Encouraging critical practice in media students: the digital dossier initiative

In a fluid and rapidly changing media landscape, today's screen production students more than ever require skills in `critical practice' to enable them to play leading roles in tomorrow's screen culture and industries. It is extremely difficult to find pedagogical approaches that facilitate student learning of creative and technical production skills and at the same time place these within a critical and theoretical context that encourages the questioning of and experimentation with existing production and aesthetic paradigms. Two second-year undergraduate screen production courses at RMIT Media have introduced `digital dossiers' as part of an attempt to foster a learning culture of `critical practice'. These digital dossiers, when embedded within a structure of process-based learning, may play an important role, we argue, in helping students identify and challenge assumptions they bring to their understanding of screen practice.