Pedagogy-Led Practice and Practice-Led Pedagogy: A Feedback Loop of Teaching and Screenwriting

Abstract

As practitioner-educators, the co-authors of this chapter were invited to design a new screenwriting Masters course. The course would be revisiting screenwriting fundamentals but crucially, introducing feature film screenwriting technique to a cohort minimally experienced in writing screenplays. This raised an opportunity to examine the diverse approaches to teaching screenwriting and design the course with innovation in mind. Conveniently, the authors were in the early stages of developing a feature script that they hoped to complete within the semester. The opportunity to bring the two tasks together seemed serendipitous. The authors developed a practice-led, or ‘practice-influenced’ structure that treated the students as equals not novice screenwriters. Striving to balance intuition, creativity, experimentation with a deep and critical knowledge of structure, form and convention. It became clear that this feedback loop between practice and pedagogy could not only benefit the students, but also the teachers, with the potential to be utilised across all creative practice forms.