Teaching global media to the younger generations demands a reconsideration and broader vision beyond traditional methods of teaching world and national cinemas within the field.[1] As someone who has been combining teachings of media activism and national cinema over the last decade, I have learned the challenge of helping students develop activist relations with their own neighborhoods in order to relate to movies that otherwise may seem foreign to them, to grow critical about the world by interrogating their everyday and local habits of absorbing moving image media through a variety of smart screen devices. I resonate with Negar Mottahedeh's experience with students in the earlier decade, that for college students “who had lived the terror of the 9/11 attacks—criticism meant being negative toward things that ‘felt’ unpatriotic, ‘felt’ threatening, or ‘felt’ other.”[2] Similarly, I have observed how difficult it is for college students in the United States to avoid objectifying the world and internalize global media through a platform of formulating critique of their own habits. This struggle, to me, goes to the crux of teaching global media today because the younger generation among us has internalized the objectifying gaze of neoliberal globalization that has colonized the world at large especially through the saturation of the moving image media.

I propose that, as teachers, we should be mindful of providing generation Z with media literacy tools of critical thinking in earlier stages of education than college level. I think teaching global media today should start with helping students absorb a critical consciousness of the world through the fog of globalization that envelops their and our lives. We are connected to each other as consumers in invisible ways, that we do not wish to be, and we struggle to connect to the world as citizens in visible and ethical ways. We should honestly share this with our students and help them help us to grow critical together. But how can we approach such a level of introspection with our students in a course of one semester? We need to set in motion a teaching agenda that begins even before our students arrive in the college classroom.

Notably, there is little acknowledgment of and scholarly investment in devising introductory courses in film and media analysis for K-12 curriculum. It has generally fallen outside the scope of scholarly attention within the field even though institutions of public art education have been calling for teaching advice and pedagogy for moving image media analysis for the last seven years.[3] The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESSA) of 2015 continued the 1965 version by incorporating arts and music production into K-12 education. In 2012, the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) included the media arts both as a stand-alone category and as an umbrella for art categories in general (music, arts, theater, and dance).[4] Richard Burrows, who has been involved in art education teaching and policy for over two decades, points out a lack of concerted national organization to address media arts education exclusively for K-12 curriculum.

Among the tables of the National Core Arts Standards (2014), the phrase media arts is an encompassing umbrella for all arts as well as a signifier for “image and sound,” “video,” and “animation.”[6] Furthermore, among eleven standards of media arts pedagogy, a few call for moving image media analysis to “select, analyze, and interpret artistic work for presentation” (standard 4), to “perceive and analyze artistic work” (standard 7), to “interpret intent and meaning in artistic work” (standard 8), to “apply criteria to evaluate artistic work” (standard 9), and “relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding” (standard 11). More specifically, the high school curriculum calls for critical evaluation of “ethics, media literacy, social media, virtual worlds, and digital identity,”...“global contexts, purposes, and values,” ...“social trends, power, equality, and personal/cultural identity,” and “markets, systems, propaganda and truth.” Despite such invitation for global media analysis, K-12 art programs in public schools continue to incorporate literary analysis and select art courses without almost any reference to moving image pedagogy. Some private high schools and preparatory schools now include a media person among the staff, who provides the curriculum with select audiovisual resources.

Unfortunately, the public sphere of pedagogy in film and media studies has been invested disproportionately in higher education programs with largest group of research and publication continuously addressing graduate readership. Further, the increasingly disproportionate growth of precarious labor across all branches of humanities cultural research within film, media, and communication studies results from the demand for only adjunct teachers continue to grow rapidly within universities and colleges of higher education. Why has promoting film and media studies courses and research within K-12 curriculum not been taken up more seriously, considering that new research indicates job security and full time opportunities within K-12 curriculum in comparison to over 75% rate of no tenure track and 50% rate of no-benefit low-income adjunct positions within the higher education?[7] An increasing group of PhD graduates in film and media related fields can consider the possibility of filling in the media arts teaching positions for high school or even middle school levels if we plan teaching programs and bring them to the attention of career people at relevant national conferences.[8] Burrows also bring the importance of attending national conferences such as National Arts Education Association (NAEA) and National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC).

In its capacity as a field of artistic research and analysis, film and media studies pedagogy has hardly attempted to explore institutionally public opportunities and empowering educational benefits of getting involved in K-12 programs in ways that literary analysis became institutionalized throughout all levels of K-12 education worldwide. This negligence happens, ironically, in the face of an epistemological transformation in the course of audiovisual literacy and interaction at a global scale. The ramifications of this technological breakthrough in volume and size have been received with increasing alarm as a liability of media saturation leading to distraction and short attention span. Yet, the digital audiovisual transformation can also be envisioned as an opportunity for addressing the global scope of film and media pedagogy more meaningfully in terms of method and more inclusively, in terms of approaching younger group of students in need of media literacy and empowerment. Moving image media constitutes a complex field of affective experience and learning that demands literacy at least coterminous with traditional skills in readership and literary analysis.

Current senior high school and entry college students have experienced moving image media before they remember it consciously and even before they learned literacy. The small screen smart devices and social media have given rise to a growing school generation that is already a digital clip producer as a means of socialization and hobby but has very little knowledge of audiovisual language and analysis. This generation lives within a globalized neoliberal culture of saturated streaming media in which Netflix offers “global media” packages in multiple languages and subtitles. I think teaching global media to this generation more meaningfully should start with repeated viewing of short clips from students' own favorite titles, often available on YouTube, toward understanding of formal analysis to help students recognize otherwise invisible elements of cinematic style (mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and narration). Students already have a list of favorites, mostly popular, films which follow stylistically, one way or other, the global hegemony of Hollywood storytelling and style with some minor variations. This is the starting point of approaching introductory courses by capitalizing on students’ own investment in digital cinema and movie culture.

I have used the following teaching activities in introductory college courses in the last several years. This format can be adopted toward teaching high school students as well.

Introducing formal analysis to high school students can begin with representative short clips from the collection of artistically significant international fare from different eras, including but not limited to Anglo-European titles, many of which already circulate on popular social media sites. A non-exhaustive sample of these scenes include: the tennis game in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the dinner scene in Luis Buñuel’s Le Fantôme de la Liberté [The Phantom of Liberty] (1974), multiple scenes in Forough Farrokhzad’s Khāneh Siāh Ast [The House Is Black] (1962), entry to forbidden zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), introducing the angel in Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (1987), teahouse shootout in John Woo’s Lat Sau San Taam [Hard Boiled] (1992), Chaiyya Chaiyya dance in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se [From the Heart](1998) ––Spike Lee uses the song at the beginning of Inside Man (2006) ––the turf in Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Cidade de Deus [City of God] (2002), the couple dance in Wong Kar Wai’s Chun Gwong Cha Sit [Happy Together] (1997) and speed and time at the beginning of his Chung Hing Sam Lam [Chunking Express](1994), feeling betrayed in Youssef Chahine’s Bab el Hadid [Cairo Station] (1958), monster attack in Bong Joon Ho’s Gwoemul [The Host](2006), the descendants of Paikea in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider (2002), just got real in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), and the fight scene in Chia-Liang Liu and Jackie Chan’s Jui Kuen II [The Legend of Drunken Master](1994), masculine life in Clair Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), the meatloaf scene in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and the monster scene in Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno [Pan’s Labyrinth](2006). The variety of international clips cultivates an affective relation with aesthetically powerful cinematic scenes among students and encourages them to grow more curious about foreign movies and global cultures of cinema.

Correspondingly, 500-word weekly journals tackling short clip analysis encourages students to explore new ways of relating to their favorite cinematic scenes. I respond to every entry by pointing out areas of strength as well as weakness and guide students to improve their skills in detail scene analysis. During workshops, I encourage students to share their favorite clips with class and this adds further to the excitement. Random viewing often leads to re-viewing a short clip with class and analyzing it in detail. I help students realize how invisible elements of style express feeling and contribute to storytelling. Describing mise en scene forces students to defamiliarize the scene from its elements of acting and story. An understanding of continuity and montage techniques involves analyzing the rhythm of the clip through tapping a pen whenever student notices a cut and counting the number of cuts and measuring the time of the shots. Students begin to recognize how they live within a cinematic universe of montage in which image fragmentation is made first tolerable and then exciting through the continuity of sound and voice track. Understanding cinematography is as much about framing as the kinesis, camera's movement and subject(s) movement within the frame. Upon recognizing the difference between story and plot, students learn how they are implicated into the plot through varieties of omniscient to restricted narration.

Once students have acquired the skill to recognize and point out otherwise invisible aspects of cinematic style, they are then ready to learn critical investigations of sociocultural analysis such as ideology, class, gender, race, and sexuality through moving image culture by pointing out elements of film analysis not just the story or plot relations. This moment also marks the lecture on auteurism, to explain to students how an enormous undertaking by a group of very talented artists come together collectively under a unifying vision of a director or television producer who embodies social phenomena while expressing culturally a personal and individual experience of social and political life. In the course of examining their favorite movies, students realize while there is nothing wrong with telling stories about other people, something feels peculiarly wrong when one group has told stories of everyone else consistently for so long! Students begin to internalize and gradually discover, in their own terms and through their own experience, the undemocratic elements of a global movie industry that has been with them before they could even remember it consciously. They grow more critical in their film watching habits.

I think of audiovisual culture and moving image pedagogy as curating artistically an individual and group learning experience while promoting an activist relationship in academic democracy and diversity. The medium of film is aesthetically complex, situated in and yet transcending material culture, and mediating global movements of modernity and modernization through governmental and nongovernmental border relations and cross-cultural flows. In using popular film as teaching material, I nurture affective and artistic relations in viewing experience toward fostering theoretical observation, critical thinking, and historical investigation. As a scholarly field of higher education fully invested and skilled in moving image pedagogy, film and media studies can explore ways of teaching media arts at the high school level and, in turn, reduce the adjunct labor.

Hadi Gharabaghi has a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. His archival research makes a case for the emergence of documentary diplomacy during the early history of the United States Information Service (USIS)/Iran relations. His publications include a chapter in the edited volume Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), an essay in the Summer 2021 issue of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, a special issue of Journal of e-Media Studies (co-edited with Bret Vukoder, forthcoming 2021), and edited volume, Governing Genealogies of Film Education (co-edited with Terri Ginsberg, forthcoming 2022).

1. Julie Reid, “Decolonizing Education and Research by Countering the Myths We Live by,” CinemaJournal 57, no. 4 (Summer 2018), p. ↑

2. Negar Mottahedeh, “Reel Evil,” Cinema Journal 57, no. 4 (Summer 2018), p. 149 (146-150). ↑

3. Charts of teaching media arts for K-12 programs, devised in 2014, lays out a broad spectrum of teaching critical thinking through the analysis of media arts. National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (2014), State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education, Dover, DE, accessed July 23, 2021, https://www.nationalartsstandards.org/sites/default/files/Media%20Arts%20at%20a%20Glance%20-%20new%20copyright%20info.pdf. ↑

4. Daniel J. Albert, “An Interview with Richard Burrows about the Media Arts Standards: A Pathway to Expession and Knowing the World,” Arts Education Policy Review 117, no. 3 (2016), p. 146-152, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10632913.2016.1187935. ↑

5. Daniel J. Albert, “An Interview with Richard Burrows” p. 150. ↑

6. National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (2014), State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education, Dover, DE, accessed July 23, 2021, https://www.nationalartsstandards.org/sites/default/files/Media%20Arts%20at%20a%20Glance%20-%20new%20copyright%20info.pdf. ↑

7. New Faculty Majority: Facts about Adjuncts, 1700 West Market Street, #159, Akron, Ohio 44313, accessed July 23, 2021, https://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts/. ↑

8. Michael Richardson Wing, “High School Teaching is the New Tenure Track Job,” Eos: Science News by AGU (Advancing Earth and Space Science), 2021 American Geophysical Union, accessed July 23, 2021, https://eos.org/opinions/high-school-teaching-is-the-new-tenure-track-job. ↑