Reviewing my many years as a university teacher, I have found that nothing bedevils me as consistently as devising worthwhile assignments. My colleagues share this concern: whenever our department convenes for pedagogy workshops, discussion inevitably turns to ways to develop interesting alternatives to the predictable ten-page essay, that assessment perennial made all the more enervating by virtue of its seeming inevitability. But how does one innovate in the realm of assignments without unfairly placing new demands on overburdened students, or privileging those who may have the advantage of knowing their way around editing software or prior experience exploring digital archives? There are no easy answers here, and the pitfalls are many. Trusting in the pedagogical wisdom of my peers, I have asked six instructors who have wrestled with these issues to detail their efforts in this dossier.[1]

A common thread throughout these entries is sustained consideration of what it means to ask students to stretch themselves as they engage with deliberately distinctive assignments. But we might equally challenge ourselves by asking what we risk if we stay with the tried and true. As Paul Monticone, one of the contributors to this dossier, points out, institutional efforts to make the academy inclusive must be accompanied by faculty efforts to exercise self-reflection when aligning their pedagogical goals with learning strategies. Those assignments most familiar to faculty who entered the academy from positions of privilege may not be ideal for students who are the first in the family to attend university or are burdened with long commutes and/or family-care responsibilities. As Monticone goes on to note,

Accordingly, innovating assignments can produce the benefit of helping students to reflect on those learning goals—“to learn what one is learning.”[4]

As much as innovative assignments may ultimately sharpen students’ learning skills, one has to exercise all the more care when pushing students outside of assumed norms of assessment. Even tweaks designed to benefit students can backfire, as my university learned during the immediate shift to online learning occasioned by COVID-19. Instructors decided en masse to disperse the weighting of assessment across multiple, small-scale assignments, only to learn that this move, meant to lessen the pressure students might experience from longer essays worth more, resulted in a relentless demand for short papers throughout the term, a situation that produced a far heavier workload. Whenever we innovate, we must also take into account the repercussions of such retooling, whether it be the mental toll for students already experiencing unprecedented levels of stress or the capacity of the TAs/graders assigned to larger classes to incorporate new criteria into their marking schemas. And, as Fiona Rawle, who has advocated a “pedagogy of kindness ... a teaching strategy that has connection, care, and compassion at its core [while still being] evidence-based pedagogy,” counsels instructors, one can offset innovation with flexibility and student choice.[5] As we experiment with our models of assessment, we should ensure at the same time that our students don’t have to shoulder a greater degree of academic risk. Building in more expansive submission timelines, giving students choice in topic selection, and encouraging them to see a disappointing outcome as part of a learning process that accommodates missteps are some of the ways Rawle suggests we can mitigate the challenge of the novel.

As mentioned, the contributors to this dossier have all thought deeply about how innovative assignments in film and media courses can invigorate the learning process at the same time that they respect the lived experience of the students for whom such assignments are designed. Michael Zryd’s entry traces the developmental history of a distinctive sequence analysis assignment that students undertake as a group project, devised for his department’s first-year introductory course. Beyond detailing how technological advances have altered students’ “performance” of a commentary track that accompanies the analysis, Zryd reminds us how “changes in this assignment are symptomatic of larger transformations in the film and media pedagogical landscape.” Constant modification has not only kept the assignment fresh, but responsive to a dynamic learning environment, framed by issues of academic integrity, equity, and student demographics.

Christine Evans’ entry also examines how an audio-visual format can be yoked to an assignment, but in this case, the analytical efforts are produced by upper-year students in a seminar devoted to studying the video essay itself. Evans prizes student self-reflection, as she encourages them “to question how video essays [can] function alongside written essays as meta-commentaries on argumentation and the rhetorical choices we make to persuade our readers and viewers.” Ultimately, creating video essays becomes a vehicle for students to reassess their relationship to both the written essay (still the preferred mode of scholarly persuasion) and audiovisual communication (the dominant means of conveying information in our current media-saturated environment). Equally, from Evans’ perspective, creating video essays becomes a way for students to reflect on how formal choices intersect with the affective dimensions of explanation and argumentation.

For many film and media history courses, the plenitude of online archive resources offered by such sites as the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) has prompted instructors of these courses to investigate new types of assignments. Liz Clarke offers two examples, one of which invites students to imagine themselves in the role of a turn-of the century motion picture exhibition site operator, while the other asks them to create a silent film scenario according to the period’s conventions, as articulated through screenwriting manuals of the day. While these assignments certainly displace the film text from the privileged position it enjoys when students engage in sequence analysis, Clarke avers that films may be sidelined, but they are not eliminated. Instead, such assignments “seek to innovate the ways we think about assessing and teaching an approach to film history that foregrounds industry, production, and exhibition.”

Paul Monticone’s scaffolded set of assignments, entitled “One Film, Five Posts,” also depends on students engaging with primary sources, but further asks them to put such sources “into productive conversation with secondary-source course readings.” Monticone’s assignment requires students to choose a canonical film text from the Hollywood studio era, which they then subject to a series of historically framed prompts, which range from investigating the film’s reception within the trade press to its status as an industrially produced entity to its function within a locally circumscribed cultural context. The assignment balances predictability (the same film remains the focus throughout) and variation (as each post demands something different), while eschewing the single-essay format as students develop their research skills. The rejection of the formal essay is a deliberate move, meant to lower “the stakes of student writing, but improve on it by incorporating additional learning activities.” According to Monticone, the standardized rubric for all posts helps “to reduce cognitive load and focus students’ attention on learning outcomes.”

The assignment that Charles Tepperman has devised, also for a film history course, similarly asks students to submit multiple brief response papers derived from their reading of primary sources archived on the MDHL, among other digital sites. Rooting his assessment principles in the core strategies associated with experiential learning, Tepperman ensures that the prompts that motivate the response papers “reinforce learning by framing experiences in a process of critical reflection.” In many ways, Tepperman’s experiments with the response paper model echo the insights provided by the other entries: he had modified his assignment to adjust to the demands of the moment (cf. Zryd), asked the students to reflect on their own learning processes (cf. Evans), encouraged a degree of historically informed role-playing (cf. Clarke), and ensured that the primary sources that the students encounter circle back to course readings (cf. Monticone).

The approach to assignments advocated by Randolph Jordan and Katherine Spring, though still highly dependent on students reflecting on their learning experience, takes the students out of the classroom altogether. When circumstances allow, Jordan and Spring direct students to conduct “soundwalks” that focus their attention on spaces’ sonic properties. As in some of the other assignments described, the full soundwalk exercise entails students both writing a reflection piece (they are required to write a journal attesting to their aural experiences) and technologically relaying their observations (students are asked to record a soundwalk that they have already traversed). Ultimately, as is the case with any innovative assignment, the soundwalk can lead students to places that they might not have envisioned: as Jordan and Spring point out, “the problems raised by soundwalking within an intersectional framework offer a productive way of combining our desire to open our students’ ears to the world, and its artistic shaping in the cinema, with heightened awareness of the politics embedded in all acts of production and consumption.” Ideally, the collective force of these dossier entries will encourage those reading to envision more expansive and empathetic ways to challenge your students and deepen their learning processes.

1. Some of the contributors to this dossier previously presented versions of their entries at 2021’s SCMS conference, as part of the roundtable entitled “Innovative Assignments for the Film and Media Classroom.” Other participants in earlier iterations of the roundtable included James Cahill, Lee Carruthers, and Lisa Coulthard. I thank them for their insights and their investment in pedagogy. ↑

2. Much of the research on first-generation students pertains to their broader experience and addresses the role of support departments in the university. For useful sources addressing classroom instruction, see Jillian Ives and Milagros Castillo-Montoya, “First-Generation College Students as Academic Learners: A Systematic Review,” Review of Educational Research 90, no. 2 (April 2020): 139–78. ↑

3. Paul Monticone, in correspondence with author, September 2021. The references cited in this paragraph derive from Monticone’s research. ↑

4. Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, 1st ed, The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 103–7. ↑

5. Fiona Rawle, “A Pedagogy of Kindness: The Cornerstone of Student Learning and Wellness,” Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/pedagogy-kindness-cornerstone-student-learning-and-wellness. ↑