Cohort July 2022: Faculty of Arts – Ervin Malakaj, Orrin Pavone, Jenny Ma, Giorgia Monro, Fernando Vargas
Project background
GERM 304: “German Cinema,” focuses on the Weimar Era and the history of sexuality. Over the course of the semester, students are asked to read various texts on the topic and, most importantly, watch related films prior to class sessions. Before the pandemic, students watched some films in class and streamed others online. During the pandemic, all film screenings shifted to online. Moreover, the course has now been revised to be a multi-access course, which offers students in-person and online options through lecture capture. In this context, it is not possible to return some of the film screenings to an in-person setting.
However, the films watched in class focus on an era in which they were conceived as products to be consumed communally.
Guiding question: How can we retain the various online streaming options of films for the course, while also affording students an opportunity to experience and reflect upon communal viewing? The project team includes Ervin Malakaj, a faculty member, Orrin Pavone, a former undergraduate student from GERM 304, and three additional student partners.
Main projects
- Study and assess the past viewing expectations as outlined in the course syllabi in the last four years. Main questions: what were the viewing expectations for the course, how were those presented to students, and how were those evaluated?
- Compile a bibliography of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning about learning communities, with a particular focus on film studies. Main question: what are the best practices for communal classroom engagement with cinema?
- Develop focus groups and survey materials to be administered in a sample course. Main question: What types of viewing habits do students nurture in the course?
- On the basis of the information collected from projects 1-3, develop a trial module at the end of the semester during which the class will be divided into groups, each of which will watch films using a communal watching platform (e.g., TeleParty). Students will then be surveyed about their experience. Main question: what is the most optimal way to deploy such an assignment in the future in ways that help students experience communal viewing, while also not burdening them with more work than they can take on?
Main objectives
- Develop a digital communal viewing protocol for the course to be deployed in future iterations of the class. This work will not only help students enrolled in the course get a stronger sense of the varied types of engagement possibilities with a film, but will also serve as a basis to develop a stronger culture of film viewing among students that might have an impact beyond the course itself.
- Develop a description of the assignment that can be shared with colleagues in the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies (CENES), teaching similar courses as well as with colleagues teaching global cinema studies across various Arts departments (Theatre and Film, French Hispanic and Italian Studies, Asia, English).
- Develop a presentation on the basis of this work to be held in the CENES internal pedagogy colloquium.