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The Artist as Teacher Pedagogical development

Pedagogical development for filmmakers teaching in higher education

Overview of the programme

Film Schools in the Nordic countries, like in most other parts of the world, face a particular challenge in ensuring a highly qualified teaching staff. Most film school teachers come from the ranks of the film industry, where they have been active artists in their field. Their background may or may not have included a formal education, and their selection as teaching staff is most often based on their professional and artistic qualifications.

A teaching staff with artistic and professional qualifications is a core value for these film schools. In order to train the next generation of filmmakers and storytellers, it is necessary to give the students constant exposure to active professionals who bring the latest developments and impulses into the classroom.

The Artist as (Film School) Teacher takes elements of the blended[1] and distributed[2] course and combines this with a modular structure and peer-based instruction and assessment. Relevant theoretical influences can be found in the pragmatist education philosophy (Dewey), constructivism (Piaget), constructionism (Papert), social constructivism (Vygotsky), critical pedagogy (Freire), and peeragogy (Rheingold).

  1. What is a “blended” course?

    "Hybrid“ or ”Blended“ are names commonly used to describe courses in which some traditional face-to-face ”seat time“ has been replaced by online learning activities. The purpose of a hybrid course is to take advantage of the best features of both face-to-face and online learning. A hybrid course is designed to integrate face-to-face and online activities so that they reinforce, complement, and elaborate one another, instead of treating the online component as an add-on or duplicate of what is taught in the classroom.

    The definition of hybrid or blended continues to be a much debated topic, as does the use of the term hybrid or blended itself. Although many definitions of hybrid and blended learning exist, there is a convergence upon the three key points identified above: (1) Web-based learning activities are introduced to complement face-to-face work; (2) ”seat time“ is reduced, though not eliminated altogether; (3) the Web-based and face-to-face components of the course are designed to interact pedagogically to take advantage of the best features of each. This Web site uses the term ”hybrid“ throughout for historical reasons specific to our campus; we intend our usage, however, to include the alternative nomenclatures ”blended“ or ”mixed mode. 

    Quote from https://www4.uwm.edu/ltc/hybrid/about_hybrid/index.cfm

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  2. A distributed course is one where the learning materials and expertise are distributed more or less evenly among the participants in the network. In addition, the course itself is not centralised, but spread out among several participants. https://www.insidehighered.com...  ↩