Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

While the origins of training for the broadcast industries are grounded in work-based apprenticeships, entry-level knowledge about television production is increasingly delivered in a university setting. Despite this shift to an academic backdrop, industry-focused practices continue to guide the education delivered to production undergraduates, with a blend of practical skill acquisition, and professional discipline, informing the core principles of vocational instruction. What is often missing from industry attentive educational models are explicit opportunities to reflect during formative activities such as technical training, an omission which is both educationally reductive, but which also misunderstands the growing demand for reflective workers in the media industries. Though the application of an educational toolkit ‘Reflective Reels’, students on a Production Management (PM) course were encouraged to create new processes and ways to interpret training actions. The incorporation of activities designed to harness active reflection while ‘doing’ aimed to support learners as they took ownership of their creative process (Orr et al., 2010), Adopting a qualitative case study approach, informed by a Communities of Practice (Wenger,1998) framework, processes were incorporated to develop students’ actions, understandings, and situations through collaborative action (Kemmis and McTaggart, 2005), emphasising reflection both during and after practical sessions in the television studio environment. This examination of reflection related not only to the learners taking part in the study but also to the researcher/lecturer, exploring reflection and reflexivity as it related to their teaching practice, asking questions about their identity and personal philosophy.This paper will outline this research and offer some initial findings.