How can we support students to engage with programming and leading sessions?
At the BAFA in Chelsea, we have always supported and gently pushed students to take ownership of the course and to lead sessions, choose content, and invite guests. Since COVID, the take-up of those opportunities has gone radically down, with some of them having been removed from the curriculum as a consequence (the Y2 budget of £150 per group for 3 or 4 students to invite an expert to deliver a session for them).
My research question changed throughout the project from “What skills could students gain by co-programming AV Film Forum sessions?” to “Would a more individualised level of support through 1:1s increase the take-up and the depth of engagement of the students leading those sessions?” to “What is stopping students to engage with co-programming sessions?” and I leave the ARP with the question “How can we support students to engage with programming and leading sessions in the current increasing levels of workload and external financial and caring pressures?”
What I would really like is to reclaim the joy of making time to nerd out with students.
AV Film Forum sessions were ideal for this attempt because they exist outside of the curriculum and thus the assessments. Students could self-volunteer and pull out at any time. There is also a long tradition in film of co-programming with students and of the cinema space as a pedagogical space(Buckland, 2008; Zielinski, 2014; Chambers, 2019; Kerns and Yates, 2020). Students engage with AV Film Forum from a position of nerdiness about the things they really care about, which means our 1:1s are conversations between two experts preparing them to leave the institutional framework.(Moten, 2018)
Ideally, the ARP will help us as a team to nurture spaces to co-produce knowledge outside of the curriculum and help the students find their own way to share it