Introduction
This reflective report outlines the development and critical evaluation of a inclusive pedagogical intervention I designed for first year MA Performance: Screen students; a Manifesto for Inclusive Filmmaking Practices workshop. The development of this intervention has been informed by my learning throughout this unit, and how I have applied this to the specificities of the students on my course, the unit I lead and by my own positionality as a socially engaged filmmaker and teacher.
As a filmmaker working primarily in community settings, I frequently engage with the dynamics of representation and power, particularly through the lens of what Lacan, Foucault and later Mulvey describe as ‘the gaze’: an individual (or group’s) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups or oneself. The gaze is often shaped by the structures and hierarchies in our society, impacting how individuals and groups are observed, represented and understood. These concerns are as central to my pedagogical approach as they are to my creative practice. I have had to consider, for example, the aspects of my identity that are immediately present on first encounter and how this impacts the group. I am a white woman in my 30s, I have an English accent that is often associated with the middle class, I don’t have a visible disability and I hold a permanent contract within the university. These aspects of my identity afford me considerable institutional privilege. However, many other aspects of my identity are often obscured by the institution but shape my outlook and experiences, such as my gender, my chronic health condition and experience of surviving violence. All of my lived experiences have led me to a career that prioritises anti-racist approaches to social justice and creating artworks with people and communities who are often under or misrepresented. This also motivates my teaching practice and commitment to intersectional social justice in higher education. This intersectional awareness, grounded in the theories of Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), Sara Ahmed (2012), Laura Mulvey (2003) and bell hooks (1994), underpins my drive to foster inclusive, ethical, and reflective creative practices in my teaching. This intervention design was inspired by the importance of specificity as described by Asif Sadiq (2023), as it is directly tailored to a Unit that I currently lead with my filmmaking students and community partners, and is an attempt to create achievable but meaningful change within my context.
Working with external community collaborators, including older people at Age UK, queer club goers at Riposte, D/deaf and disabled artists at Graeae Theatre and people who have experienced homelessness, poverty and inequity with Cardboard Citizens, our students must be prepared not only technically, but ethically and empathetically. The intervention proposed is a manifesto making workshop that synthesises and solidifies inclusive learning from prior sessions. This aims to equip students with a shared, co-created framework for ethical filmmaking that can guide their collaborative practice moving forward. It can also be applied to our wider course context, making a dedicated shared commitment to inclusive practices across our cohorts and teaching approaches.
Context
The context for this intervention is rooted in my teaching of Unit 4A with 1st year students on MA Performance: Screen at Central Saint Martins. This unit focuses on community-engaged creative practice, where students collaborate with marginalised groups to create films, installations, and performances. The curriculum is already rich in preparatory workshops, including trauma informed practice with Cardboard Citizens, aesthetics of access training with Jenny Sealey, DEI training with Tas Emiabata, and explorations of queerness and hope with Dr. Ben Walters. These sessions provide essential knowledge, but I identified a missing piece: a space for students to digest, consolidate, and collectively articulate their understanding of inclusive practice before undertaking their collaborations. When they leave campus to participate in their projects, I wanted them to be able to access a guide and reminder of best practice, that they helped to shape and create, together.
The manifesto workshop is designed to fill that gap, it is a co-creative exercise where students synthesise learning and generate a guiding framework for inclusive practice. I chose the manifesto format because it allows for creative expression, collective authorship, and political positioning. On speaking with Amberlee and my peers (Antonella, Rosaline and Sara) I also now understand that this manifesto tool could be utilised effectively within the wider course context, supporting students and staff with a framework to better support one another’s needs and fostering a supportive community of practice.
Rationale
Filmmaking is a powerful tool, it can make both meaningful change and devastating harm. It can act as a both a mirror and window – reflecting society back to itself whilst also opening up possibilities for transformation. For example, Laura Mulvey (2003) critiques traditional film’s patriarchal structure, illustrating how cinema reproduces societal gender norms. Her work, rooted in psychoanalysis, reveals how the male gaze positions women as passive objects of visual pleasure. Similarly, filmmakers can be at risk of upholding colonial practices, particularly when engaging with communities. Michael Renov quotes MacDougall about the ethical concerns that documentaries reproductions of reality can create, saying:
‘no ethnographic film is merely a record of another society: it is always a record of the meeting between a filmmaker and that society.’
Referring back to Macdougall’s criticism of traditional ethnographies ‘”distinctively Western parochialism” Renov notes:
‘…the maker…translates and reshapes cultural otherness. In doing so, he mimes the omniscience of conqueror or expert’.
(Renov, M. on MacDougall, D. 2004). This directly links to the themes explored in the IP unit, and how uncritical reproductions of practice can further uphold damaging dominant structures. These insights are vital when working with people: we must always question who is looking, who is being looked at, and under what terms.
As the leader on Unit 4A, I believe it is my responsibility to work with students to develop their own ethical participatory filmmaking practices, that engage meaningfully with the communities they encounter. I hope to create a unit where students feel brave enough to push against the status quo and develop film practices that can be transformative tools for change.
Pedagogies of discomfort (Boler and Zembylas, 2003) encourage students to sit with tension and complexity, which is often where the most transformative learning happens. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) helps make sense of how overlapping identities create varying degrees of discrimination and privilege. Inclusive pedagogies, and ethical filmmaking practices therefore, must actively confront structural inequalities, rather than adopt superficial measures as outlined by Sara Ahmed.
The manifesto, historically used to declare radical new visions (Futurists, Guerrilla Girls, Paula Varjack), offers an ideal form for students to engage in this kind of transformational thinking. It rejects neutrality, which is often an oppressive stance in educational space, and instead asks students to take a stand. This aligns with Freire’s (1970) notion of education as a practice of freedom, where learners become co-creators of knowledge, not passive recipients. It also connects with Karen Barad’s (2017) idea that;
‘Participation is about co-labouring for change, co-creating knowledge and co-creating the future. It requires humility and openness to others… participation is about connection and relationship. Participation means recognising how everything we do is entangled with others, including the natural world’.
The manifesto-making workshop also provides multiple access points for students with diverse needs and learning styles: visual materials, spoken word, tactile collage, and discussion-based work. It invites embodied and affective engagement, fostering what hooks (1994) calls “engaged pedagogy,” where teaching is rooted in care, dialogue, and mutual transformation.
Reflection
The decision to use a manifesto stemmed from a desire to create something that students could carry with them – practically and symbollically – into their collaborations.
Inspired by Dr Walters’ idea of “mutant hope machines,” I saw the manifesto not as a fixed declaration but as a flexible, replicable tool that could generate change across contexts. Through discussion with my peer’s, I feel confident that this could be an affective tool, and have also been given excellent creative suggestions on the practicalities of how to create the manifesto. Sara, for example, suggested that it could take the form of a pocket-sized zine, which connects really beautifully to creative activism.
However, I was also aware of the risks and discussed these with my tutor and peers. Manifestos can flatten nuance, assume consensus, or become symbolic rather than practical. They are shaped by the voices in the room, and even a diverse cohort cannot represent every perspective. This tension between clarity and complexity is ever-present in inclusive practice. One of my peers pointed out that the manifesto might risk being “tokenistic” if not critically engaged with. This led me to design the workshop with multiple reflective points, including pair work, group dialogue, anonymous feedback, and collective editing, to ensure that the manifesto was co-owned and meaningfully constructed. All of these discussions were an important reminder of why dialogue is fundamental when developing inclusive practices. As Ahmed (2012) notes, the aim is not perfection, but to keep doing the work, to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016), and to continually push against exclusion.
Designing the session also required logistical care, and considerations around safety and ‘brave’ spaces. I implement changes to the session plan in order to create a space in which the students could feel brave, for example I considered the room layout (a circle for equity), materials (captioning tools, tactile objects), and emotional safety (check-ins and breaks). These decisions were grounded in trauma-informed principles that I learnt from Cardboard Citizens: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural consideration.
Action
The manifesto workshop was originally designed to be a 2.5 hour session following the students’ preparatory training. On receiving feedback from my peers, I now believe it actually needs at least a full day of workshopping to work ethically and affectively. The longer session will involve sharing existing manifestos, collaborative reflection on inclusive practice, creative construction of sentences using mixed media, and collective editing of the final group manifesto. The session concludes with reflection on the process and how the manifesto might support students in their upcoming collaborations, and finally a tangible zine that students can take with them.
This intervention has potential to impact both my personal academic practice and our broader departmental culture. It offers a replicable model for other courses, and could be adapted for staff workshops to co-create inclusive values at the course level. It also allows me to better understand students’ evolving needs, challenges, and priorities, informing future curriculum design.
Long-term, I hope to implement similar manifesto workshops at the start of each year, making inclusion a continual, living conversation rather than a static module outcome. This could counteract the atomisation often experienced by students in individualised learning environments, replacing it with collective accountability, reciprocity, and care.
Evaluation
Through this intervention design, I’ve deepened my understanding of what meaningful inclusion looks like in action, and have reconnected with hope and amibition in the face of the challenges of teaching within a large institution. I’ve learned that inclusive practice must move beyond content into structure, process, and power dynamics. It requires acknowledging my own positionality, making space for discomfort, and committing to shared learning.
I plan on delivering the manifesto workshop next year, and will evaluate it’s success through qualitative methods including student feedback forms, reflective conversations and a follow up focus group at the end of the unit. Potential questions to measure the Manifesto’s affectiveness could be:
- Did the manifesto shape your decisions?
- Did it provide clarity or inspiration in moments of ethical uncertainty?
- Did you feel able to challenge oppressive norms in filmmaking through these shared values?
- Did the manifesto making workshop feel inclusive and accessible to you?
- What barriers did you encounter, if any?
- Any suggestions on how to develop the workshop in the future?
Conclusion
This process has reinforced that inclusion is a continual, iterative practice that lives in the relationships, structures, and decisions we make every day. This intervention represents a small but purposeful act of transformation. It draws on theory and practice, personal experience and institutional context, and centres students as co-authors of inclusive change. It acknowledges the messiness of this work and resists easy answers, holding instead a commitment to doing the work with care and integrity. As Ahmed (2012) reminds us, diversity work often involves “being the change”, disrupting systems, asking hard questions, and making space for others to speak.
This manifesto workshop aims to be part of that disruption: a hopeful, creative and grounded space for students to articulate their values, challenge harmful norms, and commit to filmmaking as a relational, ethical, and transformative act.
Through this unit, I’ve reconnected with why I teach: to build spaces of dialogue, reflection, and care, where students and staff are empowered to reimagine society through creative practice.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). ‘From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice,’ in Landreman, L.M. (ed.) The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators. New York: Routledge, pp. 135-150.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press Books.
Boal, A. (2019) Theatre of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
Boler, M. and Zembylas, M. (2003) ‘Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference’, in Trifonas, P. (ed.) Pedagogies of Difference. New York: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review.
Czerniewicz, L., & Cronin, C. (2023). Higher Education for Good. Open Book Publishers.
Duckie (2020) Dr Duckie – Homemade Mutant Hope Machines – The Talk, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT0gKR–d4I
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Graeae. (n.d.). Graeae | world-class theatre & training from D/deaf & disabled artists. [online] Available at: https://graeae.org/.
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Helguera, P. Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011)
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
hooks, b. (2003). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge.
Ledwith, M. and Springett, J. (2022) Participatory Practice. Policy Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. London Afterall Books.
Renov, M. (2004) The subject of documentary. Minneapolis ; London: University Of Minnesota Press.
Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx [Online}. Youtube. 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw
Traumascapes CIC. (n.d.). Traumascapes. [online] Available at: https://www.traumascapes.org/.
UAL (2024). Anti-racism strategy. [online] UAL. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/strategy-and-governance/anti-racism-strategy.
UK Government (2022) Working Definition of Trauma-Informed Practice. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-definition-of-trauma-informed-practice
Leave a Reply