The Edit 10

Encourage collaboration and cooperation over auteurism and competition. Build a strong community within your classrooms by modeling professional and cooperative behavior in the classroom. Establish explicit expectations of mutual respect and equitable collaboration both in the classroom and on location. Openly discuss inclusion as a policy on your syllabus and a practice in your class. Think carefully about forming teams for class projects, including rotating students through roles throughout the semester. Assign teams rather than let students choose their collaborators. Ensure that shyer and less confident students have opportunities for leadership and technical roles and that more dominant and confident students learn how to listen, support, and assist their quieter peers.

Part of the process of learning how to produce a media work involves developing self-awareness of each creative choice – why it’s important to the final product, what meaning it conveys, how an audience might receive it (and a consideration of who that audience is). Asking students to place their choices in a theoretical and historical context inspires deeper reflection on how their works fit into the larger world of media. Blending these approaches can also help to bridge the divide that students often see between their production and critical studies courses.

Keep a balance between developing storytelling skills and focusing on technical training. Without balanced attention to creative expression, trite or harmful content can go unaddressed in favor of development of technical ability. Creating a strong connection between craft and content opens up a space for the class to discuss representation and how technical execution shapes that representation.

All stories, and many other forms of expression, are about characters’ identities: their personalities, emotional states, flaws, and backstories, but also their age, place of origin, race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, class, etc. Because developing characters is integral to the process of most mediamaking, questions of representation are critical to developing rich, authentic characters. Suggest students break away from stale and harmful stereotypes and instead draw from personal stories before attempting to craft characters different from themselves. If students tell stories of characters who are less familiar to them, provide resources and techniques for crafting characters’ language, experiences, and identity to build depth, responsibility, and thoughtfulness into the story development process.

Active, cooperative, and experiential learning enables students to get hands-on experience with a skill or concept in a low-stakes setting that emphasizes problem-solving and communication skills. Provide regular opportunities for all students to gain practical experience in an environment where they can ask questions, solve problems collaboratively and independently, and succeed in applying what they’ve learned. Enable students who might otherwise simply observe to participate in learning as fully as more confident students. Prepare assignments with attention to accommodating the physical, economic, or scheduling challenges facing working and low-income students, students who have family commitments, or students with disabilities. Consider the diversity of access to resources among students as you evaluate their work.  

Provide opportunities for solo and self-sufficient work in addition to group projects. Independent work not only provides all students the space to develop their skills, but creates accountability for students’ learning, so that each student becomes responsible for their own growth and contributions.

Evidence shows that placing constraints on student projects has strong pedagogical value in promoting creativity and critical problem-solving, especially for introductory students. Creating boundaries on student work discourages problematic content while students are still developing theoretical and conceptual skills. Constraints need not be a list of banned items; instead, they can be a way of directing student work to encourage deeper engagement with specific skills. Such constraints can include limiting the length of projects, allowing only specific equipment to be used, focusing on conceptual approaches like a theme, or emphasizing stylistic approaches like the use of color. In introductory classes, pedagogical research shows that less is more.

No individual instructor can accommodate the needs of all students. Instead, reach out to campus, community, and industry resources to connect your students to support systems, funding, and learning opportunities—inclusion or disability offices, student organizations or clubs, and internship coordinators, etc. Staff at these offices can also provide support in offering advice on best teaching practices for specific student populations and in locating additional resources. Invite guest speakers to fill in gaps in your own knowledge or experience, to contribute to critiques, or to model the diversity of people who can take on particular production roles.

Take time to explore your own thoughts, experiences, and points of view on topics outlined in these practices. While implementing the EDIT 10 can feel organic, you may find yourself engaged in difficult conversations about how best to create and collaborate across difference and and how to address problems in representation. Carve out time for your own individual introspection and preparation. Research the issues that impact specific marginalized communities, especially those most represented on your campus. Acknowledge your own role as an authority figure with your students to explicitly promote an understanding of, and challenge to, the power dynamics that can play a role in shared learning in the classroom. Be prepared to advocate for students of marginalized identities who might otherwise be left to defend themselves on their own, and be willing to listen, make mistakes, and grow.