In this contribution, I discuss some efforts to implement experiential learning strategies in weekly response assignments for the online version of a Film History survey course. While we might tend to think of experiential learning as primarily related to internships or other kinds of work-integrated learning, experiential learning can also inform strategies for classroom education.[1] In general, pedagogical theories of experiential learning concern themselves with how hands-on activities can enhance, enrich, and transform learning experiences. In David Kolb’s learning cycle, “learning arises from the resolution of creative tension among ... four learning modes. This process is portrayed as an idealized learning cycle or spiral where the learner “touches all the bases”—experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting —in a recursive process that is sensitive to the learning situation and what is being learned.”[2] In a similar vein, Ash and Clayton write that “learning—and understanding learning processes—does not happen maximally through experience alone but rather as a result of thinking about—reflecting on—it.”[3] In both of these descriptions, instructors use a hands-on activity or experience to deepen the students’ understanding of course subject matter; further, teachers must reinforce learning by framing experiences in a process of critical reflection.

What would a set of tasks and assignments that “touches all the bases” look like in the context of a film history course? As a result of the pandemic, we have been teaching remotely in my department (Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary), which has meant adapting classroom experiences to online experiences. This change in teaching modality complicates experiential learning strategies in some ways, but the literature on experiential e-learning provides some guidance here. Specifically, researchers emphasize the crucial role of reflection as a component of this strategy: “The process of challenging students’ self-reflective methods as demonstrated through the use of web-based journals and e-portfolios encourages them to critically think in new ways, producing unique and individualized approaches to problem solving.”[4] My strategy in online courses involved assigning regular weekly response papers that required the students to engage with digital resources like the Media History Digital Library, the Internet Archive, or ProQuest Historical Newspapers. These assignments adapted my in-class “flipped classroom” activities with the aim of immersing students in a historical context, while also familiarizing them with digital resources that they would use later in the course.[5] In order to make the most of the experiential dimension of the assignments, however, I needed not only to frame the experience (immersion and research) but also to require students to reflect on the implications of this experience.

Each week, I gave students an activity (reading a historical newspaper or magazine, for example) and a prompt that asked them to imagine some of the contexts of moviegoing that extended from what they learned, while expanding on the course reading and lectures. Prompts included:

Because all the assignments were short (typically one-page responses), limited opportunity for in-depth reflection emerged, but I did try to “touch all the bases” in each prompt.

Let me unpack one of these in a little more detail. Here is one of the prompts I used for an early assignment:

• Who is the magazine’s intended audience?
• What is a quality of film form (understood broadly to include style, genre, aesthetic aspects) that is commented on in the magazine/article you looked at?
• What does the magazine/article reflect about the social standing of movies? Are they lowbrow? Sophisticated? How is this conveyed?
• What does this item help illuminate about silent American cinema in general (the films, industry, or audience)?

This assignment asks students to experience reading historical materials as its first goal. Historical documents can be challenging but rewarding for undergraduates; while it might be difficult for students to make sense of them at first, they provide rich sources of film context that differ—in being messier and more idiosyncratic—from the homogenizing and unified voice of a textbook. One can frame this activity through a kind of role-playing: ask students to imagine what it was like to be a reader of the magazine in the 1920s. Who are they? What interests them about movies? Because historical documents are likely to include qualities that are racist or sexist, one must frame these in a critical way for students. How did the magazine (or Hollywood) understand its audience to be constituted? How did the magazine reinforce social norms around race, gender, or class? In this example, students experience (they undergo historical immersion through reading), engage in reflective observation (they notice specific aspects of the magazine’s content and address), and start a process of abstract conceptualization (they think about how the material challenges their understanding of film history). By asking students to reflect on these dimensions of their reading, we start them on a process of thinking historically (and critically) about motion pictures.

These assignments show students that historical documents exceed in detail and complexity the necessary generalization required in a survey course. The prompts ask students to reflect on these historiographic implications and force them to grapple with the specificity of primary sources. For example:

This prompt seeks to immerse students in a kind of filmmaking that the course has given them little guidance to make sense of. They are asked to describe and hypothesize about film materials that do not seem to fit into “film history” as our course has framed it. As a result, our discussion of these films extends to asking why home movies are not included in our Film History text. What histories of cinema are privileged or omitted in the course? Why? In this way, the activity provides an entry point for thinking expansively and critically about the subject of the course itself.

Asking what further experiences or reading would expand the students’ understanding of the topic constitutes a final step in any of these assignments (the last “base” in Kolb’s cycle). How do we build on this initial cycle around the bases—experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting – in order to continue developing or researching the topic? For Kolb, the productive nature of the experiential learning cycle derives from the tension between doing a concrete activity (in this case reading/viewing old film materials) and engaging in abstract conceptualization (thinking about how to integrate these materials into the narrative of film history).[6] But the process also generates future experiencing and conceptualizing. Some of my most rewarding teaching experiences have come from students wishing to continue the research they begin with these assignments.

I have sketched out some efforts to “touch all the bases” of experiential learning through online response assignments. Perhaps this asks a lot of a small assignment, but one can also easily see how taking one assignment as a starting point, and expanding it more methodically, might enrich the subject even further. I find the weekly responses to be a productive assignment for students (and they find it interesting) precisely because it introduces them to such a wide range of experiences (different moments, historical materials, contexts). This may not immediately impress students as the “concrete experience” that winding a film on a rewind can be, since it lacks that physical dimension; but we’re all grappling with how to live without concrete experience these days, aren’t we?

1. In a recent piece for the Teaching Media Dossier, I wrote about using experiential education techniques to teach non-theatrical film history. See https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/j/jcms/18261332.0060.605/—taking-a-turn-on-the-rewind-strategies-for-experiential?rgn=main;view=fulltext. ↑

2. David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Second Edition (New York: Pearson, 2014), ebook np, chap. 2, O'Reilly Media. ↑

3. Sarah L. Ash and Patti H. Clayton, “Generating, Deepening, and Documenting Learning: The Power of Critical Reflection in Applied Learning,” Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education 1 (Fall 2009): 27. ↑

4. Kathy L. Guthrie and Holly McCracken, “Reflective Pedagogy: Making Meaning in Experiential Based Online Courses,” Journal of Educators Online, 7, no. 2 (July 2010): 4. See also Undrahbuyan Baasanjav, Incorporating the Experiential Learning Cycle into Online Classes, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9, no. 4 (December 2013): 575; and Rebecca Carver, Robert King, Wallace Hannum, and Brady Fowler, “Toward a Model of Experiential E-Learning,” MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 3, no. 3 (September 2007): 247-256. ↑

5. These activities are more fragmentary than the major assignment Liz Clarke has designed, but they are similar in other respects; see Liz Clarke’s contribution in this dossier. ↑

6. Kolb, Experiential Learning. ↑