Month: November 2019

Integrating Filmic Analysis in Composition

ewprog on

Ryan Youell presented at Teacher Talk a series of resources and insights exploring how to integrate film and filmic analysis into the composition classroom. The resources provided below can be used in any composition classroom (111, 131, 182, etc…) and can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.

Where do I start?

Just as picking an essay or book for your class requires extra planning, the same is true when it comes to picking a film to incorporate into your class. “Think about authorship,” Ryan told me as during the Teacher Talk, “select films that are in conversation with previous or upcoming lessons.” In addition to this advice, we talked about how film selection requires careful consideration of who’s voice is being highlighted, both for those actors/actresses in the film, but also the director/writer. Ryan provided a curated list of the most useful texts he’s found while teaching filmic analysis as well as a list of film terminology. Both of which can be downloaded here – Film Terminology    /   Filmic Analysis Readings

Staging Filmic Analysis in your Classroom

Incorporating film into your classroom can help change up your sequences and introduce students to viewing texts and composition in new ways. Whether you want your students to dig into the mis-en-scene, a shot-by-shot analysis, or looking at how the film is constructing an argument as a whole, filmic analysis offers a diverse and flexible series of teaching opportunities. Ryan has provided two scene analysis examples that he uses in his classroom. The first exercise seeks to build a student’s analytical eye, requiring them to apply the various film terminology and awareness of how a single shot is put together to create an inventory of ideas. The second exercise builds from the first, asking students to use their inventory to consider how the scene they’ve picked is relevant to the film as a whole. This work also helps challenge students to move away from visual summary, which Ryan has found to be a common and resilient practice.

Following this, Ryan supplied a examples of students’ close reading and two major assignments that he’s used in his class. These assignments bring together the work done in the first two exercises, putting the students in conversation with author bell hook’s writings about the film and the film itself.

Download the exercises here – Scene Analysis Excerises

Download the major assignments here – Major Assignment Examples

Thank you to the workshop participants and facilitators who were a part of Teacher Talk and special thanks to Ryan Youell for curating these resources for use by the Teacher Talk and the Expository Writing Program. Teacher Talk is hosted by the Expository Writing Program’s Critical Classroom Series. Critical Classrooms is a workshop series and teaching endorsement available to graduate instructors.

Anti-Racist Pedagogy Workshop

ewprog on

by Belle Kim

In this post, I want to share a workshop I led in 2017 following Trump’s election and the ensuing, urgent call for more active conversations and mobilizations within our department and program around issues of race, equity, access, power, and critical pedagogy. I’m attaching a detailed description of the workshop along with materials used in the hopes that we as a program will return to and take up the questions raised below again and again in productive ways that lead to substantial, material, and institutional change.

ENGLISH 131 POST-ELECTION WORKSHOP
“All presidents have been destroyers.” – #StandingRock

The purpose of this workshop is to (1) think and strategize together on developing a critical antiracist pedagogical practice that reflects our commitments and investments as scholars and activists; (2) develop course descriptions that situate composition and the thematic content of our class in the current political reality in which we reside, as well as a statement for the syllabus that articulates our own commitments and the expectations we have for our students; (3) mobilize the rhetoric of “stakes” and “warrants/assumptions” (Outcome 3) to teach the ethical and political implications of producing particular kinds of argumentation and discourse; (4) launch collaborative teaching projects that can offer individual teachers more support.

Below are some critical questions that have shaped the structure, content, and objectives of this workshop:
  • How do we frame and confront the post-election moment in our classrooms in ways that actively acknowledge and hold different vulnerabilities and their uneven effects?
  • What would attempts to think historically about the present look like, given that the entire history of the US has been one of state violence against people of color? For whom has the normalization of white supremacy been consistent rather than a newly emergent crisis?
  • What is ethical and political pedagogy? What does it mean to be accountable in the present?
  • How can we inhabit and disrupt the university and its current iteration as the production of neoliberal, settler colonial, antiblack racist expansionism while remaining committed to learning as a decolonial, noncolonial, and abolitionist practice?
  • Given that the neoliberal university establishes itself by incorporating diversity, difference, and radical disruptive energies into itself, how might we cultivate a practice of critical pedagogy that cannot easily be subsumed, co-opted, or evacuated of political force?

Critical Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop (click here for powerpoint)