Introduction

Introduction and overview

In this special issue our goal is to explore the ways in which the audio-visual essay transforms the relationship between screen theory and creative practice, and creates new learning and teaching encounters for teachers and students to engage with the moving image. By bringing together theory and practice, and teaching and research, the special edition intends to create a dynamic dialogue between them, enriching and extending the ways in which we together can think and make the world anew.

As the Journal of Media Practice and Education enters the end of its second decade, the audio-visual essay provides one example of how research and teaching have been ‘joined up’. In the editorial for the first issue of the journal John Adams asserts that, ‘It is in many ways surprising that the rich and diverse culture of practice-based media teaching has yet to give rise to an associated culture of joined-up research’ (2000, 3). The questions that guide this special edition are:

What kind of creative practice research does the audio-visual essay offer teachers, artists and scholars?

What lessons can be learnt from the history and development of practice-based teaching and research in tertiary and higher education for this emerging form?

What new perspectives and models does it present for contesting perceived divisions between those who make and those who think?

How may the audio-visual essay liberate our research and pedagogical practices?

What research and teaching limitations may the audio-visual essay engender?

Context

Recent journal issues of MPE attest to the current richness and diversity of the field of creative practice research and its vibrant relationship to learning and teaching. It is therefore surprising that there has been little discussion within this field of the development of the audio-visual essay as a teaching and research methodology. Early champions of the audio-visual essay for teaching and research: Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley and Jason Mittel, had largely published their work through books and articles prior to adopting videographic methods (see Grant 2019; Keathley 2012). The main journal for audio-visual essays, [in]Transition, attracts a majority of traditional-essay based scholars and reflection upon audio-visual essays has emphasised the alternatives they offer to written essays, over how they extend creative practice research in the classroom and beyond. The apparent scarcity of engagement with the audio-visual essay as a creative practice tool can perhaps be explained by abiding institutional divisions, which often separate off those who make and those who do (for historical background see Christie 2008), assigning to each different measurable outcomes for their scholarship and making it difficult to ‘join-up’ as a community of teachers and scholars. Such divisions are exacerbated first, by national policy directives that treat creative and scholarly research differently (see Adams and McDougall 2015), with the former often treated less favourably, and second, by a ‘gap’ that is perceived to exist between teachers and researchers in tertiary and higher education.

Nonetheless, the audio visual essay is being used increasingly in schools, colleges and universities, in the arts and humanities, as a rich and invigorating ‘non-standard form’ of course assessment and mode of creative and intellectual enquiry. In Victoria, Australia, for example, 6 of the leading universities have the audio-visual essay embedded in its curriculum, and schools teaching for the Media VCE tertiary qualification increasingly employ the video essay for coursework assessment. Similarly, the audio visual essay has become a central pillar in the way that film, television, and media scholars, in particular, publish their research since it allows one to:

Explore the ways in which digital technologies afford a new mode of carrying out and presenting film and moving image research. The full range of digital technologies now enables film and media scholars to write using the very materials that constitute their objects of study: moving images and sounds. (Grant 2014)

When teaching and researching the audio visual essay one brings into the same conjoined space, the coordinates of theory and the practice of making – very often offering one a radical or energised praxis with which to discover new things and to re-make classroom relationships.

Given these characteristics, the audio-visual essay would benefit greatly from being thought of akin to a ‘space for creative practice research’ which, as Batty and Berry put it, offers ‘a research space filled with constellations of connections, which serves as a vital incubator for risk taking, reflexivity and fearless critical thinking’ (2015, 181).

In this Special Edition we bring together leading video essay scholars to consider the impact of this practice-orientated research, and production-led teaching, on such factors as:

1. The relationship between critical and creative enquiry;

2. How the audio visual essay opens up new forms of cultural capital, for students, teachers, and/or researchers;

3. The role that the video essay has in challenging traditional forms of research, and of/or logocentric forms of assessment;

4. The way the video essay fosters critical and creative autonomy, utilising and extending a range of transferable life skills;

5. The challenges that the video essay offers researchers, and/or teachers in having this form of output legitimised within the academy, and/or the school and university curriculum.

The articles here emerge out of the Not Another Brick in the Wall: The Audio Visual Essay and Radical Pedagogy Symposium held at Monash University in November 2018. The symposium, which ran for two days, included speakers from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe and North America. Contributors explore the audio-visual essay across a range of contexts and from different critical and creative perspectives, and what binds and propels them forwards is a concern with the relationship between creativity and criticality, and their usefulness and importance within the teaching and research nexus. A number of the articles are drawn from empirical research conducted in the classroom, at tertiary and higher education level. Contributors also explore the question of radical or informed pedagogy, and how the ‘voice’ of the audio-visual essay opens up the learning experience to empowering and politicised experiences and agencies. We see how the audio-visual essay gives rise to new forms of productive research, giving the researcher and teacher new ways with which to deal with screen material and philosophical ideas.

The order of the articles creates a creative and critical journey: we start with Travis McKenzie’s audio-visual essay, employing the form that they believe liberates students at the school where they teach. Then in a cluster of three dialogical essays, Redmond and Tai; Potter, Grieve, Richardson, Robinson and Tuck; and Godfrey empirically explore how the audio-visual essay has been successful (or not) in their teaching and learning. Redmond and Tai, operating from different academic backgrounds, discuss the radical learning potential of the audio-video essay in relation to results they drew from research conducted with third year students studying a celebrity unit at Deakin University. Potter et al assess the effectiveness of the audio-visual essay as a learning tool with 2nd year chemistry students who took a mobile digital storytelling lab at Monash University. Godfrey reflects on the use of audio-visual essays as an assessment task in undergraduate Screen and Media studies at Flinders University, finding that it generated possibilities for future mentoring and collaboration between students.

Fowler joins up the practice-as-research that is regularly discussed in MPE journal with experimental, artistic and independent practices that are less frequently thought of in this way and academic audio-visual essays. The hinge they use is that of comparison, understood as a research and creative method through which they discover a new practice: the videographic diptych. D'Cruz's concern is with the viability of practice-as-research within higher education, making an argument that the audio-visual essay as a form can unsettle verities about the relationship between creative play and scholarly knowledge within a range of pedagogical institutions. de Bruyn closes the special issue with an exploratory trajectory. Through showing how their own audio-visual essay demonstrates the ‘constellations of connections’ (Batty and Berry 2015, 181) required for a more visually oriented form of critical thinking, they fashion a response to the proliferation of screens in our contemporary technological age.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Catherine Fowler is an Associate Professor in Film at Otago University, New Zealand. She is editor of The European Cinema Reader (Routledge, 2002), co-editor with Gillian Helfield of Representing the Rural: Space Place and Identity in Films about the Land (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and author of Sally Potter (2009). Her articles on artists’ moving images have been published in Miraj, Cinema Journal and Screen.

Sean Redmond is Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has been a media and screen educator for over 25 years, including being Chief Examiner of the NEAB A Level Media Studies syllabus (1999–2001) in the UK, which championed the â critical and creative autonomyâ of students. He is the author of 15 books, is a curator and installation artist, and guest edited (with Tessa Dwyer and Claire Perkins) an edition of the video essay journal, (In) Transition, on the Poetics of Eye Tracking: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/theme-week/2017/36/poetics-eye-tracking Seanâs video essay work, The Ear That Dreams: Eye Tracking Sound in the Moving Image, can be found here: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2017/09/07/ear-dreams-eye-tracking-sound-moving-image.