This past week has been quite exciting in terms of reflection opportunities and teaching practice.

As Production Manager/Specialist technician, I don’t normally do much structured teaching. I find myself offering tutorials or supporting students in developing their design ideas and together find solutions to realise them. However I don’t regularly hold lectures or deliver workshops.

This passed week I was invited to hold a workshop on sound to film students.

I was asked to focus on sound as a concept to help the students think about how sound can help them tell a story, more than how they can achieve perfectly recorded dialogue or prepare naturalistic soundscapes, i.e. not sound à la Hollywood.

Well, the fact that I was asked only a few days earlier made it a bit nerve wracking: how would I be able to prepare thoroughly in only a few days? I started jotting down a few ideas and realised that I had way too many ideas to be able to read all about them too (I wanted to have some validation to hand)…not even staying up all night every night all the way to the day would have sufficed!

So, I opted for a more efficient and practical approach. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation, which was to start off with a brief intro to sound where I explained how it can be used in live and captured realms. It seemed only fair to give some context. I then proceeded to explain the physical nature of sound and how it behaves in a physical environment. It seemed fair also to introduce some key technical vocabulary. Finally, I explored how sound in its very physical nature can affect us and the ways in which we can use that to tell stories and create experiences for our audiences. Feeling vs hearing. Listening vs hearing.

Great!

On the day, whilst chatting to the unit leader as we waited for the much delayed students, I realised that my approach to the lesson was way too formal, but still I was confident that what I had prepared was a good stepping stone. I was ready to improvise: I never felt like that before. Not nervous? Ready to improvise? Ready to let go of all my preparation and actually enjoy what I had to say? It seemed mad. I never really gave myself permission to let go in that way.

So we all sat around a large table and I started. I didn’t project my slides, but just shared directly from my laptop (we were close enough to see and I have a large laptop) and I only needed to show key images not all the slides.

It worked out really well.

I found that the students were engaged, they were taking notes, they asked questions. The unit leader contributed a few times too, making the whole session very conversational, which gave me a great sense of ease: suddenly teaching felt more like an exchange of ideas, a sharing, rather than an imposition as it sometimes felt in the past. I loved it!

The students, most of whom I already knew (they were stage 3 students whom I had recently worked on a show with) introduced their pieces to me. We discussed ways in which they could explore what we had just spoken about, there were questions, answers, debates and so we all learned a lot: I was inspired by the diversity, the content and context of their projects and the students learnt new ways to think about sound.

I’d like to explore more this idea of “letting go” and being able to trust myself in what I can offer, rather than feeling like I need my notes as a crutch in case I forget some words. I suppose this confidence is coming now, after many years of having worked in the industry, having taught sound in different environments and having many stories to tell, sharing what went right and wrong and what I have learnt from all of those experiences.

When I first started I was asked to teach sound having had no experience in the field whatsoever. I had barely finished my qualification. It was not a pleasant teaching experience. I felt like I was cheating the students. It didn’t seem fair to talk about a subject purely from a theoretical point of view. I couldn’t pretend to know something I had no experience in. And not only that, I felt that teaching that way was incredibly boring to the students: I couldn’t bring anything of mine to the table, I couldn’t share any experience and so all I was saying to them felt dead, it lacked the vividness of real life, the application of the theory I wanted them to believe was true. I quit after a few months and started sound mixing in a venue.

Then I got a job in another university as visiting lecturer, as I was still working in the industry. It was already better: I realised that the practice had to supplement the teaching. And so it seems my life carried on that way: a few years in the industry, a few years in education, sometimes both at once, the two practices feeding off each other.

But now it feels like a new chapter has begun, now it’s different, feel I am giving myself permission to trust my knowledge and my experience; on one hand I feel I have validated all those ’empty’ words and perhaps what I can share with students is more meaningful. On the other hand, I have made peace with not knowing. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know… So it’s ok to share what you know and carry on learning as you go.