A few weeks ago, I joined a cohort of international media educators to present at the What Could Media Studies Be? conference, hosted by the Media Education Association and University of Sussex in the UK. My talk was listed as follows…
Zooming Cinematically: Making Movies Remotely
Joseph Kraemer, Towson University, USA
This is a presentation about thinking outside the box… or rather about telling a story within the “box” that is Zoom. As an educator who teaches college students how to make movies, I had to rethink what filmmaking means during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students could no longer go make their movies with actors and crew. Instead, we embraced Zoom filmmaking because the software proved to be quite capable of allowing students to produce short films that spoke to our collective experience of moving our social lives into the virtual. A new “remote aesthetic” has emerged in culture with this format.
Link to Access Conference Proceedings: https://www.themea.org.uk/post/teachers-talking-what-could-media-studies-be-videos-from-the-day
Saturday 13th February 2021
The Covid-19 Pandemic has emphasised just how vital media are to our education, work, public health, community, and leisure. Yet media education continues to be at risk as part of a wider attack on arts and humanities. The event brought together media teachers from across primary, secondary, FE and HE for reflection and dialogue about what our subject is, how we teach it, and what we think it could be.
The aims of the day were:
1. To learn from our colleagues with different levels of experience and working in different educational settings
2. To celebrate our teaching achievements after almost a year of working in incredibly difficult circumstances
3. To enhance a sense of community between primary, secondary, FE and HE media educators
4. To bring together ideas about what we want our subject to be and make plans for the future