Page content

Early Career Educator

Department: Arts and Humanities

Biography

Dr Victoria McCollum is a Lecturer in Cinematic Arts within the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has published several cutting-edge books on Film, Media and Television. Victoria is passionate about better articulating and integrating the rich relationship between theory and creative practice on screen media programmes.

She believes in engaging students as partners in curriculum innovation and is dedicated to creating transformative learning opportunities for her students encouraging them to develop their own identities as early career filmmakers, producers and content creators. Victoria is also heavily committed to supporting staff, particularly adjunct and contingent faculty, to develop comfort with, and confidence in, the shared work.

She is dedicated to curating well-designed, flexible, inclusive, relevant and accessible curricula that promotes student and staff engagement and success.

Title

The Early Career Educator Caught Between Cinema Theory and Film Production Practice as Research Curriculum Innovation and Engaging Students as Partners

Summary

Screen programmes across the globe, which now relate to the fasted growing area of our economy, are plagued by the same fundamental problem, otherwise known as ‘the split’ (Buckland 2016). Problem is, the theory (film studies) has become too hermetic and cut off from practice (filmmaking) and the practice (filmmaking) has become renowned for evading and disdaining theory (film studies), reducing much contemporary film education to a sterile exercise in learning to use technical equipment (Buckland 2016; Nelson 2013; Tomasulo 1997).

Over the past 3.9 years, I have co-led a team in the design, delivery and development of all major graduate project modules on the Cinematic Arts programme at Ulster University, Magee. This included curriculum design, in which students and staff worked together to develop and enrich the learning and teaching experience, and better articulating and integrating the rich relationship between theory and creative practice.

Keywords

Filmmaking / Innovation / Theory-Practice