There is an assumption that since experimental media–film, video, mixed media, etc.—is by definition unconventional, thereby, teaching it does not incur the same challenges to inclusion and equity as traditional approaches. The experimental canon that is most often taught is just as white, just as male, and just as straight/cis as documentary and narrative modes. In order to deeply engage students in difficult topics and to challenge them to create experimental work themselves, I too have had to experiment with my pedagogy in ways that have pushed me to be a better, more antiracist teacher. I recognize that this kind of work is personally taxing and requires an incredible amount of focus, transparency, and flexibility, but I find the results continue to be worth the effort. Intentionally placing inductive learning–an approach to pedagogy that is student-inquiry driven often in pursuit of problem-solving or deep understanding–and interdisciplinarity at the center of the course design process while also focusing my in-class energy on creating a collaborative, artistic community has helped my students. All students, but in particular those who have been historically excluded, experience the freedom to create work that does not just fulfill course requirements, but that gets accepted at festivals and, most important, helps them grow as artists in their chosen trajectories.

In my experience, students from historically excluded groups are drawn to experimental film and media production and study in large part because they know they will be asked to make work as individual artists. This solo work affords them space and privacy to use the tech and explore their own vision. I understand this inclination–in fact, that’s what drew me in as an undergraduate. As Black, queer, female-assigned undergraduate who grew up working class, I often found it difficult to make the time to practice techniques learned in class outside of the classroom, and the group project format of documentary and narrative production courses often left me in supporting roles rather than in key creative positions–my ability to step into those key roles confidently was further complicated as I developed a chronic illness and physical disabilities. Those systemic barriers and a lack of exposure to experimental works do mean that students often come in shy and lacking the same level of knowledge they might have for narrative or documentary, but that can also encourage them to be more open to the unconventional, the vulnerable, and the downright strange examples that experimental media has to offer.

Introducing the many possibilities and forms of experimental media can be challenging as students generally come to class at the beginning of the semester with fewer examples or working definitions of concepts or terms than they would in a class focused on popular media. In fact, plenty of students come in feeling alienated or suspicious of the mode. Opening students up to experimental filmmaking is usually my first hurdle to clear, albeit an exciting one. Personal filmmaking can be an accessible entry point to students, particularly minoritized students, as it emphasizes the artist’s voice and often has a form that reflects its content rather than hitting a fixed structure or set of beats. While I do bring experimental works that are not personal films into the classroom, I often find that students are excited to dive into personal filmmaking as a kind of respite from the other kinds of filmmaking they engage with in other classes.

While this entry point of personal filmmaking is an effective one and the single-author paradigm is attractive to students, I am not willing to give up on collaboration in the classroom–or in my own art practice. Collaboration is an important part of any sustainable artistic practice, even if that collaboration takes on different forms than we are accustomed to in crew-based filmmaking. As a means of exploring alternative methods of collaboration in filmmaking, I collaborate with my students in the design and implementation of the course as it unfolds. This involves a high level of discussion in the classroom and requires me to relinquish quite a bit of control over proceedings. While this is an uncomfortable position in some ways, I find it to be highly rewarding for the students in particular. For students who are used to accepting the syllabus as-is, they must take ownership of their own learning and their peers’ learning if they are co-creators of the class work.

But truly antiracist, expansive pedagogy that supports collaboration doesn’t end at fixing one week of a syllabus or inviting students to change one reading in a syllabus. At community forums or university conversations about antiracism, race, identity, and equity on campus, when students are asked about ways that faculty can better include more perspectives in the curriculum, I often hear them talk about syllabi and with good reason. If we begin zoomed out to the widest view of this work, we must begin with our values as faculty, and if we value antiracism in our work as instructors, then we must seek to be inclusive not just in the works we choose to highlight, but also in the way we design our assignments, the ways we cover the material, the ways we conduct our classroom time, and the way that we position ourselves in the communities we build in class.[1] It is not enough to simply shoehorn all of the works and readings by minoritized makers and scholars into a single week or unit or to only speak about that work in relation to identity without sufficient attention to issues of craft, nor is it sufficient simply to add a token artist into each unit of study without discussing the author’s specific context or perspective in conjunction with their craft.[2] It is vital to speak holistically about the artist and the work. This kind of deep inquiry can also give students an easier avenue to share their prior knowledge and open the discussion to a range of disciplines.[3]

Much like we must consider changes in our institutions, our student bodies, and our political and cultural moment in our teaching, no filmmaker creates work in a vacuum. The instinct to teach creative work free from context is one that we must resist, particularly when introducing students to filmmakers from historically excluded groups. Engaging in antiracist pedagogy requires an interdisciplinary approach–not just focusing on the film itself, but also history, science, mathematics, literature and other fields that can help with understanding an artist’s work and inspire future works. The same is true of the films made by white men who make experimental films–whether personal or seemingly impersonal ones–and bringing that discussion of creator and context to the fore gives students greater opportunities to find a foothold in the work and give them the space to bring in their own prior knowledge to their interpretation. Moreover, much of the richness of experimental media is in a filmmaker’s ability to take inspiration from various disciplines. Experimental media explores the moving image as the means to investigate, to meditate, to consider.

One film I often show is Christopher Harris’s Reckless Eyeballing (2004) when we discuss the use of rhythm in experimental film. This film appropriates images from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Foxy Brown (1974), stills of Angela Davis’s FBI Most Wanted Bulletin, and other media images to interrogate the white gaze directed at Black people since early narrative cinema. Harris also incorporates film theory and the physics of light into this work to make his perspective even more explicit. While students can often identify the images of Birth of Nation from their early film history courses and many of them are able to recognize Angela Davis’s name, they don’t necessarily know the history of the film’s title, nor are they able to parse much of the film’s finer points on their own. While my purpose of including the work in the syllabus is to talk about how Harris uses repetition and rhythm to drive his point home, it would be a disservice to the film not to discuss Emmett Till or Angela Davis or to ask students to recall what they know of Blaxploitation film. This method is particularly successful when paired with a reading that helps students draw connections between the lesson and the materials. In this example, that means including an interview between Harris and Terri Frances[4] as well as having students read and parse a villanelle[5], a kind of poem that relies on a strict structure and repetition.

This kind of dense interdisciplinary pedagogy can make it difficult for students to fully engage in live discussion on the spot. For introverted students, in particular, it can take hours or days to fully process the information in front of them; extroverts may be more forthcoming with their initial thoughts, but given further prompting to consider those thoughts may help them find greater depth. In my experience, reflective practice is necessary to get students past those knee jerk reactions and into deeper reflection that will impact the quality of work they make in these courses. This reflective assignment can take many forms: blogs, discussion board posts, essays, creative assignments, etc. The format the end product takes is less important than the work of reflecting. I often give students a discussion post prompt consisting of questions meant to push them to think more deeply about the discussion, the materials, and their own projects. This is, of course, more work for the faculty as students are far less likely to engage with these assignments if they see them as busy work without some level of feedback. I often bring up some of the standout posts in the next class and ask those students if they are willing to expound. I like to do this at the start of class as a way to build a bridge between the concepts from week to week to help meet students where they are, amplify the voices in the room that need a little time and space away from the material to process, and to give students more opportunities to learn from each other.[6]

My teaching practice is certainly a demanding one. I am admittedly exhausted at the end of most days and need hours of downtime to recover–my favorite method of recovery is taking hours to rest my voice by not speaking. That part of my self-care routine also gives me space to reflect and prepare for the next class meeting and my other responsibilities. Taking on a reflective practice in my teaching has been incredibly valuable to my own growth as a teacher and as an artist; I’d argue it also makes me a better friend, colleague, and family member, too. I ask no more of students than I’m able to do myself, and I find it imperative to be transparent about my limitations and boundaries in the classroom. We often begin class with deep check-ins particularly once we’re in the final project stage. As a precursor to discussing readings and screenings, I say, “Let’s be humans before we dive into the readings. Let’s all just check-in about how we feel and how things are going.” In the beginning of the semester, I often start these check-ins to model how open they can be. Students who are uncertain of what we’re really doing sometimes double check by asking, “Wait. So, we can just talk about anything?” or “What am I supposed to say?” The answer is always just anything you want to share with the group about how you’re doing. I did this in the pre-COVID era, but I find it’s even more valuable to students now. I know there are plenty of us who are tired of COVID and tired of talking about it, but I have had students tell me in person and in my evaluations that my willingness to acknowledge their humanity in class made them feel safe enough to take risks in their work. I hope that it also teaches them to engage humanly with their teammates, coworkers, cast, crew, and other collaborators outside of the classroom especially in times of intense stress or crisis.[7]

After that deep check in, we dive into the material through a process of Inductive Learning.[8] Put most simply, after reminding the students what we are discussing that day I begin with the same question, “So, what did you think?” This open-ended approach to the material does invite tangents (some productive, others less); so, it does require some steering on my part. I don’t often stop the train of thought in its tracks. In fact, it’s usually another student who will push their peer to address the material (“But what does that have to do with the section of the reading where the author talks about x?”) I still have a list of things I want us to discuss based on the coming assignments or the unit we’re exploring. Sometimes, when there is a lull in conversation, I like to ask the group why they think I selected the given reading or film we’re discussing. This usually leads to fruitful discussion that engages their own curiosity and my learning objectives for the day.

This collaboration with students extends beyond classroom discussion and into the grading process. In order to encourage student growth, we must create open spaces that embrace mistakes as learning tools rather than opportunities to deduct points. I create a safe space to fail by spending the bulk of the semester assigning short exercises that are graded on completion rather than on mastery. In the 300-level experimental production course I teach, students will complete eight short exercises that make up 40% of their final grades. That 40% can be fully earned simply for making attempts and submitting them. Students still share their work and are expected to identify what went well and what they would do differently with more time or another attempt, but in my experience the work they produce is still inspired and challenging. Rather than incentivizing laziness or procrastination, I have found that the students feel free to take risks and explore areas of production they have been curious yet intimidated by. This can help students step away from a culture of perfectionism and also to level the playing field for students who have less time for homework or less access to expensive computers–I have a near 50/50 split between students with their own editing machines and those who do not.

After completing these pass/fail exercises, I collaborate with students to build a rubric for their final project. This project is a new work that they are required to submit to a festival by the end of the semester. Students are welcome to incorporate elements from their earlier exercises into this project, but it should exist as an independent work. The class discussion we have when designing the rubric is often spirited and informative. I like to begin by asking the students what they value in a film, what they’ve learned this semester, and what separates a good experimental project from a great one. They don’t always agree with one another, but they do listen and respond thoughtfully. In six years of teaching, I’ve only seen a room not reach consensus twice. In both of those instances, each student designed their own rubric, and I found that the variations were minute. Here, I’m continuing to center the students’ experiences, learning, and values rather than my own assumptions about what I think they need to know or press them into making work the way that I do. I find this method to not only be more democratic, but it also builds accountability into the assignment. Students are collectively determining what they want feedback on and what they think is a reasonable, achievable, and worthwhile pursuit given the course and the timeline.

It is my goal each semester to create an environment where transformational learning can take place. In teaching students to question the rules of traditional filmmaking and traditional learning, I hope I am helping them develop the tools to question the structures of society that may have drawn them to the material in the first place. Part of what draws me to experimental media is its ability to make viewers question the limitations of the medium. Similarly, I hope that my students walk away from our time together questioning what the limitations are for the classroom experience, what the limitations are for higher learning, and whether they want to stretch, push against, or defy their own limitations or expectations for their artistic vision and practice. The inclusive experimental classroom is a place where barriers can break and collaboration and creativity can provide new ways to help students expand and explore.

Gabby Sumney (any pronouns) is an experimental media artist who makes films, videos, prints, and expanded cinema works that explore issues of race, migration, sexual orientation, gender identity, and ability status. Gabby is also an Assistant Professor of Film Production at the Pennsylvania State University and the creator of This Week in Experimental, a weekly newsletter focused on providing resources to experimental artists seeking creative, intellectual, exhibition, and financial opportunities.

1. “Effective Teaching Is Anti-Racist Teaching,” The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. August 5, 2020. https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/teaching-learning-resources/inclusive-teaching/effective-teaching-anti-racist-teaching. ↑

2. Mihaela Mihailova, “An Anti-Racist Animation Syllabus,” Fantasy/Animation (June 19, 2020). https://www.fantasy-animation.org/current-posts/2020/6/19/antiracist-animation-syllabus?fbclid=IwAR0UhKS-M6YUDNkq_1KguEPtntUIPYynfjVIEEAZo5zgKwT8hRIz1hYRM3c ↑

3. L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Revised and Updated an Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013). ↑

4. Terri Francis, “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afrosurrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris,” Film Quarterly 69, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 47-56. ↑

5. “Villanelle,” Poetry Foundation. September 16, 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/villanelle. ↑

6. “Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Action: First Steps,” Columbia CTL (September 20, 2020). https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/anti-racist-pedagogy/. ↑

7. Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994). ↑

8. Michael Prince and Richard Felder, “The Many Faces of Inductive Teaching and Learning,” Journal of College Science Teaching 36, no. 5 (March 2007): 14-20. https://www.pfw.edu/offices/celt/pdfs/Inductive(JCST).pdf. ↑