Re: tips for teaching? (2 responses)

From: Fabrice Lyczba <[email protected]>

Hi Amanda

As a follow-up to Prof. Schaffer's lovely definition of our job (" to model passion for thinking, not to transfer verifiable knowledge"), may I point to a book that I think  should be compulsory reading for new and not-so-new teachers, Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster ? It's about how the best teachers are those that teach a subject they know nothing about :-).

Best


Fabrice Lyczba, Ph.D.
Université Paris Dauphine

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From: Leo Enticknap <[email protected]>

Bill Schaffer writes:

> I was a tenured lecturer in film studies in both Australia and the UK for over a decade.  Resign yourself to doing this for its own sake, because your institution DOES NOT VALUE TEACHING. You can have a stellar career giving soul-deadening lectures all your life, so long as you attract external funding and/or find the right theoretical niche to inflate your publication count.

I get the impression from this that you probably haven't been working in UK academia (at least, in a job that involves a significant component of undergrad teaching) since (a) the National Student Survey came along, and (b) the government withdrew all public subsidy for humanities degrees, meaning that students meet their entire cost from their £9k fees.  The result of those two developments has been that institutions still do not value teaching per se, but they value your popularity among students almost as much as they value your funding and/or publications record.  This of course makes it challenging to teach and assess in ways that students might find difficult and/or unpleasant in the short term, but which you believe will boost their attainment and employability in the long term.  And of course 'rate my professor' type websites have introduced the Tripadvisor concept to academia: students with an axe to grind rant into their keyboards ad nauseam, whereas those who are broadly satisfied tend to say nothing.

James Ivy writes:

> In planning my course for the spring semester I wonder if I'm anachronistic in my thinking that the experience of watching Chaplin's *Modern Times* on a laptop in a dorm room is so very different than watching it on the screen in a classroom, sharing the experience with an audience.


Of course it's different.  Before the mid-1950s, filmmakers did not envisage their work being seen in any other context than a darkened auditorium of 100-2,000 people watching the film communally, sequentially (no pause or skip buttons) and on a screen between 5 and 20 metres wide.  The 'classical' continuity system of film language, and the oppositional ones that developed in response to it, were invented in that context, as were the visual styles, performances and other cultural norms of cinema before other ways of consuming moving images became widespread.

Of course, this creates a problem for today's 18 year-olds, some of whom have quite literally never set foot in a cinema, and most of whom do so two or three times a year if that.  The technologies that now dominate the creation and consumption of moving images are the precise opposite of those which existed in the first half of the twentieth century, hence the "i" prefix on Apple's line of personal IT products.  They are precisely that - personal, not communal.  The famous sunrise shot in 'Lawrence of Arabia' is not going to have the same emotional impact on a viewer looking at it on an iPhone, with cheap earplugs, crammed into an economy class seat on an airliner as it is in 70mm in the Cinerama Dome.

For that reason (and, as Bill Schaffer put it, also at the risk of sounding immodest), when the department in which I worked moved into a new building in 2010, I argued hard for that facility to include a fully-equipped cinema, with proper, tiered seating, a decent-sized screen with masking for all the main aspect ratios and the ability to project every significant film, video and digital format (apart from 70mm - with the Bradford museum just down the road showing 70 regularly, there wasn't any point). Screenings for my courses are on BD upscaled to 2K as a bare minimum, and 35mm or DCP where possible.

Attendance at module screenings is compulsory, and this has resulted in negative feedback in module questionnaires and the NSS.  There are frequent comments along the lines of 'Why do we have to show up and see it on campus, given that we can watch it on our own devices whenever we like?'.  And if I ever program a film that is not available online or on DVD/BD, I get serious complaints.  Attention span is an issue, too - whenever I look down from the projection booth during these screenings, I can see a sea of glowing Facebook pages on smartphones (if any politician promises to end the ban on the use of cellphone jammers in theatres, I would vote for them like a shot, and have on many occasions been sorely tempted to build and use one illegally). Oh, and when I showed 'Seven Samurai' earlier this year, there were 60 or so students in the theatre when the lights went down, and 5 when they went up again 224 minutes later.  The rest had all walked out, probably before the first reel was over.

Leo

Leo Enticknap
Institute of Communications Studies
2.35, Clothworkers' Building North
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
Tel. +44 (0)113 343 5853
Fax: +44 (0)113 343 5808

*On the web:*
My workplace web page <http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/peope/leo-enticknap>
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Personal Website <http://www.enticknap.net>
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