Formación desde el Programa Académico De Contaduría Pública

My research with the Clip Club children and elsewhere professionally over the past decade, suggests that many young people have unexplored and undervalued

knowledge and skills related to media, film and popular culture, along with a ready disposition to make, communicate and be part of a productive team. The boys involved in the ‘filmed’ film review award ceremony at the BAFTA headquarters, testify to an enthusiasm to participate in ways that are familiar to them and over which they feel they have some mastery. Furthermore, Nimbus and Leonardo were able to reflect on the merits of learning that involve social interaction and the sharing of complex film-making processes. Indeed the Clip Club’s longevity and two

resultant short films are a testament to the children’s collective and hitherto unrecognised interests and capacity to commit to sustained literacy practices.

It is in these respects that my work is redolent of the thoughts and opinions of popular ‘creativity guru’ Robinson (2011, 2013) whose entertaining and influential promotion of ‘everyone’s hidden artistic talent’ appears to have accrued public and cross-sector endorsement. Though sceptical of his essentialising tone I concur with some Robinsonian rhetoric in as much as many young people’s talents remain undervalued and redundant in formal school contexts, rather than uniformly

undiscovered. And as Robinson’s popularity is likely the result of a backlash against reductive curricula and a lack of opportunity for young people to express their interests and preferences, my findings become laden with political significance.

Both thoughtful individuals, Nimbus and Leonardo in particular articulate the deficit elements of their school experience – a lack of relevancy and autonomy. Clip Club created a space in which participants exhibited dispositions for reciprocal relations, for productive action, and for rhetorical communicative performance – arguably the required attributes of a new literacy practitioner.

Conditions of possibility

My material draws attention to the constraints under which primary children operate in the formal curriculum. Leonardo articulates the stress related to SATS (Standard Assessment Tests) and heaves an audible sigh⁵⁵ in the process. He sees Clip Club as a release from the strictures of the formal system, rather like some form of

compensation for what he calls ‘the burdens of the day’, whereas a holistic grasp of this relevant expressive art form should constitute more of a core entitlement. Such are the constrained conditions of possibility in much formal schooling that this level of collaborative and autonomous interaction with digital media as routine, is unlikely to be a popular choice amongst teachers, nor even a legitimate practice in the eyes of the inspectorate. Many teachers are overburdened and unskilled in media production, and formal assessment procedures are set up to audit the quality of exercise book marking and levels of individual progress in tests. Indeed there is a boldness of spirit in schools interested in pursuing moving image production as a standard meaning-making practice as will be seen in the next Chapter.

Somewhat paradoxically, despite being a place of fun and refuge, Leonardo has absorbed from public discourse the benefits of gaining media skills in school that could be employed in the work place. Throughout my research and in other professional evaluation work, young people consistently profess the usefulness of film and media production experience to their future careers, seeing it as an adult work-oriented activity. This binary between practical media as work and/or play, and why in the former case the benefits should be deferred until adulthood, is a recurring theme in media education to be taken up in Chapter VI.

In addition, the re-production of film industry protocols evident in Clip Club, and their constraining influence on youth practices is potentially problematic. It seems there is a lack of imagination on the part of educators, practitioners and software impresarios to re-construe professional standards and practices for younger users. We fall into them with enthusiasm and without question, we mimic linear

pre/post-production models, the festivals and the awards, which effectively preserves

‘cinematic life’ (Furstenau and MacKenzie 2009) as mythic and remote, and does

55 Listen @ https://soundcloud.com/shelleuk/leonardo-july-2014/s-ZeYgI#t=05:43 [Accessed 21 September 2015]

little to move the medium on as an expressive art form in the everyday lives of teachers and pupils.

Hybrid transactional pedagogic model

At the beginning of the thesis I made a distinction between formal, informal and non-formal education, and Clip Club fell in the latter category in that it was run under the aegis of the school but was not accountable to it. There is no doubt that the non-formal nature of the Club had an impact on Dual 2 who struggled in the non-formal school structures. As indicated above, the opportunity to engage in sustained after school media production may be an appropriate outlet for some less privileged pupils to express themselves and to prepare them for a sense of belonging that is neither school nor home. The Clip Club provided a transitional staging post between these two domains through engagements with popular culture and its link with moving image production.

Moreover, formal pedagogic approaches might embrace the latitude for local

community building offered by non-formal, hybrid education models, whose ethos is often less individualistic and more collaborative, where ‘failure’ is given time to be reinterpreted as a process of iterative review and regroup. The moments of friction in the Clip Club alluded to earlier, were resolved sensitively and democratically with attention to the wider context. The children were offered time and space for critical reflection on proceedings in which they were emotionally invested. It is also possible that this experience and the Club’s positive encounter with professional adults

seeking their advice, spurred the children on to higher levels of achievement, the implications of which will be examined later.

An appropriately facilitated creative media session accommodates different talents and interests through iterative production practices and the negotiation of different roles. In an atmosphere free from assessment levels and prescriptive standards, Nimbus for one, in a prolonged series of Clip Club literacy ‘events’, was able to experiment with his less confident ‘creative’ side, explore social collaboration, as well as indulge his interest in computer science and social networks. These practices are the hallmarks of the kind of dynamic media literacy elicited by this research.

I speculate that what was being generated through the mobilisation of media

composition practices was a gestalt of greater significance than the films themselves.

This is an idea corroborated by Dual 2’s ‘address to camera’, who sensed that the success of the Club was built on participation in a co-dependent flattened hierarchy of social and material relations, leveraging new technologies for a collective purpose.

Pedagogies related to creative digital media underscore efforts to create a supportive and inclusive teaching habitus which is both conducive to learning and dismissive of ranking and categorising systems. Just as Clip Club learners engaged in editing a series of ‘temporal gestalt(s) of sound (and) image’ (Furstenau and MacKenzie 2009, p.14, drawing on Merleau-Ponty 1964b, p.54) in iMovie, so a temporary historical gestalt was created amongst its participants.

From a research perspective, through this partial anatomy of experience in a

particular local community, it has been possible to lay out the dimensions of creative digital media composition, which may prove fruitful in other contexts. It is to this task that the thesis now turns as my focus shifts to the development of international film and moving image education and the ways in which this is applied in the UK. In so doing I further invoke the dimensions of Figure 12, on page 136, however I do not wish to give the impression that the model is being validated in a deductive sense.

The studies in the following chapter have played a vital part in its formulation and the progress of my thinking, and it is the necessarily linear design of the thesis structure that imposes a sequential narrative.

Chapter V – Interpretation of Material Part II