A few people have asked me recently about my MA Dissertation, which focuses on the relationship between Gender and Production work in Media Studies. I've decided to put it online here, so that anyone who wants to reference it in further study can do. I do assert my right as the author to ask you to email me if you do reference it though, as this will allow me to send you the full catalogue reference for it rather than the web address.Here it is:
An investigation into the relationship between gender and production work in A-Level Media Studies by Stephen Connolly
Chapter 1 -Introduction.
Media Studies teachers often ask their students (rightly or wrongly)to start their production work from the perspective of the storyteller: “Produce a storyboard” or “Write a script for your trailer/film/advert/soap opera” is something that every Media Studies teacher will say at least once a week. The importance of the story or narrative is fundamental to Media teaching and research. What follows is an examination of many different stories – the stories that students choose to tell through their production work, as well as the real-life story of how they go about producing that work. It seems appropriate, then to start that examination with a story of my own.
A few years ago, when I was the Head of Media Studies in a large (1800 pupils) Comprehensive School on the outskirts of London, I often used to spend many hours after school supervising students who were finishing off production work in their own time. One afternoon, one of my Year 13 students came to me with the film she had made as her coursework production in Year 12, asking to re-edit and improve the finished product she had handed in a couple of months previously. I was slightly surprised at this, as she had achieved quite a high mark for the film (90 out of 120 – a solid B grade) and she had achieved an A-grade for the AS course overall, so I asked why she wanted to spend time trying to improve the film. At first she was reluctant to say, offering vague mutterings about the fact that she “could do it better now”. After some probing, she blurted out “I just want to show Martin and Paul that I can do it as well as them, that’s all”. Martin and Paul were two high-flying male students in the class who had both received very high marks (110 and 115 respectively) for the same piece of work, and had both been offered places on prestigious Media-related University courses – Paul on the Broadcasting degree at Leeds University and Martin on the Film Studies course at Warwick University. The female student in question also had applications in to these courses but had not had any kind of response. After some discussion, I agreed to let her re-edit the film, which did achieve a slightly higher mark. I relate this story because it is one of the (several) incidents which set me off on the train of thought which concludes with this dissertation. Why was it that this student wanted to compete with her male counterparts in practical work specifically, when she was easily beating them in the other areas of the course? And why was it that this incident was different to others in which I had female students in Year 13 confessing to me that they were terrified of using a camcorder? These and other occurrences led me to the exploration of the relationship between Production work and gender.
The problem of gender and how it affects classroom performance is a subject which has long bothered educational researchers, if only because it is clear to them (and many teachers) that there is a marked difference in the response given by male and female students. The issue for the teacher is one of both cause and effect. What kind of conditions give rise to the perceivable differences in attitude and achievement in their subject by girls and boys, and what kind of effect do these have on the indviduals performance and the class as a whole?
For Media Studies as a subject, the concern is compounded by two factors. Firstly the subject's unique status as a means of framing Popular Culture in the classroom, means that the assumptions about gender implicit within a lot of pop culture texts are likely to be carried in with students from the outside world. One might imagine for example, a situation in which a class full of 15 year old boys were asked to analyse magazines aimed at 15 year old girls for a Media Studies GCSE exam. To this study, the boys bring their experience of the discourse of gender and subsequently encounter an entirely different discourse. This is not a problem which is likely to face say , the teacher of Maths or Science. The second factor is that Media Studies involves production work, which in turn, by definition, must involve technology, and the relationship between gender technology is something which has occupied both sociological and educational researchers for some time. Indeed, their have been numerous studies into the relationships between gender and production work in subjects such as design and technology, but none as yet, in Media Studies. It is clear that because of historical discourses about gender that there will always be a connection between gender and the act of making things, even within the context of the classroom.
This study is then motivated by my own experience as a teacher of Media Studies in several large London Secondary schools. The above account notwithstanding, I often thought that I could detect a difference (anecdotally) between the types of production work male and female students engaged in and enjoyed. I often also thought that this involved preconceptions of and attitudes towards technology, particularly with regard to certain types of technology. I was initially convinced, for example, that girls enjoyed film and video work less than boys did, preferring to focus on the attention-to-detail and finishing required by say, print based products. The account with which I opened this chapter was one of the things which made me realise that the issue was not as straightforward as it seemed and deserved further investigation. The purpose of this study is then, to put these hypotheses to the test and to identify what kind of trends occur when one examines production work in Media Studies and its relationship to gender. Also, its purpose is to look at what kind of attitudes to and preconceptions of production work male and female students hold, and latterly perhaps to suggest ways of challenging them.
While there is no specific study that covers the ground attempted by this dissertation, there has been interest expressed in it. These theoretical observations will be given in due course, but it is worth while pointing out that there has been concern about the issue of gender and production work in Media Studies for some time. Indeed, the Second Cox report expressed a concern about girls and production work in Media Studies as long ago as 1989;
"Many aspects of media education and IT involve the use of machines…Our culture often regards machines as a male preserve, and girls may need opportunities and encouragement to show that they can be just as expert as boys in such areas" (Cox,1989)
Similarly, Jenny Grahame identified the relationship between gender and production work as one of a number of issues surrounding production in her work with David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green some years later:
"Issues such as the 'gendering' of particular technical competencies, from storyboarding to camera skills: the relationship between students ' cultural backgrounds and their perceptions of genre: and the way in which class, ethnic and gender interests might determine students understanding of narrative structure all demand fuller exploration."
(Buckingham, Grahame, Sefton-Green 1995:p.45)
This dissertation is centred around an analysis of the attitudes towards, and conduct of production projects carried out by Year 12 students at the Ursuline High School in Wimbledon, South West London who were studying for the OCR AS Level in Media Studies. It involves an analysis of the kind of things that they say about production work (through both interviews and questionnaire),a concomitant analysis of the production work they have done , as well as an examination of the things they have written about the production work experience in their evaluations of that work. This is analysis is carried out in the light of numerous theoretical perspectives: the place of production work within media studies; the pedagogy of production work; observations about gender within the Media Studies classroom; and some wider theoretical perspectives on language and discourse and education generally. What I hope to do by carrying out this analysis is to summarise the state of the relationship between gender and production work in the Media Studies classroom based on my observations. Rather than setting a single research question I think that there are four central questions that this study attempts to answer;
1) Is there a distinct difference between the type of production task which boys and girls are inclined to choose to do – and what reasons do they give for making that choice; for example is there an issue of technology here?
2) Do boys and girls differ in their attitudes towards practical work? If so why and does it matter?
3) Do boys and girls go about the production tasks set in a different way?
4) What kind of conclusions (about the nature of the relationship between production work and gender) can we draw from the content of students production work?
I firmly believe that answers to the above questions will also raise numerous questions themselves. An examination of production work and gender must by definition, also involve an examination of questions about identity, role playing, self-representation, the nature of learning (particularly in Lave and Wenger’s sense of social participation), genre and perhaps most pragmatically, the use of ICT in the classroom. The penultimate sections of this study will hopefully shed some light on these questions and some possible answers to them.
Finally, the study will deal with ways in which the issues raised may well affect the day to day running of the Media Studies classroom. This is in no way intended to be a “self-help manual” for any Media teacher who might read it, but rather as a way of drawing attention to those practical issues which do occupy classroom practitioners. This dissertation started with personal experience, and I hope it shall return there as a means of situating the observations made and the theoretical debates which are examined within it.
Chapter 2 Theoretical Perspectives: Pedagogy, Practical Work and Gender
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Media education in secondary schools has since its inception as a curriculum subject in the late 1960’s (Buckingham,2003:87) included some element of production work within its remit. In order to give some context to the discussion about production work and gender which follows, it is necessary to look at the way in which the role of production has developed within media education for two reasons. Firstly, discussions about the precise purpose of production work, may relate to the roles that male and female students take in the production process. For example, one might conjecture that one of the reasons why girls may be reluctant to undertake film and video production work is due to a dearth of role models in the film and video-industries. If one believes that production work has a vocational purpose then it may be a means of addressing this issue. Secondly it seems clear that students attitudes to practical work will be formed by the way in which the teacher presents that work to them. This presentation is to some extent dependent on the individual preferences of the teacher, but is also dependent upon the way in which production work is framed by the syllabus or specification that the teacher is delivering. In order to understand this framing process, and the subsequent attitudes to production work fostered, it is worth looking at how production work came to occupy the position that it does.
The place of production work in the Media classroom
Alvarado et al observe that production work within educational establishments in Britain has a long history. Since the 1950’s, film making has been taught at postgraduate level, and that it was being considered in schools not long afterwards, in the Newsom report on English teaching;
In 1963 the Newsom Report recommended film-making as an ‘interesting and useful’ activity for students self-expression, especially for the more disaffected pupil. Unconsciously influenced perhaps by the dominant critical view of the time that film should be recognised as an art form for individual self-expression, teachers introduced 8mm film-making into schools as an exciting extension to the general shift in English teaching away from the analytical towards an encouragement of the expressive. This pedagogic approach was given a boost in the 1970’s when advances in video technology seemed to offer the promise of everyone becoming a communicator producing their own DIY television show.
(Alvarado, Wollen and Gutch.1987:p29)
This account of the birth of production work is included here because it makes two valuable points in relation to the wider debate about the relationship between gender and production. Initially, the importance of self-expression is emphasised, and as we shall see later, this is a vital aspect of production work for both male and female students. Secondly, the notion of “everyone becoming a communicator” is even more relevant now – with the advent of the new media technologies- than it was in the 1970’s. It is this development, making media production, editing and transmission much easier FOR ALL STUDENTS, that is one of factors allowing the repositioning of gender roles within media production work.
However, the inception of production work within the media educators curriculum does not stop with the Newsom report. It is clearly not the case that production was brought painlessly into the world, not there one day, but present the next. Indeed there was (and still is) much discussion about the role. During the 1970’s and 1980’s much of the debate was characterized by arguments about production work as an expression of “creativity” and furthermore, what “creativity” actually meant. Some of the most interesting comments of the time were made by Bob Ferguson in his article “Practical Work and Pedagogy” published in Screen Education(1981). Ferguson was convinced that the vast amount of production work being done at the time was designed to occupy underachieving ( and for Ferguson, almost exclusively working-class) students, in order to stop them being disruptive to better behaved, middle class students:
The general context for practical media work has been linked with children who are expected, at best to be average. This has serious implications for the way in which practical work has been approached and it has ensured that teachers who felt themselves to be working with ‘above average’ children treated it as a diversion from more serious matters (Ferguson.1981.p42-43)
It is clear now that Ferguson did believe that there was a benefit to production work, but that this was not the benefit that many teachers saw at the time . Indeed Ferguson believed that it was essential for understanding the media from theoretical point of view;
Practical work in media studies is about making meaning and understanding how one has done it. It can be taught and practised. It does not include rationality, analysis and the desire to learn (ibid.p.42)
For Ferguson then, practical work is a means of raising issues about ideology and politics, rather than avoiding these challenging issues. He wants students’ experience of production work to involve an evaluation (if not an interrogation) of the ideas that the media product itself and the institution that created it, brings about. He illustrates these ideas with an observation that is particularly pertinent to this very study, when discussing what happens when students are not forced to confront the ideological concepts which lie behind their own production work:
A video-tape may be made about, for instance, a bank robbery. Students play out the kicking of someone’s ribs in front of the camera. They try to look as hard as The Professionals. It is a male-dominated activity and the female is often excluded or brought in in a manner which reinforces dominant sexual stereotypes. Personal experience of the media is not interrogated, contextualised, challenged or debated.
(ibid: p.48)
These comments, made over twenty years ago, highlight one of several different viewpoints about the possible purpose of production work. As we will see, others view Ferguson’s comments as limiting and limited in their scope. What is even more fascinating in the context of the current debate however, is that here, Ferguson identifies quite early on that the content of students production work can be gender-dependent. Additionally, he also notes that production work raises problematic questions about the producer and their view of issues such as gender. It would seem then, that questions about the relationship between gender (and race and class) and production work are implicit in discussions about the purpose of production.
The arguments about the purpose of practical work and the attached pedagogical approaches, rumble on, but a useful summary can be found in “Making Media: Practical Production in Media Education” by Buckingham et al. Here four key view points are presented: 1) Practical Work as Self-expression in which the creativity of the individual is emphasised through experimentation with the medium, generic conventions etc. 2)Practical Work as a Method of learning, in which the production work is designed as a means of developing or promoting certain types of skills e.g social or communication. 3)Practical Work as Vocational Training, where the production work is scene as a preparation or training for a career in the Media. 4) Practical work as deconstruction, which is the position which Ferguson, Masterman (Masterman, 1980) and others adopt, claiming that production work is a means of exploring and subverting the conventions of the media text. (Buckingham et al, 1995.p4-6). To re-iterate, I believe that the view of the purpose of production work will affect the way in which students perceive that work. While it is not the case that male and female students view production work in the above terms, it is evident that different students do view production work in different ways, dependent on their view of the wider subject, motivation and personal agendas in terms of career path, personal enjoyment etc. It is these views that will hopefully become evident in the subsequent analysis of what students say about their production work, along with how this is related to gender.
Gender and Production Work – What the Theorists (don’t) say
What of academic debates about gender and production work? As mentioned above, there is actually very little written on the topic specifically, though there is a good deal written about gender issues within Media studies generally and broadly speaking, statements about this topic fall into one of three categories: 1) Statements relating to the discussion of gender issues in the classroom; 2) Gendered behaviour in the Media classroom; and 3) The self-representation of gender by male and female students through practical and other work in Media Studies. For the purposes of this study, all three types of statement made by academics and practitioners within the theoretical field are worth consideration, as they give a sense of why gender might be important for the teacher of Media Studies in the Secondary classroom. Evidently, though it is the observations made in the third category which hold most interest here, as this brings in the element of production work.
There are a number of important pieces of research which generate statements from the first category, and these are usually reported as a arising out of the analysis of texts. Grahame (1990) and Brockie (1992) for example both comment on the kinds of discussions about gender which occur in the Media Studies classroom. While there is not sufficient room for a detailed analysis of these accounts here, what appears to be a common element in both is that they emphasise that students are aware of the way in which Media Studies frequently problematises gender by making students discuss something which they take for granted. Students realise that they are expected to comment on gender even if that means contradicting their own personal viewpoints. Grahame observes that a group of girls making a programme for a pre-school audience were highly critical of their own work because they were aware of the ideological content of it;
“…their story had been chosen because it was the only item in the programme to offer multicultural images; yet in evaluation, they were critical because there was no girl in the narrative, and the women were represented in conventional domestic roles…” (Grahame, reprinted in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992:p372)
Similarly Brockie observes that the boys in his Year 8 Tutor group know that perfume advertisers could sell the same fragrance to both men and women simply by using different images according to the intended audience, yet still will only respond to those adverts which target males. (Brockie, reprinted in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992:p372). For me, these observations and others which relate the kind of things students say about gender issues in class discussion, suggest an interesting connection with the wider aims of this dissertation. Why is it, when students are aware of the ideological baggage which comes with media texts, do they often “revert to type particularly when representing gender in production work? A good example of this will be closely examined in Chapter 5, which highlights the fact that, girls frequently want to produce film work which represents violence (sometimes highly sexualised) against women from a male point of view. These students have been taught about the objectification of the female body in mainstream cinema, agree that it is wrong, but still wish to carry on doing it in their own film work. While it is the case that numerous practitioners have offered some insight into this tension between ideological knowledge and experience (particularly Williamson, 1981) there seems to me to be a difference between what the student knows about gender issues in media studies and what they actually want to do (or not) with that knowledge. This observation could very probably be extended to any number of ideological discourses (race, class etc.) present within media texts, but it is in these observations about gender issues in discussion that are the most relevant here. They emphasise the point that the relationship between gender and media education is a problematic one and that production work is one site at which this problem may be explored.
The second type of observation or statement made about gender and media studies involves gendered behaviour in the classroom. One might say that this reflects a wider concern about gendered behaviour in school, full stop–but several pieces of research do point to the unique way in which male and female students respond to the tasks they are given in the context of media education. Andrew Burn, in his article “Spiders, Werewolves and Bad Girls” highlights this when he describes students reactions to watching The Company of Wolves;
Boy’s and girls reactions fall into distinct patterns. They sit separately to watch. Boys are more likely to crack jokes, comment aloud, follow startled reactions at shock or suspense by laughing aloud, debunk the horror…The girls comment much less, laugh much less, grimace at the horror frown when the narrative takes a complex turn, smile with appreciation… (Burn,1996;p163-164)
This would seem to indicate that the gendered difference in response to tasks set relies originates in the students relationship with the text. Here, boys laugh at the film as a means of asserting masculinity or power and as a way of establishing a bond with their fellow class mates. Girls on the other hand, seek to know the narrative and have perhaps a less knee-jerk reaction to the film. Burn’s observation here, will undoubtedly be born out by the anecdotal evidence of many Media teachers, and indeed, Buckingham comments on this phenomena at some length (Buckingham,2000;p138-141). I believe that this kind of theoretical perspective offers a link to the wider purposes of the work carried out here in that it may give some insight into what motivates students to choose certain types of practical projects.
The third type of statement is probably the most relevant here. The issue of gender in relation to production work and subsequent self-representation is tricky in that there is only really one major text on Production work in the classroom – “Making Media: Practical Production in Media Education” by Buckingham, Grahame and Sefton-Green – though David Buckingham’s most recent work also offers some interesting insights (Buckingham, 2003, p160-168). Chapter 7 of “Making Media” – (“Do I look like a prostitute?”) makes the point that representation and reality are problem areas for students and teachers when doing production work, and also raises the question of modality, which will be discussed further below. In this work, it is clear that the issue of realism with regard to self-representation is something that concerns students, especially if they end up asking the question, while producing a soap opera within Media studies, which makes up the title of this particular chapter . Perhaps more obliquely it demonstrates the fact that part of this concern is about gender;
The Second concern that is being invoked here is a more specifically educational one. In terms of our interests, we have to ask what (the student) thinks she is learning from dressing up like a prostitute; and in what ways acting the role might contribute to her understanding of, amongst other things, acting, making soaps and even being a prostitute. (Buckingham, Graham, Sefton-Green, 1995, p170)
What I am seeking here is what lies underneath the question which prompts Julian Sefton-Green to make the above statement. Not only is the question one of realism, but also one of self-realisation. “Do I look like a prostitute?” comes not only from the students desire to produce a realistic text, but also from a desire to create a text which presents the producer (either within the product as actor, or outside it as director) in as positive a way as possible. This idea is extended further in Buckingham’s account of the female students who produce a parody of Cosmopolitan entitled Slutmopolitan. Buckingham relates that the driving force behind this project is the student’s sense of humour, but that because of this the production ends up addressing some quite serious questions about gender representation in magazines.(Buckingham, 2003; p167-168) Both accounts rely upon the fact that ideas about gender were being explored through a kind of self-representation; in the soap-opera, as students took on roles and acted out character experiences, while in the case of Slutmopolitan, the students revealed their own views, feelings and ambiguity about women’s magazines. This inevitably leads to one of the questions set out at the start of this study - what exactly students are trying to say about gender through the content of their own practical work?
Within this quite narrow theoretical field, occupied by debates about the place of production within Media Education and the relationship between gender and media education – we can see that the questions generated by academics in their discussions deserve some further investigation – hopefully carried out here. Before conducting this investigation though, it is worth giving brief consideration to some wider theoretical perspectives which may be helpful.
Wider Theoretical Views – Situated Learning and Multimodality
It is clear that Media education in the classroom (and indeed outside of it) involves students learning in ways that are different to those adopted in other subjects. In this section I hope to touch on some theoretical views which may help us to understand this. The process, for example of learning to watch a moving image text, has parallels with print literacy but is obviously not the same thing. This idea is explored by Hodge & Tripp (1986, Ch.1) Buckingham (2003, Ch 3), Burn (unpublished Chs 1,2). As can be seen below, Buckingham and Burn particularly make use of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s notion of multimodality(Kress & Van Leeuwen,2001). Similarly the idea of how one learns production skills is difficult to assess – how do I learn to use a camcorder properly, or take a good picture? I would suggest that some insight into this might be gained by taking some ideas from Lave and Wenger’s concept of situated learning.
The idea of multimodality has a great deal of relevance for people researching the process of media education because it seeks to address a number of questions about the way in which students learn to deal with the substantive content of the media. Kress and Van Leeuwen argue for the idea that many texts that we encounter are multimodal in their nature; that is to say the producer making them combines several different modes of communication. A web page for example might involve written text, moving images, music and visual design. For educators the issue here is not simply that the supremacy of the written text is passing, but that their students need to develop a way of dealing with these multimodal texts that is wider than traditional print literacy, something that Kress and Van Leewen themselves advocate;
If schools are to equip students adequately for the new semiotic order…then the old boundaries between writing on the one hand…and, on the other hand, the visual arts…should be redrawn. This will have to involve modern computer technology, central as it is to the new semiotic landscape. But above all it is crucially dependent on having the means of analysis, the means for talking about the “new literacy”, about what is we do when we read and produce things.
(Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996, reprinted in Burn 2002)
There is a link here in that the final sentence of the above quotation points back to one of the questions laid out at the start of this dissertation – what reasons do students have for choosing the type of production that they do and what does this have to do with technology? One of the aims of this study is to try and understand some of the differences in the way in which male and female students approach production work. This idea of “’the new literacy’, what it is we do when we read and produce things” means that part of the production process is finding a way of describing what and how we learnt. What students learn of this “multimodal discourse” will undoubtedly be revealed by the things that they say about their production work and these utterances could be the key to understanding this new literacy better.
As a teacher of Media studies I have often thought about the way in which students might learn production skills and concomitantly the best way of teaching those skills. As Buckingham points out, there are evident difficulties with managing the learning of production skills (Buckingham, 2003; p82-83), but the question that occupies me most here is how students learn outside the regular classroom situation, as I believe that this is where students spend most time on their production work. One of the things that may arise in a study of this kind is that male and female students learn in different ways through their production work. One may look to the work of Lave and Wenger to gain some perspective on this. They propose that in many cases individuals learn socially rather than by instruction, by entering in to what they term “communities of practice” where they learn by doing, rather than by receiving information (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This can be taken as a model for explaining how students acquire production skills. When students choose a production task, it is clearly not the initial instruction session given by the teacher which teaches them how to use a camcorder or take a picture or construct a web page. It is the process that occurs afterwards, when they consult each other and older, more experienced adults and enter a “community of practice” where they really learn the skills they need to complete the task. No one would deny that students consult older adults for help in other schools subjects (such as Maths, say) outside class, but it is only in Media studies, where students are expected to complete a task independently, that they are often “apprenticed” - to use Lave and Wenger’s term – to each other and to older adults. As the data in Chapter 4 indicates, some of the students choose a particular production brief precisely because of the ease with which they can apprentice themselves to a parent or older sibling.
Reviewing the literature surrounding the central questions set by this dissertation should lead us to the conclusion that there is good deal of work which skirts around the main issues relating to gender and production work. Several theoretical positions provide starting points to investigate the issue but none deals with it directly. As we shall see, this may be because there is evidently some difficulty in assessing a relationship that students and teachers are often not directly aware of but evidently does have some bearing on the work that they do.
Chapter 3 – Methodology
The bulk of the data for this study comes from the two Year 12 Media Studies classes at the Ursuline High School in Wimbledon. I have taught these two classes for the last 10 months, and the study focuses on both their comments about production work and the work they have done. UHS is primarily a 11-18, non-selective, Catholic Girls High School (NOR 1100) in Wimbledon, Southwest London, but it has a confederated 6th form with the nearby boys school, Wimbledon College. The cachment area of the school stretches from Streatham and Croydon in South London, to Hounslow in the West, via Kingston and large parts of North Surrey. The school is about 40% ethnic minority intake, and the two classes that are referred to in this study are both made up of boys and girls.
These students are following the OCR AS/A2 Media Studies course, in which the production constitutes 40% of the final mark. The work look at here is for the AS course, where students can opt for one of six different production briefs set by OCR, (see fig.1) working in a range of different Media. They have approximately 6 months to complete the project, which is assessed for a) Planning and Research, b) Construction and c) Production Report/Evaluation. Figure 1 outlines the Production briefs available to the students and also shows the number of students –male and female – opting for each one.
Figure 1: Choice of production tasks – male/female ratio
Brief 1)Film 2)TV 3)Print: Ads 4)Print Magazine 5)Radio 6) New Media Total male/female
Male 8 1 0 2 2 6 19
Female 10 4 2 9 0 3 28
Total 18 5 2 11 2 9 47
Here it can be seen that the Film brief – in which students had to make a two minute opening sequence from a thriller movie – was the most popular option for both male and female students. This is interesting in itself as it seemed to indicate that film making was as appealing for males and females. After this, the options were quite distinctly polarised, with Magazine making being much more popular with females than with males, and the New Media option being much more appealing for males than females, with double the number choosing this brief. What lies behind these figures is a complex set of reasons that are, I believe, connected to social class, technology, self-representation and identity and the subsequent study, will I hope bring them to light.
The raw data for this study comes from three sources. Initially I conducted three of semi-structured interviews with small groups of students. These consisted in raising a standard set of issues and topic questions I was interested in discussing with four or five students together to promote a group discussion. I conducted these interviews during the time when students were working on their productions, in most cases before or just after they had started construction work. I also asked all the students to complete a questionnaire (see appendix 3) after the completion of their practical work. The second source of data comes from the students finished production work itself. As can be seen in chapter 5, in analysing this I have taken an opportunity sample (Brown & Dowling, 1998; p.29-30) of six students (three male, three female) and looked at their finished productions, making observations about what the texts themselves say about their producers. In effect this is the kind of qualitative textual analysis outlined by Brown and Dowling (ibid;p85-89) in which the text, in this case the students production, is referred to the ideological concept of gender Finally, what the students say about their work in the arena of the production report comes under scrutiny. Chapter six consists in looking closely at what the same six students write in their production logs and what that reveals about the relationship between gender and production.
The reasoning behind a mixed approach to methodology is twofold. Firstly, by using a combination of interview, questionnaire, and qualitative textual analysis I hoped to uncover both the things that students say directly about gender, through interviews and analysis of production logs, as well as what they say indirectly through the content of the work they produce. As mentioned in Chapter 3, gender is a problem area for both teachers and students within Media Studies, and both may possess knowledge about gender without knowing what to do with it. The production work itself is , I believe, a means of demonstrating this dichotomy. Secondly, I fell that a mix of qualitative research methods would be more useful than any quantitative approach (such as content analysis, for example) as they would better enable me to establish generalizations about the nature of the relationship between gender and production work in media education.
Chapter 4 -Data Analysis: The Interviews and Questionnaires
The initial interviews focussed on the period before and during the period in which the students were working on the construction of the product. Students could opt to do one of six different productions (See Chapter 3, appendix 1) and the interviews posed a number of questions about the decisions surrounding and perceptions of, that production work. (see appendix 2). These questions were used as a starting point for a more wide ranging discussion, and this semi-structured interview technique (Deacon et al,2002: Brown & Dowling, 1998) was employed as a means of finding out about the gender differences in perceptions of practical work without "loading" the questions so that there was evidently a different set of questions asked of male and female students. Subsequently, at the end of the production period, I asked students to complete a questionnaire (see Appendix 3) regarding their work. This is analysed later on in the chapter.
In order to carry out the analysis of student responses in the interview situation, I decided to loosely code them into a number of different categories in order to establish whether or not a pattern emerged in terms of the kind of statements male and female students made about practical work and the issues surrounding it. This coding process equates with the fourth stage of Brown and Dowling's mode of interrogation, namely , the asking of the question "What is the general empirical field within which the work is located". As the research question focusses on the relationship between gender and the attitudes to and perceptions of practical work in Media Studies, the statements were coded into the following categories. 1) Statements made by either boys or girls: 2) Statements about Media Studies as a subject 3) Statements about practical work: 4) Statements about technology and 5) Statements about gender issues. Here, a statement is defined as any utterance longer than a “yes/no/nil” response. Clearly, some statements are likely to overlap and may fall into more than one category, but for the purposes of clarity, I have decided to allot statements to only one category.
This coding process revealed that boys and girls made roughly equal contributions to the interview discussion (53% - 47% with girls in the majority) and subsequently the majority of the discussion focussed on statements about the nature of production work itself and the technology used to produce it (60% of all statements were about these two topics, in fact). This information obviously comes with the caveat that the questions were designed to generate discussion about gender and technology, and thus slightly biased, it is clear that the students had a lot to say on these topics, which obviously occupied a good deal of their concern. While the number of statements about gender made was very small, these were, as can be seen below, quite revealing. What follows then, is analysis of this interview data.
Analysing the Interviews
Bearing the statements made by the Cox Report etc (see above) in mind one might expect girls to make negative statements about the technology involved in practical work, but I really want to go beyond this really rather vague generalisation and look at the apparently differing attitudes that girls and boys have to practical work. Indeed these statements about "girls and technology" do not appear to have a solid basis when one looks closely at what girls really have to say about the hardware and software that they use. Indeed, the initial figures brought to light in Chapter 3 suggest that female students are as equally at home with film-making as boys are, despite it being a “technology-heavy” medium.
In the interviews, there were some concerns raised by students of both sexes about the technological aspects. One male student, Jamie, expressed an inability to use a computer but then acknowledged that he would have to become familiar with one in order to edit his film. This was the reason why he chose not to do the Web-based or print based briefs.
Jamie: Um. I'm not much good at computers, so I thought that the web and print-based stuff would be a waste of time.
And later on:
Jamie: I've got no idea how to edit. So I've got to learn to do that today, so I can edit tomorrow!
Similarly, Kathleen said that she did not really feel able to use a computer confidently, despite the fact that she had chosen the film brief and would need to use a computer to edit the film.
Kathleen:I don't know about the website one… I don't really enjoy that side of the Media … you know the technology.
SC: But you've got really use to the camera
KM: I've come to like the camera yes.
SC: So why do you say you don't enjoy the technology but you like the camera?
KM: I've got a preconception about it…I'm a bit fearful of technology…I don't know…when you write things down on paper you know they're not going to go anywhere. Computers are a bit more dodgy than that.
It was clear that for these students, preconception was the key theme here. When pushed for an explanation about their apparent lack of confidence with the computer, it became clear that they didn't see the computer needed to create a website or magazine as the same computer they needed to edit their films. Indeed the process of editing seemed to be something isolated from the skills required to operate a PC. When pushed for an answer about any problems he anticipated with the editing process, Jamie replied "No, it'll be alright". (Notwithstanding his previous comments about not being very good with computers). Jamie's comments may well lead us to conjecture that there is status ascribed to the different types of activity that students might be carrying out under the guise of practical work.. Film-making, in which students feel that they are in some way imitating the glamour of Hollywood professionals, could for some students, be a higher-status activity than the anorak-coated world of the internet , despite the fact that both require a fairly high level of ICT skills to produce a good finished article.
Despite the concerns of these students, other students of both sexes had no qualms about the technology involved in practical work. Witness Ryan for example:
Ryan: I'm quite a whizz on the computer and I thought that making a website wouldn't be too hard. But now getting down to the work has been harder than I thought. I'm normally on the computer 24-7 anyway.
One might think that this is typically adoleascent male behaviour: bragging about one's proficiency with a computer, claiming that the work would be easy etc. However, Ryan's comments have a great deal in common with those of his female classmate, Kim;
Kim: I find it easy to do webpages because I'm OK with the computer, and I 've got one or two around the net that I've made before, so I found it easy. I did that rather than a film or adverts, because I'm not good at the whole-text writing thing. (??)
SC: What do you mean by that?
Kim: I mean writing enough to fill a whole supplement. And I don't have the patience to make a film. Too much editing and stuff.
In the light of the comments from the Second Cox report, one could easily have expected the things Kim says to be uttered by a boy. It seems that attitudes to technology are being formed less and less by gender and more and more by issues such as access to that technology, and by family background in which use of that technology is encouraged. This idea is ratified by Rebecca’s comments, who says of her production;
Rebecca: My family are involved in advertising. They sometimes do adverts at work, so I thought it would be quite easy to do.
Rebecca is undoubtedly working within what Lave and Wenger would call a “community of practice”. And later on;
Rebecca: I’m using my computer at home, and I don’t have any problems with that.
In order to give a theoretical perspective to this point, it is useful here to make reference to Pierre Bordieu’s ideas about cultural and academic capital. For Bordieu, there is a distinction between a) what an individual learns in school, b) what an individual learns at home and c) the combination of the two.
"Academic capital is, in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school (the efficiency of which depends on the amount of cultural capital directly inherited from the family)" (Bourdieu 1979, p.22,)
In respect of gender, the kind of comment which Cox makes in 1989, seems to place emphasis firmly on the fact that boys acquire certain kinds of cultural capital ( concerning ICT) outside school, in the home and in friendship groups, thus increasing the value of their academic capital. I would suggest that this implication is being rendered obsolete by a number of factors, not least the fact that ICT is now compulsory in Secondary schools in the UK. As girls adopt the skills and language of ICT, reinforced by access to that Technology at home and encouraged by parents who see computers as useful tools, the value of their academic capital increases, matching and surpassing that of their male counterparts. The comments above made by Kim and Rebecca, bear this out.
Kim , Rebecca and Ryan's academic capital appears to be of a higher value than Jamie and Kathleen's when it comes to ICT skills. This difference is not about the “gendering” of technology but about other social and educational factors – something which may surprise some observers.
While there were only a very small number of statements made by students about gender, these do prove both interesting. Two in particular are worth mentioning here, because I believe they relate, indirectly to perceptions about the kind of production work that male and female students are expected to engage in. Take Rob’s comment when asked about his choice of brief:
Rob: I’m a bit of a geek anyway so I did the computer one because I felt more comfortable with it.
The use of the word “geek” here is what should hold our attention. That Rob chooses to describe himself in these terms, which is essentially a view of himself mediated by other people, implies that it was almost inevitable that he chose the ICT brief. The use of the word geek to describe an someone (usually male) with an “obsessional interest” (Oxford Dictionary of New Words) in a particular topic – in this case computer technology – says a great deal about Rob and about his view of the kind of production work he not only wants to do, but is expected of him, being the kind of 17 year old male that he is. This may seem to contradict the observations made about the progress of girls and technology, but it must be emphasised that this seems to be a view Rob is imposing on himself, or thinks that other people have already imposed on him. We might see Rob as conforming to the view of gender and production work outline in the Cox Report, and as I have already asserted that this view is less and less relevant, it is important point that Rob was the only one of the 19 males included in the study to use a word like this. How the classroom teacher might handle this kind of expectation in the classroom will be considered in chapters 7 and 8.
It is also interesting to see that some of the female students see their male counterparts as source of information or authorities when it comes to technologies. Witness Krystal’s comments about the editing she will be doing.
Krystal: …I’m going to edit using Moviemaker. There’s a guy in the other class who’s used that and his film looks really good, and he says it’s easier to use than Adobe Premiere
Krystal is not making any admission of her own lack of competence here – she is going to edit using the Moviemaker package – but merely using the knowledge of a male student (perhaps the kind of knowledge that is implicit in Rob’s description of himself as a geek?) in order to help her as a task. Krystal is one of several females in the class who see their male classmates as a resource to be tapped, not in order to do the task for them, but so that they can learn about the technology required to do the job in hand.
From the interview transcripts, a picture emerges of two contrasting positions. The first is that technology and its use are, for some students, not related to gender, but to social factors, such as access and familial support. The second position suggests that in some respects, technology is still gendered, but that in a post-feminist culture, female students are much more prepared to use their male counterparts as a resource in order to gain the knowledge needed.
Analysing the Questionnaires
The questionnaires were written and administered by myself and a student from the Central School of Speech and Drama’s PGCE Media Ed. Course who was working with me at the time. They are similar in form to a general evaluation proforma that I use at the end of every major piece of practical work, but the questions are adapted to suit the purpose of this study and a piece of research work that the PGCE student was doing at the time. The questionnaires were anonymous, in order to encourage candour in student response, with the questions pertinent to this study being nos. 5-14, which relate directly to production work.The most interesting aspect of these responses was the differing things that male and female students said about their approaches to production work.
For example, the majority of female responses to question 8 ( “What area of practical word would you say your strengths lay and why?”) involved the word “creative”, with students here describing themselves as “being creative” or enjoying the “creativity” of the subject. Male students on the other hand tended to respond by describing a particular skills that they were good at, such as “editing” or “storyboarding”. I believe that this points to one of the differences in male and female students attitudes to production work. This would seem to indicate that for males, one of the things that they enjoy about production work is the chance to acquire specific skills. This is reinforced if we momentarily return to the interview stage of the study, and take a look at two responses (from Jamie and Peter);
Peter: I’m pretty comfortable with it. I mean I’ve learnt new skills along the way, but generally I just got on with it, you know…taught myself.
And;
Jamie: I've got no idea how to edit. So I've got to learn to do that today,
For female students it seems to be the opportunity to be creative that is appealing, and specifically, the chance to create a good finished product. One questionnaire response stated that “I’d like to think I’m visually creative, because my finished piece looked good”. This was written by a female student who was doing the Brief 3 (Magazine), and is fairly typical of students like her, who felt that their work “achieved the best grade possible” or felt they “could have done a better evaluation. This attention to detail contrasts with male students, many of whom felt their work was “badly planned” or could have been better if they had to do “less other work”. However, if we go beyond these responses, it becomes clear that the male students do take a positive delight in the actual process of making the product. Not only does this link back to the notion of acquiring specific skills mentioned above, but also points to the idea that the male students would rather be “doing it” than “planning it”. Whereas several female responses to the questions about their finished product mentioned things like enjoying |”researching and compiling information”, male responses often included things like “ (when) filming, I knew what I wanted and I was good at directing people to achieve this” and “the ICT brief allowed me to experiment with sound and video at the same time” or “I think I’m a hands on person”. This last comment was made by one of the students who described his work as “badly planned” thus seeming to highlight this contrast between planning and doing.
Something that the questionnaires reinforced however was that there was no apparent gender difference in male and female students willingness to use technology. Witness these two female responses;
“I find I’m really good with computers, so I would say my strengths lay in computers and photography”
and
“I felt I’d be more capable of accomplishing Brief 3 …due to the fact that I had software at home”
Again the notion of access to technology is more important here than gender. It seems that the majority of girls in the class were quite happy to use computers, camcorders, digital cameras etc, to achieve the task in hand.
To conclude then, it is clear that the questionnaires indicate some basic differences between male and female attitudes to production work in the class. Male students seem to enjoy the actual production process; female students seem to take pleasure in the planning and organisation and arrival at the finished product. The responses also raise the thorny problem of creativity again, something which caused debate in Chapter 2. It seems to be the case that female students use the word more freely than their male classmates to describe what they enjoy. I would posit that this does not mean that male students are any less creative than females but that females use the word creative to describe the process they go through when they are developing their ideas – the “planning” and “organising” that many of them talk about. The male students use this word less because they seem to be less concerned with these areas of the production, but it is undoubtedly in the “doing it” that their creative instincts are to be found. It is my belief that these views are supported through a closer examination of the production and evaluation work itself which follows in the subsequent two chapters.
Chapter 5 – Analysing the Data: Production Work
This chapter and the one that follows it both focus on the work of six students in the class, three of whom are female (Louise, Tania and Sarah) and three of whom are male (Hendrix, Rob and Tom). Of these students, only two, Sarah and Rob, had taken part in the interview stage of the study, though all had completed a questionnaire. This opportunity sample of six was chosen primarily because they were some of the students whose work had not been sent to the moderator, but also because they provided a chance to view work done for the most popular briefs. Louise, Tania, Hendrix and Tom all chose Brief 1, which involved constructing the opening of a thriller. Sarah, chose Brief 3, which was to produce the colour supplement for a new Sunday newspaper and Rob chose Brief 6 – producing a new entertainment Website. These students are a broad cross section of the class, and their unmoderated final marks ranged from 110 out of 120 to 80 out of 120, where the lowest mark in the class was 67 and the highest 113. Here , there actual finished product will be analysed and in Chapter 6 closer attention will be paid to what the students wrote about the production process in their reports. In Chapter 6, only five production reports are analysed as one student (Tom), did not hand his in. Hopefully this analysis will give some answers to the fourth question posed in Chapter 1 – what the content of students production work tells us about its relation to gender.
Louise –“ The Case”
Louise’s production work is a short (4 minute) film opening in which a woman returns to the scene of a crime she committed some years before. At the opening of the sequence, we see her returning to the scene and encountering another woman, who it transpires she stole a case from. The film then moves from this encounter to a flashback sequence in which the actual theft is shown. In her log Louise refers to these two characters simply as the “protagonist” and the “antagonist” respectively. After the flashback sequence the narrative returns to the encounter between these two, and the extract ends with the opening titles appearing over shots of the antagonist chasing the protagonist down the street.
What is most interesting about watching Louise’s film is the aggression with which her characters behave. Her cast of four is entirely female, and yet they move around the screen with the vigour of all male action heroes. They leap around rooms, dive into hiding places, confront each other aggressively, and chase each other, full pelt down streets and through gardens . As we shall see in her production log Louise is very clear about why she wants her characters to behave in this way, but even without her written input it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that this is a female student who has spent a lot of time watching films targeted at men and wants to make a film like the ones she has seen but with women.
The film is well edited, contrasting (perhaps a little stereotypically) black and white film to show past action and colour film to show present. Also interesting is the choice of music for the extract, which moves from an atmospheric remix of Portishead’s “Glory Box” to the frenetic guitar-thrash of “All My Life” by the Foo Fighters. What is obvious is that this music was chosen with the kind of deliberation which one would expect of a real life director. The freeze-frames in the chase scene are deliberately timed to coincide at the points where the music stops, and then, when the music starts again, the action continues.
Outside observers might see the content of Louise’s work as being more typical of that done by boys, but she is only one of several female students whose film work represents women in this way – in essence as strong, aggressive and as devious as any man. What we have here is the female filmmaker who enjoys “male” genres and wants to work with them using female protagonists Louise has obviously watched a lot of suspenseful, psychological and violent thrillers (her product research focuses on Pulp Fiction, Silence of the Lambs, Psycho and Alien) and sees no reason why they should not be made by girls.
Tania: Loved to Death
Tania, like Louise, has produced the opening to a thriller in which two women have mobile phone conversations and then one of them ends up dead, with the editing implying that the other is the murderer. It differs from Louise’s in two main respects; firstly, while we do see a dead body, we do not see the level of confrontation and aggression that features in the first film. Secondly the editing, is remarkably skilful in that it frequently allows the producer to play tricks on its audience. We see the women talking on the phone and assume that they are talking to each other, though at the end of the film it is clear that the victim at least has been talking to the police. Similarly at one point, the audience is convinced into thinking that one woman is asleep on a bus shelter bench, when in fact only closer examination, she is dead. The editing process that allowed Tania to create these effects is something which occupies a great deal of time and thought for students in this particular age group, as shall be seen below in the analysis of production logs. Tania for example, used iMovie to edit her film as she had access to it at home; Louise on the other hand, used Adobe Premiere, which is the package available to students at the school. Both students however, mastered the software to the point at which they could create quite sophisticated effects with it, and were able to doing things such as cross-cutting between two different timelines in order to create a sense of continuity. As Andrew Burn has commented on several different occasions (Burn & Parker 2001, p33 Burn et al 2001, p34 -40) the nature of digital video means that manipulation of film and images means that the creation of film is something that is now accessible to everyone. I would say that here “everyone” is quite definitely male and female students, as Tania demonstrates.
Sarah: Sundae
Sarah chose Brief 3, which involved producing the supplement for a new Sunday Newspaper. This kind of print based brief is still a popular choice for many students and teachers and indeed, as a moderator of both A-Level and GCSE coursework, I have often found entire centres of 100+ students producing this kind of work. Anecdotally, many teachers would identify this kind of production as being popular with female students, and so at first glance, Sarah’s work seems to be reverting to type. However what is most interesting here is the way in which she has used technology, and what the content of her work says about the way she sees the production.
The front cover of the magazine consists of a large image of a girls face (the model) stretched to cover the whole of the A4 front cover. Over this have been laid a masthead, sell-lines, puffs and other standard layout conventions of a magazine. Aside from the slight graininess of the main photo, which occurs because a normal sized photo has been blown up to A4, the cover looks very accomplished, demonstrating Sarah’s ability to use appropriate fonts, colours and styles for the task. It is quite clear that she has mastered some of the more arcane aspects of Microsoft Publisher. The heart shaped puffs at the bottom of the cover are not unlike the kind of techniques the News of the World’s Sunday magazine frequently use.
While much of the promised content of Sarah’s magazine is standard female-orientated fare, the double page spread that she chooses to include is a little untypical. The review of the Barnett Newman exhibition is not unusual for a Sunday Supplement but is, I would argue, what some teachers might not expect from a female student when asked to do this kind of task. As Buckingham notes, the kind of work that female students produce when faced with magazine making has (historically) tended to be about representing the interests of the producer or as a space for pushing back the boundaries of acceptable comment in a school context. Sarah is only one student but she is an example of the fact that it may not do to generalize about what male and female students will produce when faced with a practical task.
Rob : pubmaster.com
Rob chose brief 6, which asked students to create a homepage and six linked pages from a new entertainment webzine. Pubmaster.com focuses on what people might do for a night out in Wimbledon, the locality in which Rob lives. The Home page is divided into three different sections – pubs, bars and clubs and features pictures, reviews and ratings. The pictures of the inside and outside of venues are taken with a digital camera and the pages have been generated with the help of a software package (Microsoft FrontPage).
What comes across immediately from this work is it’s organisation. Everything is very clearly labelled, navigation bars are easy to use and the work has a clear sense of what a good website should be like. Here it is obvious that Rob has not only mastered the technology but also has an attention to detail, which some observers might feel is uncharacteristic of male students. Certainly, some of Rob’s male classmates who also did this brief did not organize their work as well as he did. It is also interesting to note that he takes A-Level Design Technology, which may account for the presentation of his work.
Despite the meticulous neatness of the work, it is very much male orientated. The idea of a website devoted to pubs is something which is unsurprising in the current cultural climate, and indeed Rob takes as his model similar websites, based on the Monopoly Board and Circle Line pub crawls , both of which are authored by men. The website is presented in a striking blue and black colour scheme, seemingly asserting the creators masculinity. Rob’s work however reinforces the idea that new media technology facilitates students skills and imagination in a way that perhaps old media technologies do not. Here is a male student with a good eye for design who has been allowed to progress beyond the traditional print based project of magazine making, rather in the same way that Louise and Tania have been allowed access to the previously “secret” (and male?) world of film-making through their use of iMovie and Adobe Premiere. In Rob’s case the facility of Microsoft FrontPage makes it possible for him to combine his (feminine?) attention to detail with technology to produce a male orientated product.
Hendrix: Critical Data
Hendrix ’work is another piece of film making, this time a bizarre introduction to a film in which the narrator relates the story of how a computer disk with some vital information came into his possession and then how a masked intruder followed him and fought him for possession of the disk. A large proportion of the film is taken up by an extended martial arts – style fight scene, at the end of which the narrator wins and retains the disk.
This film, like a great deal of film work done by male students at this level relies on a good deal of violence and dramatic changes of camera angle to sustain the “interest” of its audience ( see figure 1). For many male students undertaking this brief, “thriller” means violence, but what often makes them unconvincing is the location in which these are filmed. Indeed the comments Bob Ferguson makes in 1981 often still seem to ring true today (see above)
Fig 1. Stills from “Critical Data”
For example, as an external moderator I frequently see “Sarf-London” gangster movies that have been shot in rural Buckinghamshire. Hendrix’ film is no exception as it tends to degenerate into a kind of kung-fu film which is set in a suburban garden. However, some of Hendrix difficulties with the genre that he is meant to be working in are caused by his relationship with the technology he is using, something that he elaboarates upon in his production report (see below). He also demonstrates something that is quite common amongst many male students, which is over-ambition. He wanted to do some quite complex things in editing, but did not leave himself enough time to do them. When questioned about this though, he did not regret his lack of organisation, but commented that the most important thing was that he had shot the film, as this was the thing he had enjoyed the most. Hendrix’ comments reinforce the ideas that came out in the interviews and questionnaires – namely that the ideas and the process of realizing the idea itself is much more important to male students than finishing the product.
Tom : Cassandra
The final piece of work examined here is another opening to a film. In “Cassandra” two women meet in a London Café . While in conversation they begin to discuss a locket that one of them is wearing. The implication is that the locket has secret powers and that great misfortune befalls the person who has opened it and sure enough, towards the end of the opening, one of the two women has a minor accident.
Cassandra is short on action and heavy on dialogue, and consequently did not achieve the highest of marks, but , for the purposes of this study it raises some interesting questions about representation. Tom, a male film maker features two women as his central characters, and his script gives some clue as to how he views women. His protagonists are professional, smart women who “do coffee” and work in journalism. Here we see a male student attempting to give a more representative (if a little clichéd) portrayal of women by making them central to his production. I would suggest that in the same way Louise has watched a lot of “male” genres before producing her film, Tom has watched a lot of “female” genres, and uses these as the basis for his representation of women. Here we see the idea that the relationship between gender and representation in production work is changing.Tom’s piece of one of six or seven done by male students in this cohort whose filmic protagonist is a woman and who attempt to make more complex representations of women beyond the wife, girlfriend or victim stereotypes which have historically populated student film work.
The production work presented by these students does bear out some of the issues and contradictions raised by the interview stage of the study, and indeed, demonstrates that the relationship between production work and gender is more complex than some of the initial views expressed on it suggest. It is in an examination of the production reports that one finds an elaboration of some of these issues.
Chapter 6: Data Analysis – The Production Logs
Upon completion of the construction of their product, students are expected to write a 2000 word evaluation of the process called a Production Log, which is worth around 25% of the final mark that students receive for the production module. Almost inevitably, it is often the thing that students leave until the last minute, but a close analysis of this piece of writing often reveals how students truly feel about the production process, as it is often the climax of the project where they have expended the most energy. I believe that it is here that we will find some of the most interesting insights into the relationship between production work and gender.
Louise: “…women also possess physical strength….”
Louise’s evaluation provides us with some insight into the thought process that were going on when she filled her film with the aggressive female protagonists that she does. In the final section of her log, she writes;
“ I wanted to illustrate how women possess physical strength and can go against the conventional concept that women are the physically weaker gender, both physically and mentally…The antagonist wants to use physical strength to retrieve the case from the protagonist, though she fails and a chase ensues, suggesting their may be violence later on”
This is a bit more than just wanting to even up the playing field in terms of the portrayal of men and women. It seems as if Louise wants to reinforce the post-feminist idea that not only can women be as tough as men, but they can retain their femininity. She cites an interesting female precedent for her work;
“The only mainstream film where a woman appears in an action role and is not a feeble, ineffectual woman is Terminator 2. Sarah Connor, played by Linda Hamilton, is both physically strong and intelligent, telling the men what to do and when to do it. She is the mother to mankind’s saviour, John Connor, possessing maternal qualities (and)…a physically strong freedom”
Sweeping statements aside, Louise’s perception of Sarah Connor as a kind of gun-toting Virgin Mary demonstrates that she is aware of the stereotypical representation of men and women in action thrillers and wants to change that. Her film work becomes a space where she can challenge what she has seen and present an alternative view. It may well lead us to the view that production work in Media Studies, like many other areas of cultural life and education is a place where this post-feminist view of the world can be expressed.
Louise does not spend any time in her evaluation discussing the technological process of constructing the film. There is no discussion about using the camera, or about the use of software to edit the film. Given the high quality of the finished product, it seems safe to assume that this was not a problem for her, and that the project of creating a film that is “different” is the main concern. Indeed, she spends quite some time giving theoretical justifications for her choice of camera angle, mise-en-scene and soundtrack. Louise wants to create something that competes with the boys on every level; in terms of content, practical skill and theoretical perspective – but make something that is definitely by and for the girls.
Tania: “Dogs kept barking and running into the shot…”
Unlike Louise’s production log, Tania’s does not give any theoretical justifications for the decisions taken in production but is largely a straightforward account of the process of making her film. Perhaps the oddest thing about the account is the part where she relates her original idea for the film;
“My original idea for the content/storyline of my opening sequence was gang rape…However after careful consideration, I changed my original idea from rape to murder as I felt that I would be able to convey this more easily to an audience”
Tania is a quiet student from a middle class family of South Asian extraction. The fact that she wanted to make a gang rape the central theme of her film puzzled me, as she did not seem to be the type of student to be interested in this kind of subject matter. In fact, she only changed her idea because her audience research showed her that quite a lot of her classmates were shocked by the idea. Tania refused to be drawn on where her original idea came from, but it was clear that she thought that “rape, murder and bodily harm” were the things that should form the content of a thriller. Tania’s ideas here are indicative of something that I would suggest is occurring more frequently in production work. Unlike Louise, who is to some extent, making the film for herself and her female audience, Tania is making the film she believes men will want to watch. She sees the thriller as a male genre, a brief which has been set by a male Chief examiner and will be seen by her male classmates and teacher (me). This is disturbing but not untypical.
Apparently, Tania’s main technical problems were to do with locations and actors and subsequently the things that happened to those locations and actions. She writes;
“The scene in the park, where the girl was lying on the floor dead was difficult to film because dogs kept barking and running into the shot, yet after many takes we completed it.”
These kinds of difficulty are the sorts of things that occupy Tania’s mind during the production process; weather, actors, locations etc. Like Louise she does not see the process of editing as at all problematic.
“Luckily I was able to edit at home, otherwise it would have been a rush to edit at school, due to the fact that I missed my time slots because I hadn’t finished filming.”
Again access to the technology is what is governing the students use of it. Tania’s comments in her production log bear out the idea that for many female students technology is not about whether or not they see themselves as able to use it, but whether or not they can get at it.
Sarah: “You can’t really get a bleed on the paper”
The most interesting aspect of Sarah’s production log is its obsession with software. Sarah used several different packages and she talks at some length about them. This would seem to indicate one of two things; either she is very proficient with the software concerned, or she believes that mentioning them will in some way get her extra credit. As I had explained to the students that this latter belief was incorrect, we can assume her proficiency. For example;
“I constructed my product using a combination of Microsoft Works Word processor, Coral Print House and Coral Photo house. I use Microsoft Works Word processor for the basic layout and printing of the product. I used HP director package to scan my images into the computer. Once they were in the computer I used Coral Photo house to manipulate and improve my images for the articles”
Sarah is an individual who has an eye for detail. She, like Rob also studies design, but here is using the technology as a means of improving her finished product.She does not see the technology as an obstacle to her producing the supplement, but as a means to making it better.
Also interesting is Sarah’s adoption of a technical vernacular when describing the production process;
“When I printed it off for the first time I realised I had to change the page layout because it wouldn’t have looked like a supplement article, it would have been too small. So I changed the settings so that the galleys would go as close to the edge as possible. But knowing that you can’t really get a bleed on the paper I knew I wouldn’t get it as perfect as I would have wanted.”
It is important to dwell on the linguistic choices that Sarah makes here. Use of the terms “galleys”, “page layout” and “bleed” all imply an absorption of the language of the magazine medium or industry and a desire to demonstrate the knowledge of it that has been acquired. Perhaps more telling though, is the last line. The desire to “get it perfect” is something that characterises students work (often girls) in the print and ICT based media.
Rob: “I have learnt the hard way…”
In the very first paragraph of Rob’s evaluation, we may find a clue to one of the complex reasons why and how male students make the choices that they do when they are deciding about production work;
“When choosing, I looked at my own personal strengths and weaknesses. I had no previous experience of using a camcorder and the editing suite so I decided to rule out the film-making idea”
Rob presents us with with the idea that for male students, their may be a loss of face involved in choosing to work with a medium that one is not entirely comfortable with. Rather than making statements of the kind that we heard from Jamie (in Chapter 4), it is clear that Rob is confident in the medium with which he is working.
Rob’s production report is, like his practical work, extremely methodical in its presentation and he takes his reader through every stage of the production process. For example, in his audience research, he chose to use a focus group as his chief tool of qualitative research, and his evaluation is quick to point out that there is a problem in responding to the vast amounts of data that this generates. This kind of observation would seem to indicate that in many ways, Rob is not a typical male student, but moreover an extremely bright one.
Rob, like Sarah, spends a good deal of time talking about software and the way that he uses ICT to complete the project, adopting the kind of vernacular that one expects of a teenage “computer geek” (the students own words). What this seems to demonstrate is that again, students familiarity with the technology is more important than their gender. Rob does, however do something in his evaluation which is common to many male students, which is to self-deprecate their own organisational skills.
For example I have learnt the hard way the importance of backing up your work regularly and the importance of using decent equipment such as a camera with a good flash.
This kind of evidence reflects some of the observations evident in chapter 4; namely that boys see themselves as disorganised, and poor planners of the work in hand. In Rob’s case this could not be further from the truth – his work is neither disorganised or poorly planned. What I believe is occurring here is the attachment to a self fulfilling prophesy; teachers believe boys to be poorly organised, tell them so and subsequently, boys believe it to be the case even when it may not be. Here then lies a truth about teachers perceptions of gender and its relation to production work.
Hendrix – “I thought that producing your own film would be great fun”
Hendrix’ production log sometimes (unfortunately, but entertainingly) reads as diary of the internecine strife he , and the people who helped him, experienced when making his film . There is a lengthy description of how he had to shoot his film twice, because his originally tape got damaged, and an amusing admission that he could not quite film everything in the way in which he wanted because his mum wouldn’t let him “trash” his house. More important than this amusing diversion though, is what Hendrix says about the structure and style of his film.
As observed in Chapter 5, the film is problematic as it is not really a thriller at all; more a sort of martial-arts/sci-fi hybrid, with lots of dramatic changes of camera angle. While this probably lost Hendrix marks, (for lack of control) it is fascinating to see what he says about his production decisions in his report. For example when talking about his storyboard, he says;
It allows myself and the audience to get a quick glimpse of what the film may look like, even before filming is made (sic). It is like a raw process of a movie, experimenting using different angles. And if one scene looks a bit dodgy I can easily change it by drawing another idea.
We return here to another idea first aired in Chapter 4 – that of risk taking and experimentation; the idea of “Doing it” to see what happens. This is for Hendrix, a key part of the pleasure of production work. He continues;
…as we moved out into the garden, where the fight scene began, I moved away from the idea of a thriller movie to the idea of an action movie. I think this is losing me marks but I’m not surprised.
This seems to be a reinforcement of the notion that for boys, production work is about process, rather than product. Hendrix’ carefree attitude to loss of marks is something that does not bother him, because messing around with camera angles, arranging fight scenes and so on is what he wants to do, and indeed, is why he chose to do Media Studies in the first place. As we shall see below, when we set his attitude against some of the theoretical arguments about the purpose of production work we find ourselves facing a conundrum.
Some conclusions about the data
From these five production logs, we can begin to draw a number of conclusions which reinforce those drawn from the interview and questionnaire stage of the study. Firstly, that production work can be used as a space in which to present views which challenge dominant ideology, and that bright students can view them as such. For female students this may allow them to compete with boys in the areas that have previously been seen as dominated by males. Secondly, while there are certain expectations held by students about the content of production, (cf. Tania, above) the gender related issue here is not to do with technology, or fear of technology, as demonstrated by Sarah, but is more to do with the difference in attitudes towards product and process.
The comments made by Hendrix, highlighting his nonchalance about ignoring the brief, are interesting when viewed in the light of some of the theoretical perspectives laid out it Chapter 2. When Ferguson claims that “personal experience of the Media is not interrogated” (Ferguson, 1981,p48) Hendrix is likely to say “so what?”. He took Media Studies so that he could make the kind of film that he wanted, which is what he has done. When we are faced with the kind of (frequently male) student who simply does what they want in production work it is quite hard to challenge them. Hendrix work is technically proficient and thus scores a reasonable mark for construction. One might be inclined to say that Hendrix has interrogated his own experience of the media, but that it has confessed to nothing, and so he has carried on regardless. Hendrix is not making the kind of impromptu roll-about that Ferguson describes. He can talk about his choice of shots, connotation, signification and a range of other technical terms. The fact is that like, Tania, his work reflects the point made in Chapter 2, that there is a difference between the knowing about the theoretical background to a production task and what you do with that knowledge. This seems to indicate that the purposes of production work which Ferguson desires, and which Buckingham outlines are being subverted. The students wish, in some respect, to use the production work for their own ends.
With the analysis of this data complete we can now draw some wider conclusions from the study.
Chapter 7 - Group work and a word about intervention
From the analysis of the data made in the preceding three chapters, it should be fairly clear that there are some evident differences in the way in which male and female students perceive and conduct their production work. While some students do seem to conform to the preconceptions about gender and production work with which I began this dissertation, it is also clear that some students do not. Notwithstanding this, the question of how the classroom teacher might deal with a situation in which a students access to the production work curriculum is limited when these attitudes prevail, still rears its head. It would be easy to say for example that the girls who do not have any qualms about using ICT in this study come from priveliged (or at least middle class) backgrounds. How might a teacher working in a different school, where there is less access to ICT for their students, deal with these preconceptions?
It is worth while pointing out here that all the students involved in this study work individually. This is something that I frequently impose on students as it makes things easier for me as a teacher. Also for the purposes of this study, it is easier to make clear distinctions between the kind of judgements that male and female students make about their work. However, for students and teachers who find themselves in situations where production work is prohibited by gendered attitudes, group work may of course, provide an answer.
There are numerous accounts of the use of group work and its benefits to students (Bowker, 1991,pp18-26, Buckingham et al 1995, pp75-103, Buckingham 2003,p.83) and indeed in some accounts it is seen as fairly vital for the success of production work within the secondary classroom. As Buckingham comments;
Group work is often regarded as an unavoidable consequence of the complex technologies involved; video production for example is generally seen to entail several distinct roles that will be performed by different students.
(Buckingham et al, 1995. p.75)
While taking issue with the above statement – I believe that in the age of digital video it is quite possible for a student to produce a video without recourse to anyone else – I do accept that group work does serve other purposes. Bowker points out that production work is important on a social and institutional level;
Practical activities…frequently involve group work. Both types of practice thus highlight the social nature of media production and consumption, and accentuate the need to talk compromise and negotiate. (Bowker, 1991 p.18)
One might suggest that this is a site at which, by making male and female students work together, some of the attitudes related to gender could be tackled. Kathleen’s preconception about the technology involved in making a website (see Chapter 2) might be overcome by engendering a situation in which male and female students help each other work in different media. As Buckingham observes though, this “ideal world is sometimes hard to achieve in the classroom
In the case of media production, for example, gender differences have frequently been seen as a particular problem in this respect: boys, it is argued, always hog the equipment, while girls are left in the more exposed position of performers…boys and girls are likely to approach both the technology and situation of small group work with different expectations and orientations
(Buckingham et al 1995, p77)
My own experience as a classroom teacher bears out the observations made above, and indeed this is one of the reasons why I have often encouraged students to work individually. However, it seems that a good way of dealing with a situation in which the kind of attitudes which may be held by boys and girls in relation to production work might well be helped by having students work in single sex groups. Thus by placing together those students who are confident at working in a particular medium, there can be a transfer of skills while avoiding the situation that Buckingham describes above. The teacher here has to intervene, by loading the groups so that those (usually female) students who are more confident with the use of technology than some of the others within their gender group can benefit them. This study has demonstrated implicitly that if a teacher wishes to tackle some of the more problematic issues surrounding gender and production work then they must, use their most valuable assets to deal with them – namely their students.
Chapter 8 – Conclusions
At the end of the first chapter of this dissertation, I set out four questions which I believed needed to be answered in order to investigate the relationship between gender and production work. These were as follows;
5) Is there a distinct difference between the type of production task which boys and girls are inclined to choose to do – and what reasons do they give for making that choice; for example is there an issue of technology here?
6) Do boys and girls differ in their attitudes towards practical work? If so why and does it matter?
7) Do boys and girls go about the production tasks set in a different way?
8) What kind of conclusions (about the nature of the relationship between production work and gender) can we draw from the content of students production work?
There are undoubtedly some clear answers to the first two questions posed here, so these will be dealt with first, but the latter two are harder to respond to .
There is on one level a difference between the type of production task that male and females will choose to do. The majority of the students involved in this study wanted to make films, and of this majority, there was almost an equal number of girls and boys. After this, certain production tasks became more popular with each gender group. What is clear, is that girls are not put off film-making, despite its image as a “technology-heavy” medium. This idea is connected to the fact that technology now appears to be less of a stumbling block for girls doing production work than it was say, ten or fifteen years ago. Many girls are quite at home with technology and give this as a reason for choosing to do particular types of production work. Boys reasons for choosing production tasks, particularly film, are linked to the answers to the above question 2, which are outlined below.
Boys and girls attitudes to production work evidently do differ, and this should matter to both student and teacher for a number of reasons. Boys enjoy the process of production, the actual “Doing” of production work – sometimes even at the expense of their final mark. Girls on the other hand are more concerned with the finished product, the way it looks and what they have achieved. Consequently, if you are a female student you seem to be doing exactly what the examiner wants. If you are a male student and the moderator only sees your final product, it doesn’t really matter how much experimentation or risk-taking you have engaged in, if you haven’t done your evaluation, then you will lose marks. Teachers may well be concerned at this, and future studies may look at how to harness this attitude.
Do boys and girls go about production tasks in different ways? Probably only to the extent that is characterised by the response to question number 2 – boys concentration on process means that this is likely to take up a lot of time for them, whereas for girls, it will be the presentation of the end product which takes up their time. What is clearer is that there are both male and female students who take time and care with their work and male and female students who do not. Going about your work methodically is not simply the province of girls, and being poorly organised is not simply the province of boys, despite the fact that many teachers and boys believe this to be the case.
What kind of conclusions can we draw from the content of students work? This is the trickiest question to answer of all, because the scale of this study is quite small and the content of the work is quite varied. There is some evidence that female students want to produce the kind of content that males have traditionally produced, but this is complicated by the fact that some students seem to be doing it as a challenge to male dominance, while others seem to do it as an implicit acceptance of that dominance. Similarly, there is some evidence that male students will simply create whatever content they want to, regardless of the brief. The sort of study that might be better equipped to answer this question, would involve many students all working on similar or identical briefs.
To conclude then, this dissertation has shed some light on the complex relationship between gender and production work in Media Studies at Secondary school level. This study is a relatively small scale one, and in order to investigate the problem further, one might wish to take a larger group of students from a range of class and educational backgrounds. What is clear though is that there a number of issues arising from the relationship between gender and production work, but that these are not the issues that classroom practitioners suspect there to be. The role of technology, forexample, within Media Studies is developing all the time, but it must not be forgotten that students develop outside school as well as within – perhaps as part of the communities of practice identified by Lave and Wenger. What also becomes clear however is that there are issues for the classroom teacher in the way that gender can affect the outcome of production work. I include no empirical evidence here, but I am fairly sure that there is a marked difference between the final marks for production for males and females; a possible consequence of the process/product dichotomy identified earlier.
This study might be then , the starting point for a wider study into gender and production work. One which would need to involve, a closer examination of the production processes of a larger group of students and a colder examination of the way that work was assessed. This would reinforce the ideas that are clearly emergent here, but not concretely evident enough in a study of this scale and would also provide more insight into what could be a topic with a great deal of impact on the work of Media students in schools.
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Thursday, December 02, 2010
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