Asking Questions First

abbyjean:

gratuitous picture of my experiences at school this semester.

I’m teaching a course right now that has a primary goal of “teaching collaborative media production,” and I’m faced with this exact problem. Thinking back to my own experiences as a student, I can honestly say that the split between my experience of these graphs was 50/50. I would, at the expense of killing the joke, say that in my experience, “trust no one” has a healthy quarter slice on the top graph rather than a graph to itself. And in some ways, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Media production has a somewhat unique position within academia — its industries mirror many institutional shifts in higher ed. More freelance labor with fewer full-time positions, more ruthlessness scrapping at the bottom of the totem poll, weakening unions, a constant expansion into corporate sectors in ways that don’t necessarily code “media production” (in the same way that the administration-ification of higher ed doesn’t necessarily code “research and learning”).

So one component of teaching collaboration in a media production pedagogy setting, especially if we’re being realistic about jobs jobs jobs, is learning how to hustle to save your butt. Can that fundamental reality of a brutal economic climate square with genuine collaboration?

In my experiences so far, I’ve been trying out my “spoonful of cynicism” idea — basically, a veneer of “gaming the system” may actually help students better understand, care about, and use what are actually the rules of the system. I’ve taught students how to “play the student card” in setting up shoots, which (I think) makes them feel empowered to do the realistic work of negotiating as a producer with some authority, even in institutional settings. I’ve taught fair use as an expression of their rights as users of copyrighted material, but insist on these rights being exercised thoughtfully to think critically about why we might (or might not) use copyrighted material in our work. I’ve had them read “post-network” TV theory by Amanda Lotz (a nicely accessible, but already horribly out-of-date, diagnosis of the state of contemporary television) and weaselly but to-the-point reality TV theory by reality producer Troy DeVolld.

The basic idea is connected to what some have called “code-switching,” or moving between two different modes of address (usually between “home” and “school” or “institution”). Lisa Delpit usefully frames code-switching as a response to a seeming refusal among many progressive educators and theorists to believe that students can walk and chew gum at the same time. That is, there’s a paternalistic (and patronizing) assumption at the core of much progressive education that when the voices of students who are outside of a normative culture (poor urban and rural students, students of color, etc.) are activated, those normative culture’s standards cannot also be activated simultaneously. Delpit argues this is demonstrably false, and that though there are specific practices that “hold back” certain learners according to their home culture (correcting spoken grammar compulsively despite its disconnection to students’ writing, say), this is not some fundamental rift between two modes of address (the “socially sanctioned” address and the dialect of the student).

What makes media production exciting right now is that most normative industry standards are breaking, or have broken, down, so that the kinds of skills that might be useful to students are most likely more foundational — the kinds of skills that we might conceivably teach all students, from K through college and beyond, to become better communicators, researchers, storytellers, problem-solvers, etc. What media production has going for it specifically is twofold: (1) there is an illusion, not entirely false, of industrial-strength tools and toys—though they may or may not be industry standard, there’s something about professional video and editing equipment that lends power to exercises in critical thinking and creativity; (2) media productions lead to concrete products that can and should be used in the world.

But this means that we’re not just preparing students to make high-quality products using powerful technology; we’re also preparing them for the world in which someone might care about what they make. And that requires a certain undercurrent (spoonful) of competition, improvisation, and (call it what you like) artful bullshitting. Producers are artists, team leaders, professionals. But they’re also salespeople, hucksters, performers.

My current theory, which I hope to work out a bit in my own teaching, is that teaching the latter set of skills as a non-negotiable component of collaborative media production might actually strengthen students’ abilities to work together. Otherwise what seems to happen is that a few key students learn the “rules of the game” at the expense of the lack of interest, lack of skills (which are often developed in high school settings long before college production enters the picture, putting some students at an immediate disadvantage), lack of understanding, or lack of confidence of other students.

Then these in-the-know students play the “real” game, becoming classroom leaders, securing internship opportunities, and going on to break into a very limited component of what remains of many media industries, while other students, without being told, are left to figure it out for themselves. Not only is that system deeply, intrinsically unfair, but it actually does a disservice to collaboration in the guise of creating an “equal playing field.” Pointing out the ways in which the playing field is inherently unequal is probably a more honest, and possibly a more effective way to help students figure out how to navigate it.

Is cynicism the right word? I think so — my most engaging pedagogy moments tend to have an implicit “truthbomb” in them, when I role-play (for instance) an uncaring jerk of a network executive, or structure an activity to ensure students are working within (arbitrary) limitations to stretch their creativity. The underlying message is, “it’s hard out here, and you need to be able to fake it a little to get by.”

In building students’ confidence in an unfair environment, it might be possible to have them enter a more realistic environment (in the field) without distorted perceptions of what to expect. And the next question for me, especially knowing that for many students statistically more likely not to make it to higher education very real cynicism about institutions and authority sets in by fourth grade (the start of the “achievement gap,” though for a more interpersonal lens, try Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods), is how (and how young) might you start to begin this kind of pedagogy — something that has been tracked more thoroughly in traditional literacy learning, I think, than in media production.