Postdigital pedagogies in the omnidigital video era: educators and the CIES film festivalette curators discuss films they use and why.

Group Submission Type: Workshop

Description of Session

In his 2024 book, Irv Epstein suggests that “Film [is] a vehicle for aesthetic engagement [that] allows for a holistic appreciation of educational concerns that are depicted within larger social spaces.” Since its inception in 2015, the CIES Education Film Festivalette, has attempted to reach beyond the intellectual preoccupations of an academic education conference to engage education and its issues and processes aesthetically, emotionally and vicariously. It presents a persistent invitation to feel and think, to observe and experience, to focus on the personal as much as on policy or politics, and to recognise that fresh insights reside as much where we let our imaginations free as where we bring our minds to focus.

As a medium, film is all at once predigital, postdigital and peri-digital. Film is predigital as the entire cinematic canon was shot on photographic film before Paul Wagner’s Windhorse in 1998, which was the first commercial film that was fully shot and edited digitally. Film is postdigital in that film transcends any divide between humans and technology, educational instrumentalism, EdTech solutionism. Film has been currently- or peri-digital since the wide availability of digital technologies in the late 1990s placed a digital camera in the hand of just about every teacher and learner and made it part of their daily lives.

Film has shown us its enormous potential to inform, entertain, propagandise and educate ever since technology enabled the screen image, at first, to move, then to speak and to live in its own discrete world of sounds and images. The essential elements of film – cinematography, mise-en-scène, narrative, script, montage, sound design, acting, camera movement – which greatly enhanced, remain relatively unchanged in the digital and predigital eras. Films do not need to be about education, broadly educational, or purposefully didactic in themselves, to be useful in education. As the presenters in these roundtable presentations will show, educators draw on all the elements of film to educate, regardless of whether these draw on facts, opinions, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, power, the social or the personal. Those who write, research or theorise about education also draw on films across the digital and predigital eras, and across cultures and history to try to understand what they reveal about comparative and international education, what may have been intended by the director, how a film is never viewed the same way twice as audiences and contexts change.
While film relies fundamentally on the digital and technical, in its production, post-production, marketing, distribution and commercialisation, it is also fundamentally aesthetic, social, and personal in its affect and pedagogy. It is in this postdigital sense that contributors to this refereed roundtable discussion will focus on film as a tool for education and pedagogy, as a way of engaging learners, and as a source of knowledge and learning about education and pedagogy. Presenters will discuss the films they use in education and how they use them to shape and reshape pedagogy, learning and knowledge. Participants will be asked to talk about their use of films as part of their pedagogy and their own learning.

Sub Unit

• Book launches and Workshops / Workshop

Chair

• Jorge G Baxter, Universidad de Los Andes

Workshop Organizer

• Hugh McLean, NORRAG

Presenters

• Matthew Schuelka, Fora Education

• Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg

Discussants

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota

• Batuhan Aydagül, University of Wisconsin-Madison