On January 28th and 29th, NORDICIL organised the annual gathering of Film School teachers in conjunction with the Göteborg International Film Festival. This forum has slowly grown over the years, and this year it expanded to two days with a focus on film school pedagogy.
Naturally, I could not resist presenting what has become a bit of a pet project lately: an organised course for film school teaching. The title of the presentation was «From Artist to Teacher: Developing a Peer-based Training Programme for Film School Teachers».
The background for the proposal is this: there is suprisingly little in the way of organised training for professional filmmakers who are getting into teaching. This means that filmmakers have to, in large part, find their own way when they enter the teaching profession – with varying degrees of success. In addition to this, film schools (and, in fact, arts schools in general) are facing increasing pressure to formalise their programmes and accreditation of teachers under the unrelenting pressure of the Bologna agreements.
Given this situation, it makes sense both from a teaching perspective and from a «keep the education bureaurats at bay» perspective, for film schools to design and run a formal teacher training programme themselves. And, given the lack of (formal) expertise in this area, it makes sense to adopt the principles of peeragogy.
In the coming weeks and months I will be elaborating on this, as I – along with (I hope) several Nordic colleagues – further develop this idea and plan and launch a blended, distributed, film school teacher training programme.
