introduction

In celebrating the work of the film industry it is usually the directors and the film stars who attract all the attention. The inferred view of our culture is that the partnership between these individuals is the great creative act from which films spring. While this may be a sustainable position in relation to theatre, film is a very different beast indeed. As all the great film directors understand, it is the process of editing – selecting, arranging and timing a series of shots into a film continuity – which represents the vital creative act and governs the creation of meaning. Editing is what Pudovkin,called “the creative force of filmic reality”.

There is little excuse for the relative side-lining of the editor’s craft in Hollywood; they should know better. However when considering the making of films in schools (by which we now largely really mean the making of videos) there has until recently been a very real difficulty. This difficulty was the nature and availability of analogue edit machines. Because they were relatively expensive there were few of them in schools. Even in schools running GCSE and A level Media Studies it would be quite common to find only one or two edit suites. There was never enough time for pupils to be taught the skills of editing lower down the school – indeed quite often the only time they got to use this equipment was when they were editing the one and only moving image product they ever undertook as part of the formal curriculum.

If we draw an analogy with writing, the frustration and limitations of this technological bottle-neck are easily understood. Imagine the quality of end product if we only had a few sheets of paper and a couple pens for use with the whole of year 10. In this scenario, we could talk to the students about writing, we could read examples of it to them - but when it came to doing it we would only be able to say “each of you has one lesson and one sheet of paper and you are going to write your one and only GCSE essay – and by the way there isn’t time or the facility to do any drafting so you’re stuck with your first attempt”. It was hardly surprising that much of the video work I saw in 15 years as a Chief Moderator for GCSE and A level Media Studies was adversely affected by the severe restrictions candidates faced at the post production stage – not to mention the drop off in quality between generations of analogue edit which meant that the submitted work was sometimes little more than a murky mess.

The advent of digital technology means that, for the first time, pupils can now really spend time thinking about the different possibilities available when editing found footage or material they have shot themselves. Using non-linear editing facilities, they can make wholesale changes or minor tweaks to the sequences they work on. They can now genuinely put their work through a series of drafting changes, refining the way meaning is created.

There have been various research studies into the use of digital video in the curriculum. Most recently the BFI evaluation of the BECTa digital video project found that working with digital video:

• Increases pupil engagement with the curriculum
• Promotes and develops a range of learning styles
• Motivates and engages a wider range of pupils than traditional teaching methods, so providing greater access to the curriculum

The focus of the work undertaken by the Devon research group reported in this publication focused specifically on the second of these points. If digital video is really to be a key feature of learning across a range of subjects in a “transformed” secondary curriculum then the nature of the learning which is going on during the process of editing together different shots deserves careful attention.

Six teachers conducted the research work in four secondary schools across Devon.

• Nikkie Huddart works as a teacher of English and Media Studies at South Dartmoor Community College, an 11-18 specialist P.E College in the small rural town of Ashburton on the southern edge of Dartmoor. Pupils are drawn from a large and diverse rural catchment.
• Carrie McMillan is an English teacher at Tiverton High School, an 11-16 school. Alistair Fitchett is an art and design teacher at the same school. The intake of the school draws on the town of Tiverton itself and some outlying farming villages.
• Jane Richardson is an English teacher who also teaches Media Studies at Tavistock Community College, a large 11-18 specialist Languages College serving a large and diverse catchment to the west of Dartmoor. Bob Hooper also teaches at Tavistock. He began as an art and design teacher but now teaches solely Media Studies at GCSE and A/AS level.
• Gill Clayton is Head of English at Great Torrington School, an 11-16 school serving a largely rural area of north Devon.

The research methodology employed was a case study approach, focusing on small groups of students and using a combination of the following methods of data collection:

• Semi-structured interviews with the students
• Observations of case-study students during the project
• Unstructured interviews with the students during the project
• Semi-structured interviews with the class teacher for each case-study child, where appropriate, before and after the project.

Carrie McMIllan’s reseach set out to answer the following question:

“Can the process of digital editing help students achieve a more explicit understanding of story structures, by exploring the processes of a media with which they may feel more comfortable than print?”

Though the two students who worked on the exercise Carrie had set up took some time to become fully engaged with the work and frequently expressed their dissatisfaction with the lack of “finish” they were able to achieve, the work did address objectives for English relating to narratives:

“The students were continually discussing narrative structures in more abstract terms, talking about the elements and plot functions that comprise narrative. They were also made more explicitly aware of the connections between the ways films are structured, something Richard certainly was very familiar with, and the way narratives are structured.”

The research indicates that drawing on film, television and computer game narratives should be considered as not only a legitimate but also a powerful part of the English teacher’s repertoire.

Gill Clayton’s piece offers a challenge to the idea that editing is about a process of collaborative learning. Her research concluded that:

“…every group observed had a leader – or an editing leader: it was they who tended to do most of the editing, perhaps with the odd input from someone else in the group; but largely the rest of the group became observers. ”

As a teacher, Gill’s natural inclination would have been to intervene, to try and ensure that the “edit leader” was reined in. But the decision had been taken that in all research cases, once the task had been set up, teachers would observe the way the activity developed – uninterrupted. It is tempting to relate Gill’s finding back to the analogy drawn earlier between editing and writing. Though we encourage the use of drafting partners to help pupils test out their product, ultimately we expect them to write their own individual piece. Is the “creative force” at the heart of editing a similarly individual activity? Gill’s research raises this as a possibility. Further work could fruitfully be done on this hypothesis.

Nikki Huddart’s research was also concerned to explore the links between creative writing and video editing. Three clear research questions guided her observation:

1. What is the relationship between structure in editing and structure in creative writing?
2. What is the potential for children to transfer skills learnt during editing to their subsequent creative writing?
3. What is the relationship between creativity and structuring with constraints?

Her conclusions are certainly encouraging:

“The whole digital editing experience was very valuable in enabling students to see how they could edit their writing in the same way in which they edited film, without requiring them to sacrifice their own written work in the process. It also gave them strategies for structuring stories as they were ruthless in disallowing anything on screen which did not make the narrative “flow”, yet did completely the opposite in their own creative writing. The concept of audience, which they embraced so instinctively in their video editing, did not enter into their written work very often. However, after the process of editing, they were able to see the importance of “making sense” in their creative writing in the same way that they had aspired to in their editing”.

If true, then the case for greater integration of digital video work into the English curriculum is strengthened. In addition to study of moving image texts in their own right as part of their reading of a wide range of cultural texts, Nikkie’s work implies that by engaging with meaning-making through the processes of video editing, pupils’ own narrative writing will also be improved.

Jane Richardson’s research centred on observation of pairs of pupils editing “found” footage for a specified end with a view to ascertaining the ways in which non-linear editing impacts on oral and written skills. This proved to be over-ambitious within the time constraints and thus the outcome centred on the impact of non-linear editing on pupil talk. It is often claimed that when pupils use computers, the screen somehow encourages more purposeful and productive talk. Though setting out with that as her hypothesis, Jane found little evidence that this was the case. She did, however, detect a discernible impact on the learning process.

“ (An) interesting dynamic which the Avio seems to have is the facility for encouraging thinking. Students in the classroom often find silences and problem solving intimidating; it’s easier for someone to explain to you what to do than find out for yourself. The students familiarity with, and unconscious understanding of, moving image texts, seemed to encourage an engagement with task that is all too often absent when students use written texts. Their talking may not have been as enhanced as I had anticipated, but productive thinking within a minimal (but effective) mode of discourse, certainly was. “

Alistair Fitchett was the only Art teacher to be involved in the research project. It is fitting that he devotes considerable time to an exploration of the nature of the creative process and its place in the classroom. As the curriculum has congealed since the Education Reform Act of 1988, English – and by implication Media Studies – has largely been concerned with an analytical/critical paradigm. Though Art and Design has seen the introduction of a “critical studies” element, its central focus has remained in what one might loosely term a creative/productive paradigm. In 1991 I argued the case for greater collaboration and discussion between English/Media and Art teachers, on the basis that media education concepts could help inform critical studies for art while the production and aesthetic concerns of art teachers could strengthen debates about “finish” and “quality” in photography and film/video. (Other Ways of Seeing. Phillips: Journal of Art and Design Education Vol. 10 number 1). In the dozen years since, lens based art has grown to a point where major art exhibitions often seem to have more screens on display than canvases. Yet few Art and Design courses in school reflect this aspect of the gallery system and English has become gripped by a narrow testing regime and what the Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, called “the dead hand of Literacy.”

Alistair’s focus on creativity was thus a welcome addition to these studies. He sets his observation of the work undertaken by a group of Year 9 pupils against a model for creativity he developed specifically for this research project. His report certainly offers much food for thought at a general level about the nature of creativity in the school curriculum at a time when the word is increasingly seeping into government education speak. His piece also offers a view on the specific area of digital video editing and the findings have some link with Gill Clayton’s:

“(The research) raises the question about whether editing is an activity best done individually, and reflects the question as to whether this is also the case for the creative process. Can a group activity be a creative activity in itself, or is the creativity a by-product of the combined outputs of individual’s creative processes? The evidence of the editing activity seems to suggest the latter being the case.”

Bob Hooper had for many years taught art and design before “converting” to teach Media Studies full time at Tavistock Commuity College. His was the longest experience of teaching practical media production and until his participation in this research project, all the post production he had undertaken with pupils had used analogue edit systems. His focus was on the Casablanca editing system and its impact on the knowledge, understanding and skills it develops in the upper secondary sector student. His conclusions appear to offer a ringing endorsement of the advantage of non-linear edit systems over the ones Bob had wrestled with for so many years. He claims that:

• Digital editing processes allow experimentation
• Digital editing further develops knowledge about narrative structures.
• Confidence and success go hand in hand. The Casablanca promotes success through being easy to use, flexible and allowing extensive reedits and speed. Students, in the majority of cases, enjoy using it and are gratified by their success.
• Able students transfer interpretive skills from their experience of media texts to their own work more readily with the Casablanca system. The experience of digital editing feeds back and develops skills and knowledge about camera work and planning.
• The Casablanca promotes ambitious work.

These studies are by their nature tentative and partial. They do not claim to offer a fully argued critique of the place of digital video editing in learning. But at a time when digital technologies are being heralded by government as a means by which schools may “transform” their curricula, they offer a starting point for debates around the impact of this particular new technology on learning.

Martin Phillips

April 2003