Building our curricula

Among the most elemental of our choices in building a course is whose work we will invite students to consider. In cases where film and media complement an/other field/s, selecting audiovisual work for the classroom can be especially tricky. Neda Atanasoski (2016) emphasizes a fundamental difference, for instance, between film studies and feminist studies in how each discipline understands the notion of the transnational: “Whereas in film, the transnational predominantly signals certain thematic concentrations, formal and aesthetic characteristics, and political aspects of cinematic production, in feminist studies it primarily performs institutional and disciplining work […by suggesting] an implicit critique of the discipline’s prior omissions that can be corrected through curricular expansiveness” (219–220). Selecting diverse, non-hegemonic contexts of production may be enough to cover transnationality in the context of feminist studies, but in film studies, a full discussion would require a deeper dive into these contexts as well as patterns in form and theme. In such cases, we may feel an obligation to tread the potentially delicate ground where disciplines meet, as Atanasoski does, and there lies a common temptation to rely on this “curricular expansiveness” as a panacea for longstanding (if increasingly glaring) lacunae in course design. In film studies, the cultural weight of the canon also threatens to make immovable objects of some staple texts, although Girish Shambu (2018) sees this, too, more as a question of ideological mindset than of solemn duty to convention. He sees the predominant canon as “a partial representation of the world that remains silent about its own limitedness” and advocates for more “sophisticated attention to representation and ideology” that would recalibrate the field’s ingrained prioritization of formalism.

Representation to the point of parity—or beyond!—is one way to approach the question of what to study, but the will to include women’s filmmaking on our syllabi only raises further questions. Firstly, and maybe foremost among them: how to define “women”? For our conference, the organizing committee established a maximally inclusive understanding of women, encompassing trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, or any self-identification that would overlap with this category. In short, anyone who sees themselves or the object(s) of their scholarly focus as belonging to this group would be welcomed. The term “women’s filmmaking” also needs unpacking, as it could encompass films made by women—whether behind or in front of the camera—and/or films that target an audience made up predominantly of women. This, too, we opted to keep as wide open as our participants needed it to be, but submissions favored an understanding that centered filmmakers rather than audiences. For a time-limited event like a conference, casting a wide net in these ways has merit; however, a course is a different beast, spread out across multiple weeks with topics or subtopics that build meaning through juxtaposition, comparison, and accumulation. Managing this evolving meaning requires a long-term balancing act that must consider both the distinction and the possible fusion of categories like gender, sexuality, and race along unexpected lines. This was the theme of Tom Leitch’s (2021) conference presentation, “A Chorus of Silences: Teaching Women’s Cinema in the Context of Other Marginalized Cinemas,” in which he discussed how, for a new course, women were considered both in conjunction and in parallel with categories like queer cinema and national cinemas, finally and inevitably suggesting through the course’s very structure that such categories are always contingent.

There remains the option of not drawing any attention whatsoever to such taxonomies, just filling a syllabus with work by women and marginalized artists without pointing to this fact. To a degree, such surreptitious substitution can show how conventions have been applied, questioned, stretched, and reframed by folks left outside the traditional canon to make cinephilic conversation amongst themselves. Leaving the standards and standard-bearers behind also encourages a broader diversity of forms, no longer privileging the feature film at the expense of shorts, digital video, and other audiovisual texts and contexts. These forms have generally relied less on authorship discourses to make meaning, although Angela Martin (2003) has argued that our understanding of authorship and auteur status already changes when the filmmaker in question is a woman. So why not go full Barthes and kill off the concept entirely? Give contexts, not creators, the chance to frame discussion—this angle has appeal, especially if a course focuses on audiovisual form. Must we emphasize authorship at all?

With all due apologies to Barthes, despite its pitfalls, there is yet some life in the concept of the author. Janet Staiger (2003) insists that authorship – if not necessarily midcentury, original-formula auteurism – does matter, “especially to those in non-dominant positions” in society, including women (27). And indeed, looking at the global film industry, women have failed not only to dominate, but to achieve anything close to parity in any industrial category—and other marginalized groups have fared even worse (Simone 2021; Lauzen 2022). Navigating “non-dominant” social and industrial positions to create an audiovisual work and distribute it to the public is, in itself, no small feat; to downplay or bypass this remarkable achievement by dedicating primary or sole attention to its form risks neglecting the contextual understanding that a complete education should provide. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and George Yancy (2009) remind us that hooks advocated for “creative spaces” that “of course, are not readily given, especially to members of marginalized groups. Instead, they have to be made, demanded, or won” (7). Efforts to build creative spaces for women in film and media transcend the institutional boundaries of traditional education: activist groups like Collectif 50/50 and funding initiatives like The Future of Film is Female are working to close the gaps in representation and opportunity for women in screen media industries. These political movements, like the problems they have been set up to address, are at least as important to the contemporary film curriculum as aesthetic movements like neorealism or the late-20^th century indie boom. Understanding industrial history and current working conditions will matter immensely for young people hoping to launch their careers there, as Katie Bird makes clear in “young women filmmaker(s),” her video essay included in this issue. Diversifying the pool of creators will naturally pose challenges to existing concepts of authorship, as Staiger (2003) acknowledges through the concept of authorial creation as “technique of the self,” a definition that disposes of the old way of understanding authorship while “rescu[ing] the expression of the self as a viable, if contingent act—a potent one with real effects” both in film and in the world at large (49).

Ideally, what should emerge from any curated selection of texts – whether it’s a syllabus, or a festival program, an exhibited collection, or even the contents of a special collection like ours – is some articulation, however tentative or limited, of the relationship(s) between the margins and the center (wherever we pinpoint it) as well as the interrelationships among these marginal groups. At the macro level, this dynamic can play out within any given film, but a sense of social interconnection grows even stronger once it encircles the complex networks that produce media texts in the first place. In the classroom, hooks emphasizes, interpersonal relationships assume this role, and these relationships are a crucial ethical issue for critical pedagogy: these must be lateral, not hierarchical, and the ultimate goal is to honor the capacity of every invested individual to exist simultaneously as a teacher and a learner. Each person might then contribute to and draw from the collective effort according to their own unique, embodied perspective. As professionals running a classroom, one of the most difficult steps in creating such an environment is accepting our limitations—of knowledge, of our mental, physical, and emotional capacities—and making these visible to students when the situation calls for such acknowledgment. Importantly, Nathalia E. Jaramillo and Peter McLaren (2009) explain that the point of this is not to dominate the discourse nor to dwell on the personal, but rather to leverage each other’s perspective as “a means to move outside the immediacy of personal experience and into the realm of critical agency […to] put in motion new forms of generating and enacting knowledge for the betterment of the self and the collective.” (25) The ideal is for the individual and the group to work in tandem, seeing one another eye to eye so that they might collectively find new ways of seeing the world.

The elephant in this de-hierarchized classroom is assessment, which risks compromising a fully realized resistance to traditional, top-down instruction. Whatever the syllabus contains and however the classroom is run, at all levels of education most students are regularly and more or less rigorously sorted according to a determined standard of performance—that is, they are given grades. Although a growing chorus of educators has begun to challenge this expectation, for most public institutions, these grades, in turn, become metrics that bring a raft of consequential outcomes: institutional access to funding, especially from the state; individual access to higher education or job opportunities; and many other life-altering decisions imposed by external bureaucracies. In university contexts, assessment also cuts both ways, with standard practice including student evaluation of instruction that is often incorporated into hiring and promotion processes. Researchers have underscored myriad problems with student evaluation of university faculty, including discrimination according to race, gender, accented speech, and other factors linked more to a particular instructor than a style or outcome of instructional practice (Heffernan 2021). Such bigotry can target faculty at all ranks, but the cumulative effects of these negative comments can hit precarious instructors hardest of all. And, of course, teachers are not immune from prejudice vis-à-vis the students who enroll in their courses. Still, even with the sincerest personal intentions to confront our own biases and embrace alternative ways of relating to our students, the systematic demand for assessment, especially in the form of ranked grades, threatens to undermine progress towards a truly radical pedagogy.

While calls to abolish standardized course evaluations in universities have gone glaringly unheeded, there remains the possibility of ungrading as a means of equalizing classroom relationships. As a concept, ungrading has an established history (e.g., Ellison 1967), though it is not consistently understood as referring to (a) specific practice(s) (Blum 2020). Ungrading highlights the spirit of shared discovery cultivated through radical pedagogy, and it can emerge in different ways; it may be as simple as studying work that is new to both teacher and students, like a newly released film, or perhaps building in opportunities for peer review among students before the final submission of an assignment. The latest resurgence of academic interest in ungrading likely stems in no small part from the pedagogical contingencies of the covid-19 pandemic, as educators became more willing to experiment with pedagogical practice once so many entrenched, unquestioned habits already felt irrevocably upended (DiSalvo and Ross 2022: 13). Successful ungrading can change significantly from one discipline to another (Martin et. al 2021). What it looked like for DiSalvo and Ross (2022), who work in art history, was an expanded feedback matrix that included peer-to-peer evaluation as well as teacher-student communication; it also emphasized personal self-reflection, including self-grading, to measure progress within a given learning plan. These broad strategies could be readily adapted to media studies, given its similar balance between creative practice and historical-theoretical curricula—however, depending on administrative constraints, there may be no way around the requirement to provide, at least, a final letter grade as a capstone for the course (Leslie 2022: 2). The shape of our resistance to these systems will vary, and sharing different strategies may encourage others to take as much conscientious action as they can within their own institutional contexts.

About this collection

Every element in this three-part core of pedagogical praxis – what to study, how to run a class, and how to assess outcomes – stands to be reshaped by feminist principles. With the Teaching Women’s Filmmaking conference, we aimed to inspire and continue in-depth conversations about critical pedagogy that benefit participants in the short term while also looking towards better long-term visibility for the topic in media studies’ academic circles. Building on our 2020 Varda conference and its subsequent book project, the 2021 Teaching Women’s Filmmaking conference, in turn, inspired our 2022 iteration at Bilgi University, New Creative Praxis in Film and Television: Hybrid Futures of Gender Equality, with talks and panels that expanded hooks’s notion of creative spaces into the realm of praxis. These events, along with the communities that they have helped build, have centered personal experience as a source of meaningful reflections worth sharing with others, not least so that we might work collectively to refine and implement these ideas.

This dedicated special collection of Open Screens compiles five contributions that were presented at or inspired by the Teaching Women’s Filmmaking conference: three video essays and two articles, each addressing pedagogy in its own way. Among the video essays, Estrella Sendra’s study of gaze and sound techniques in Nadine Labaki’s Caramel (2007) forms a key part of the curriculum she uses to teach audiovisual sound, underscoring how form can suggest subversive readings of audiovisual texts. Recalling her own experiences as a film student, Katie Bird delves into The Souvenir (2019) and its production-focused paratexts in “young women filmmaker(s)” to examine how filmmaking is taught, a process that reveals the intended and unintended lessons that this pedagogy can contain for women learning the craft. The collaborative video essay “Teaching Nearby, Learning Nearby” was directly inspired by the conference, intended as a videographic capstone for the event. It borrows its title from Trinh Minh-ha, whose work Grant discussed at length in her keynote, and inspired by Bird’s video essay, it takes The Souvenir as an antithesis to hooks’s decentered, anti-hierarchical pedagogy while comparing it to the formal and informal learning depicted in another woman-led film released the same year: Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).

In her written contribution, Jolene Mairs Dyer applies the notion of a matrixial screen encounter to documentarian Kim Longinotto’s observational style and subject-centered approach, emphasizing how pairing this concept with this director is well suited to teaching alternative forms of documentary. In an overview of her course on film and architecture, Ekin Pınar looks at the interdisciplinary resonance of The Babadook (2014) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2015) for students enrolled in an architecture program, highlighting relationships between media, space, urbanism, and gender.

The path that has led to this collection was not fully straightforward. It involved retracing some steps to chart unfamiliar territory more fully, trying novel ways to process the knowledge and experiences shared at the conference and, finally, honoring our impulse to carry it forward. This led directly to “Teaching Nearby, Learning Nearby,” which we created as a collective of four – Feride Çiçekoğlu, Melisa Önel, Fetullah Solhan, and Colleen Kennedy-Karpat – each bringing different personal and professional capacities to the project. The resulting video essay combines the academic with the practical, and this diversity of input means that the end result surpasses what any of us might have accomplished alone. The films in the video essay certainly show the power of learning from others, and for us, making the video essay demonstrated the value of collaboration and resilience in carving out a creative space dedicated to teaching and learning.

The conversations about pedagogical praxis that begun with our conference continue in this special collection, which we are proud to share with the readers of Open Screens. We send our warmest thanks to the editorial team for this opportunity and to all our contributors for seeing their work through to this stage. And we invite more voices to join in—wherever and however they can—so that film and media studies can rise to the challenges of incorporating radical feminist pedagogy anywhere our teaching and learning may take us.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.