During my time teaching film classes through the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, my central focus has been on visual literacy. My classroom has been a place where I try to contextualize filmic images in order to foreground the visual vocabulary used in cinema to manipulate the viewer. By breaking down these elements, my goal is that students will become increasingly aware of the ways in which images can obscure underlying ideals that they project to the viewer. I always encourage students to share their own experiences with film, and to become active participants in the classroom as they expand their vocabulary for talking about these experiences. Rather than passive viewers, I aim to help my students become engaged critics of film, who by mid semester have expanded their cinematic lexicon in order to express their own thoughts and analyses of media they have been viewing for a long time. As an aspect of my pedagogical approach, I avoid reductionist views of my students as passive masses consuming media mindlessly, and of myself as some more hyper-aware educator come to enlighten them. Rather I begin the first day of class by showing a clip with no sound and have the students explain to me personality traits, social interactions, and motives behind character actions in the scene, all based on visual cues. This exercise emphasizes to the students, and reminds myself that they have been developing their visual literacy from a young age, and may simply need the vocabulary to break down their own analyses.

An aspect of classroom life that has become increasingly important to me is the rejection of cynical fatalism regarding systemic problems in education and the university. I have found that while it is easy to succumb to what Mark Fisher calls “reflexive impotence,” a kind of defeatism springing from an understanding that things are bad and may not improve, it is important to me that my classroom be a separate space, a kind of zone that is secluded from the outside world. I aim to create a space where all inquiry is received generously, where students feel that they can express their own interpretations of the texts, and the competitive and highly critical outside has no part in the expression of their ideas. I am very much interested in every student succeeding in my class, and aim to make my expectation for them as clear as I possibly can from the start. In their writing I am far more interested in improvement than I am proficiency, and assign small writing projects weekly in order to track that progress, which I encourage with feedback. It has been my experience that students are far more receptive to a teacher who values their ideas and wants every participant to succeed. Rather than taking advantage of the instructor, they often seem more inclined to make an effort because they feel their work is received generously and with an open mind.

English 250: Reading Film – Fall 2020 Syllabus