme of ‘string’. The lecturer-practitioners took two days to make the film, and in their research statement, discuss the ways this has positively impacted their own teaching, and their understanding of the importance of learning through play. Their students, perhaps for the first time, could identify with their lecturers as actual filmmakers, and witnessed the strength of intuitive practice in play. Jones and Fripp question whether practice through play should be more formally recognised as integral to the curriculum, rather than existing in the margins, as it offers students the opportunity to develop reflective practice, and for lecturers and students to learn alongside each other.

Adrian Hickey’s submission Generation Animation used participatory action research to empower school children, facilitated by undergraduates and tutors, to co-create animations based on their own chosen articles from the UNICEF Rights of the Child convention. Giving children ownership of subject matter, character development and story, empowered their creativity, and offered an interesting insight into how the children made sense of their feelings about belonging, justice and friendship. The animations themselves offer a unique appreciation of how these children might understand their place in the world, and give an understanding of how they handle social relationships, and of their self-regulating behaviours. There has long been recognition that identity and practice are profoundly connected – Hickey’s project reinforces the idea that practice can allow us to know how and what it is to be a human being. Generation Animation encouraged a community of practice to help the children to negotiate their own identities, and offered genuine insight to tutors and parents.

The third Screenworks piece, The Born Free Generation, Phendulani’s Story and Me, sees the director Paul Cooke explore an arts-based development project that took place in South Afrika around ‘Safe Parks’ in Johannesburg. Cooke’s research statement analyses the film’s co-creation with its collaborator and subject, the young filmmaker Phendulani, and in so doing, deconstructs the relationship between filmmaker and subject. The film makes the process of participatory filmmaking explicit, drawing on self-reflexive practice and foregrounds the on-going ethical dilemmas that arise from this kind of collaborative project. In this artist-researcher-teacher role, Cooke has developed a number of participatory filmmaking projects, that use filmmaking as a powerful tool for social action.

Following on from this theme of the relationship between filmmaker and subject, A Spirit in Place: Jo O’Cleirigh and Lamorna Valley is a documentary project that saw Tilly Craig and Russell Cleave completely re-examine their own filmmaking practice, and how documentary filmmaking might be taught as an organic, participatory and reflexive practice. Commissioned to make a piece about renowned pagan Jo O’Cleirigh, and his friendship with British painter Ithell Colquhoun, the filmmakers soon realised that they would best serve their subject by allowing him to lead the discussion in his own way, through reflection on his past and a meander through his memories, drawing the viewer gently into his reverie, with minimal camera movement and artificiality of set. Allowing him agency in his own storytelling, shooting in his own environments, and avoiding any studio shoots, drew the filmmakers away from their usual methods, and gave their subject a sense of assurance, empowering him to speak freely about his life, and therefore allowing the filmmakers to capture a sense of authenticity that may have otherwise been missed.

The final Screenworks submission, The Ethics of Making is from filmmaker Pratap Rughani who has used his own film Justine (2013) as a case study for undergraduate and postgraduate students to examine questions around the ethics of making in creative practice. Using Justine as a starting point, Rughani has created and shared a website that can be used as a critical tool to examine the relationship between filmmaker and subject. In this case, he has focused on key areas of discourse around consent, particularly informed consent, responsibility, creative freedom, collaboration, and representation. These themes are presented as a series of questions and discussions that develop opportunities for real critical thinking for film, media and art students. The website is interactive and invites visitors to apply the methods of questioning presented here to their own creative thinking and arts practices.

The five Screenworks practice works are at http://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-10-2.

In the Media Practice and Education element of the special issue, we publish Steve Connolly’s Student and Teacher Perceptions of the Differences between 'Academic' and 'Vocational' Post-16 Media Courses, a study of teacher and student perceptions of the key differences in academic and vocational media courses in the UK, which addresses the polarised discourses around these two concepts, presented here as lenses through which students and teachers view very similar kinds of learning. Brad Gyori’s Reanimating 'Shelley's Heart': Breathing New Life into Locative Learning with Dual Process Design is a locative learning tool linked to the churchyard where Mary Shelley is buried along with the heart of her husband. The article we publish explores how the creation of Shelley’s Heart led to the development of three key dual process design strategies: ‘Match’, ‘Affect’ and ‘Prime’. Tom Murray, Iqbal Barkat and Karen Pearlman’s article, Intensive Mode Screen Production: an Australian Case Study in⁣ Designing University Learning and Teaching to Mirror ‘real-world’ Creative Production Processes, shares the outcomes of an ‘intensive’ mode and ‘blended’ learning and teaching intervention in screen production, conducted at an Australian university 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. Danai Mikelli’s VR Kaleidoscope: Reconfiguring Space and Place through⁣ Community-Based Media Literacy Interventions⁣ disseminates a community-based educational project involving young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in the creation of 360-degree films for Virtual Reality. The research sheds light on the technological, relational and experiential aspects of VR practice and aspires to prompt media educators, filmmakers and communities to collaborate using VR. In Using GMG's News Game as a Pedagogical Tool: Exploring Journalism Students' Framing Practices, ⁣Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman discusses the value of GMG’s News Game as a pedagogic tool, put to work to simultaneously analyse the framing practices of news texts produced by journalism students and to inform a discussion with the students of their framing practices in conjunction with lectures and seminars exploring framing theory.

Practice pedagogy is at the heart of creative education, and there are some incredible projects taking place in Screen and Media Practice Research and Education. Thank you to everyone who submitted projects and papers for consideration for this Screenworks and MPE joint publication.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.