A case study in the use of audio-visual essays for university screen and media assessment

ABSTRACT

This article critically reflects on the use of audio-visual essays for assessment in undergraduate Screen and Media courses at Flinders University. Since 2018, audio-visual essays have been set as an optional assessment task in first-year and upper level units. In 2019, an audio-visual essay was set as a compulsory assessment item in the first-year course SCME1000 Film Form and Analysis. This was supported with a student-run audio-visual essay lab, in which upper-level Screen and Media students and recent graduates instructed first-year students in basic editing techniques for the audio-visual essay. These labs provided an opportunity for skilled upper-level students and recent graduates to engage with the first-year cohort, impart their skills, model good practice, and generated possibilities for future mentoring and collaboration. Students and demonstrators were subsequently surveyed and interviewed to reflect on the value of their experience working with audio-visual essays. Drawing on this data set, the assessment of the students’ audio-visual essays is charted against the unit of study’s stated educational aims and expected learning outcomes. In the process, this article considers the value of using audio-visual essays when designing assessment for a large, mixed cohort of students with diverse learning styles, skillsets, and professional ambitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Audio-visual essay
• video editing
• university film studies
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Nicholas Godfrey is Lecturer in Screen and Media at Flinders University, where he teaches courses on film history, media industries, and film aesthetics. He is the author of The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers UP, 2018).

Notes

1 While we would, of course, have preferred a 100% submission rate, the 85% figure aligns generally with the average national attrition rate of 20% circa 2017 (Australian Government 2017, 19).

2 Indeed, our weekly readings in Film Form and Analysis are taken from Bordwell, Thompson and Smith’s Film Art: An Introduction. We find it useful to give students a grounding in the terminology and methodology of neo-formalist film analysis before introducing other modes of critical, theoretical and historical analysis in later units. The audio-visual essay produced for the Criterion Collection on A Man Escaped (1956) has proved a useful reference point for students as they prepare their own audio-visual essays (Bordwell, Thompson, and Smith 2020; Criterion Collection 2013).