Challenging Material, High Expectations, and Critical Feedback
by Jessi Meliza, Media Arts Department Chair
This post is part of The Academy Method. The full list can be found here.
The fifth tenet of The Academy Method demands that we “expose young people to challenging material, high expectations, and critical feedback.” These three pieces are part of a whole idea that our students are artists capable of great things. Because they enter our school with the responsibility that comes with high potential, they can be trusted to handle advanced material and to receive feedback as a gift that will propel them forward.
High Expectations
Setting expectations creates a structure for students to create goals. Starting high school with well-established and high expectations can be daunting, but more often Academy students find it both encouraging and liberating.
In the Media Arts Department, students create three major independent productions in a year. Starting in the fall, everyone begins to work on a project aligned to a theme that is showcased in the November Media Arts Festival. Each student, from freshmen to seniors, starts fresh on a short film, animation, collection of creative writing, or a combination of all three. Faculty demand complete, thoughtful narratives with demonstrated production value. Peers expect one another’s work to reflect well on the department as a whole. First year students start the year in the deep end, and learn through production.
Let’s take a look at the work that a freshman animation student does to prepare for the November festival. Many of our first year media students have never been in charge of a production before. Maybe they have experience with drawing, or working on a video project, but the process of realizing a fully animated vision is new. First, a student must pitch an idea. Initial ideas are sent to be workshopped with their peers and instructors. Then, the student develops the idea: What is the story? Which method of animation will the student choose? What colors, sounds, materials, and software does the student plan to explore? Then, the idea is spun into an outline, a screenplay, and a storyboard. From the storyboarding phase, the student creates an animatic with timing and scratch audio. From there, each student’s path will vary greatly depending on their chosen production path to create a complete piece.
It’s extremely daunting to be creating and learning at the same time, but having set, consistent expectations creates confidence in the process. It’s been done before. It will be done again. During the process, expectations are communicated along the way.
Students test boundaries. The job of Academy faculty is to give students some guideposts to those boundaries with clear expectations. Many students want to skip right to animating a refined character on a fully-rendered background with a slickly-produced soundtrack, because their interpretation of “high expectations” is that craft should come easily and look instantly professional. Part of our expectations as educators includes the “boring” bits of process and breaking goals into achievable steps.
Critical Feedback
Critical feedback is a necessary follow-up to high expectations. Again, let’s look at the process of our freshman animation student. Instructors are guiding students through each phase of production, but more importantly, students are required to workshop their progress. You might know “Workshop” by a different name: critique, open studio, peer feedback, giving notes, constructive criticism, etc. Every department at The Chicago Academy for the Arts has regular space for critical feedback on creative work.
Critique is a part of the process. In “Ten Rules for Students and Teachers” from Sister Corita Kent and John Cage, “Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.” By giving external space and ritual to criticism and analysis, young artists are freed up to create truthfully and naturally. Yes, students are concerned about what is “good enough” to present to their peers. But as they practice the art of Workshop and group critique, they learn that by showing the uglier stages — the bits that are tied up in knots — revealing the final, beautiful piece has more cathartic release.
Self reflection, thoughtful feedback from peers, and guidance from faculty: these are the foundations upon which the magic of artmaking can be built. Again, within the high expectations of pre-professional training, students need to recognize their technical skills, their tacit knowledge, and their artistic craft. True, constructive, and critical feedback trains that part of learning.
Outside of presenting their own work, students learn how to consume and analyze media by practicing their own skills of giving thoughtful critique. When discussing one another’s work, students learn to separate value from technical skills, effort, or intended meaning.
Workshop in Media Arts trains students’ critical eyes for their own work and the work of their peers, but it is also a building block to learning how to critically consume professional media, materials, and ideas. That brings us back around to the first part of Academy Method #5:
Challenging Material
Yes, at The Academy, we expose young people to challenging material. What is challenging material? What does it mean to sanitize material? We are all familiar with the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” and the continued conversations about which books are appropriate for young learners. Disney Plus has a content warning paired with some of its films that informs viewers of “outdated cultural depictions” that remain intact.
There are a lot of ways that material can be challenging. There are also many ways of sanitizing material that hinders real, critical thinking and analysis. Just as importantly, students need to learn how and when to challenge the art that they are consuming in or out of the classroom. Many of the “outdated cultural depictions” in those Disney films were criticized at the time of their release. How can we train our students and ourselves to parse contemporary cultural depictions, past values, and evolving mainstream ideas of acceptable understanding?
Challenging material can also be defined as work that is intellectually challenging. It may also be work that sits outside of classic literary or film canon. Some media might challenge how we view ourselves: or assumptions, our values, our beliefs.
Let’s take a look at an example that can address all of the above definitions of challenging (as well as many ways beyond that).
Two years ago, I showed students the film Apocalypse Now in a class called Film Aesthetics. This is a multi-level class for students across disciplines in Media Arts. The group that year included students who had read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, students who were studying the Vietnam War, and students who simply were invested in the trope of the lone auteur, mad genius filmmaker.
A few key pieces needed to be put into place before we dove into the film. We agreed that after the viewing of the theatrical release of the film, we would compare it to the behind-the-scenes documentary Hearts of Darkness. We also read materials that addressed the complicated history and depictions of use of drugs by armed forces during the Vietnam War. We took a look at the time period of the Vietnam War versus the time period of the making of the film. We also had the opportunity to address the ethics of managing a safe workplace for people in the film industry.
What was challenging about the film? And what did students challenge? Students were shocked about the use of language, violence, and sexualized imagery. We talked about the different reactions that we had to certain scenes in contrast to the response of audiences at the time (the movie was not especially well-reviewed). What could students identify about the roles of the filmmaker and actors? What points did the filmmakers underline, and what did they skip when adapting a story, script, or wild vision? How did the context of some of the more shocking scenes change when we viewed and discussed the documentary?
The final question has to be: why are we presenting this material in the first place? What redeems the material if it takes such effort and patience to read, unpack, contextualize, and analyze? Challenging work is not a benefit unto itself. It should also be held to high expectations, even as it is subjected to criticism.
With defined expectations, continued practice in giving and receiving critical feedback, and excellent material, students can learn how to critically engage with subject matter and themes that are above “grade level”
Students, teachers, and families at The Chicago Academy for the Arts enter into an agreement when we engage in our work. In a safe environment, traditionally uncomfortable elements of critical engagement and feedback lead to healthy thinkers, creators, and educators. If we are all doing our jobs correctly, we can let trust and criticism coexist.