In this essay, I discuss a scaffolded set of assignments I developed for my Studio-Era Hollywood course, an upper-division film history class; in order to build on assignments that had already introduced students to primary-source research in their lower-division courses, I devised the “One Film, Five Posts” approach. The ultimate goal was to accomplish thinking and meta-cognitive learning objectives.[1] These higher-order objectives involve students putting primary sources into productive conversation with secondary-source course readings. This occurs through five short essays, submitted as discussion-board posts, which all center on a single film assigned to student groups at the beginning of the semester. While our in-class screenings are selected to amplify each week’s topic, the group films tend to be the popularly canonized classics students expect to see in a Hollywood Studio Era class.

Below I introduce the assignment as a solution to challenges faced in achieving the pedagogical goals of an intermediary film history course taught in a specific educational context, and one that is quite common, at least in the United States. I then detail the assignment itself, how its materials are assembled and deployed, and how its administration and grading ensure commitment to learning outcomes. This second section functions as something of a user’s manual for those who would like to adapt this assignment to their courses. Throughout, I make reference to my own assignment materials, which are available through the MHDL and hyperlinked where appropriate.[2]

Assignment Introduction: Background & Rationale

I designed “The Hollywood Studio System” as an intermediate media history course that builds upon our program’s introductory film history survey in two ways. First, students develop a deeper knowledge of a specific period’s filmmaking by virtue of the semester-long immersion in the topic. Second, they are able to think historically through sustained—and, ideally, increasingly self-conscious or meta-cognitive—engagement with the methods and approaches that scholars have developed to understand this popular cinema. Reinforcing the importance of this methodological engagement is a schedule that is as much conceptual as it is chronological: the course proceeds through four units, moving from the film object and aesthetics outward to the industry, social institutions, and, finally, broader cultural contexts.[3]

With respect to assessment design, my task was to craft a learning experience that was, in the first place, feasible, and, second, sufficiently challenging to encourage learning without being cognitively burdensome. The guiding principle of the assignment design was that it target cognitive tasks that focus students’ efforts on the learning outcomes of the course: “apply[ing] their understanding of particular methods of studying popular cinema” and becoming prepared to “evaluate the differences among approaches to the studio system.” An Insights-Resources-Application (IRA) assignment I encountered in Barkley and Major’s Learning Assessment Techniques provided a useable model.[4] The IRA assignment is perhaps most legible to readers as a somewhat longer and more highly structured reading-journal entry, which requires students to attend to three deep-learning activities. The assignment directs students to return to and offer some commentary on an assigned reading (Insight), connect what they’ve read to their personal experience (Application), and find additional sources that deepen their understanding of the reading’s themes (Resources). More substantial than weekly reading-journal entries, IRA essays share the journal’s advantage of lowering the stakes of student writing but improve on it by incorporating additional learning activities.[5]

My assignment uses a similar set of directives as the IRA, adapted to the goals of the intermediate media history course. In-class lectures and discussions leave students with questions about assigned readings to address in their written responses (Insight). Students’ “personal experience” with mid-century film history is limited, thus their working with a single, assigned film throughout the term functions as the shared experience that precedes and anchors the novel material encountered as the course progresses (Application). And, finally, the students are directed to seek out different types of primary sources, most often from the MHDL, that are typically used by the research program under consideration in the course and pertain to their assigned film (Resources). Besides assessing these sources generically as historical artifacts, the students come to see them as a bridge between the course readings and the group’s film.[6]

One Film, Five Posts: A User’s Guide

Given the assignment’s many components and tight synchronization with the progression of course units, the course instructor must do more advance work for this assignment than many other assessments. Sharing my version of these materials will, I hope, relieve some of the burden for instructors considering adopting and adapting One Film, Five Posts. In order to simplify their use, I discuss these materials here in the sequence that they are released to students. Lest this overview of the assignment’s many moving parts devolve into an IKEA manual, I structure this discussion around what I anticipate will seem most strange to readers consulting a JMCS Teaching Media sidebar looking for pedagogical innovations—that is, I assign decidedly conventional films.

I use the assignment as a way to incorporate into the course what we might call the TCM, or film buff’s, canon: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933), Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), and other such titles that students with a passing familiarity expect to see in a Hollywood Studio Era course. Obviously, films celebrated during their initial releases and admitted to the National Film Registry in its first years are not typical products of the Hollywood system—and studying typicality and averageness is, undoubtedly, central to understanding a mass-production culture industry. Moreover, this concession to students’ preexisting interests in the course cuts against currents in the field calling to overturn canons and pursue eclecticism.[7] But, as objects serving as a foundation for this learning activity and its goals, such titles have advantages that ought not be dismissed.

First, there is the matter of timing. For the posts to track the course’s units, the assignment must be introduced within the first weeks of the semester and student groups formed shortly thereafter. The first assignment sheet, giving an overview of all five posts, is distributed in the first week, along with a list of possible titles. In order to encourage ownership over their learning, I have students rank preferred titles from a pre-screened list, after which I assign groups. At this stage of the term, students tend not to have a deep familiarity with studio-era films; presenting a list of more obscure titles would likely result in a lot of “no preference” and otherwise spoiled ballots. Additionally, students seem to appreciate, at the beginning of term, feeling that they are studying the “best” the filmmaking tradition has to offer, and this initial enthusiasm for films long designated as “classics” is mobilized in the first two posts: their own “review” of the film and their reading of its historical trade reception alongside David Bordwell’s account of the classical group style. That students must continue thinking about their assigned film for several more weeks and assignments, even as they watch hidden gems and obscure delights in the course screenings, can lead to a diminished enjoyment in the film itself, perhaps advancing the cause of dethroning the canon.

Waning enthusiasm for the assigned film also aligns with the overall objective of the assignment: attention to the film is, over the course of the posts, displaced by increasingly exploratory, primary-source research and increasingly focused conservation with course readings. This leads to the second consideration that favors hewing closely to a relatively conservative corpus: the assignment’s need for sufficiently polyvalent films. To sustain continued reflection over a semester, film texts needn’t be particularly rich—indeed by Post 5 students are researching the local cultural contexts touched by the film—but each title must function as a representative text, industrial product, and cultural artifact. While each week’s readings and topical focus lead one to assign titles best suited to teaching particular aspects of the system, titles used for this assignment need only work well enough for students to mobilize their understanding of the scholarship. The assignment rewards creativity and problem-solving, and, in principle, any film that one might choose could work. But the requirement that students draw on primary sources obliges the instructor to ensure there is a robust vein of primary source artifacts to access, lest students end up replicating each other’s research.[8] This is especially important for Post 3 (Promoting the Product): prestige productions’ multiple stars and extensive advertising and publicity campaigns reduce overlapping topics.

Other genres can be incorporated, though I have found some present more difficulties than others, and a degree of overlapping research must be accepted. Take, for example, Post 4, which asks students to situate their film with the Hollywood cinema as an industrial system. With directors and cinematographers appreciated as innovative workers, novel uses of effects photography and early sound, and notable instances of violence and otherwise borderline content, films from the horror and gangster cycles of the early 1930s work for all three of the prompt’s topics. Most comedies, on the other hand, will pose a greater challenge, as students will tend toward the first option. In such situations, directing students toward additional topics or providing individual guidance can be advisable, but allowing student groups to converge on the same topic also has value. Given the sheer volume of the MDHL’s holdings, students rarely write on the same primary-source artifact, and, in the few instances when it has occurred, the assignment’s peer reply and discussion requirements force students to identify and explicate their differing interpretations of the artifact, its relation to their film, and its relevance to the assigned course reading. Student efforts in these directions are rewarded by this assignment, as is evident from its rubric, which is standardized for all posts so as to reduce cognitive load and focus students’ attention on learning outcomes.

Conclusion

One Film, Five Posts is designed as an intermediate option for instructors looking to give students work that is more challenging than a weekly reading response or discussion question, but not quite as time-consuming or intimidating a commitment as a more formal research paper. The initial impetus to develop this assignment came from a desire to better serve a student population for which my graduate programs’ pedagogy training did not prepare me. But I do not believe the assignment is only suited to the needs of first-generation commuter students. By carefully balancing familiarity and novelty—respectively, the film at the center of the assignment and the methods and materials that vary over the weeks—this assignment is well-tailored to assessing students’ understanding and application. The frequency of submissions and options for peer feedback present many opportunities to intervene as students practice synthesizing course readings and newly found research materials. As such, this assignment prepares the student for more summative assessments that target learning outcomes associated with evaluation and creation.

1. Lower-division course’s introductory assignments were adopted from the many useful models found in the JCMS Teaching Dossier and the Media History Digital Library (MHDL). See, for example, Emily Carman, “Film History Comes Alive: Primary Materials Research as Participatory Pedagogy,” Teaching Media: Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier 4, no. 3 (Spring 2017). https://www.teachingmedia.org/film-history-comes-alive-primary-materials-research-as-participatory-pedagogy/. Assignments targeted toward the upper-division film history course’s more advanced learning outcomes are less well represented in these outlets. ↑

2. The collected assignment materials can be downloaded through the MHDL’s Teaching Resources; see “Resources for Educators,” Media History Digital Library. Accessed 12 Sept. 2021. https://mediahistoryproject.org/teaching/educators.html ↑

3. The relevant sections of the course syllabus are included in the MHDL upload. [Direct link to the described document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10NVNtGOmW684xLFr6LM74jcp6u-cFuYi/view?usp=sharing] ↑

4. See Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire Howell Major. Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass & Pfeiffer Imprints, 2016). ↑

5. Grading labor is an important consideration for many instructors. For those working without teaching assistants, weekly assignments are often, by necessity, graded quickly and feedback is provided through a rubric. The less frequent, somewhat higher-stakes assignment permits more substantive feedback. ↑

6. Resources will be discussed further below, but here it is worth noting that the MHDL proved particularly useful when I was working as a sessional instructor and had no pull with the library’s acquisitions department. ↑

7. JCMS Teaching Media 5, no. 2 (2019), edited by Paul McEwan and Allison Whitney, addresses this with respect to the film history survey, as does Tanya Goldman in a subsequent JCMS Teaching Media Dossier. See Tanya Goldman,“Toward an Eclectic Film History Survey,” The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 6 (Winter 2021), https://doi.org/10.3998/jcms.18261332.0060.602. ↑

8. Some assignments may require more than a careful selection of titles; the instructor might also need to curate potential research resources. Post 3, for example, includes a censorship option. For this to be possible, the instructor must ensure censorship files for specific titles are available to students, whether through the microfilm editions in her institution’s library or, more likely, the Margaret Herrick Library’s open-access digital collections or a subscription to ProQuest’s Primary Sources. ↑