Book Review. Film Pedagogy. Theory and Practice, edited by Dilani S. P. Gedera and Arezou Zalipour

Video Pedagogy: Theory and Practice highlights the value of video and technology in teaching and learning, not as an alternative method to be incorporated in pedagogy, but rather as a sine qua non approach to face the challenges of education during the pandemic and post pandemic times. It offers new ways of pedagogical thinking that address the challenges of adapting to online and eLearning modes of teaching. Focused on the use of video as pedagogy

Primarily, it analyses several aspects of video pedagogy and describes the trends and predominant discussions in this field.
The volume is composed of 12 chapters organized in two parts.It starts with an introductory chapter (Conceptualizing video pedagogy), which offers an overview of video pedagogy, focusing on its definition, key elements and benefits.The first section of the book (Video, students, and learning) includes chapters 2 to 7 and focuses on how students can benefit from video-enhanced learning: to build knowledge, to enhance cultural competency, and to prompt creativity; or how students can develop their skills through video production and learn form video-tutorials.
Chapter 2 (Building Undergraduate Nursing Knowledge and Practice through video by C. Goode, L. Ditzel and J. Ross) offers practical insight into how video can be used in tertiary education for the health professions to develop students' knowledge, practical skills and interpersonal learner competencies.Drawing from three case studies, this chapter manifests how video-enhanced content facilitates students to link theoretical content and skills and contributes to improve teamwork, critical thinking and interpersonal abilities.Despite the fact that video in the education context is a long-established tool and its uses can range from webbased video lectures, video-assisted debriefing, short videos, documentaries, video simulation and videoconferencing, the three cases presented in this chapter only focus on short videos and documentaries.Further cases could have been analysed to present a more varied context of video use not only centred in short videos and documentaries.
Chapter 3 (Effectiveness of Multiple Types of Video for Learner Engagement in Business Education by S.P. Gedera and R. Larke) describes how the integration of multiple types of video in class and video production helps to: improve students' engagement, review background knowledge, promote interaction, and gain and apply knowledge.One of the distinguishing features of this study is that students were exposed to different types of videos, unlike other studies that tend to focus on content or instructional videos.Having students creating their own videos and sharing them with their cohort, prompted student interaction and created a sense of community.
The next chapter (Flipping the Classroom: Using Video to Enhance First-Year Undergraduates' Cultural Competency by M. Parish et all) provides readers with an example of a case based on the flipped-classroom method to enhance students' cultural competency.This case study brings forth a good example on how the use of video can serve to practice an innovative teaching approach to get students to master "soft skills", and also on how to cover cultural differences and awareness, necessary to achieve communication fluency.
The most creative study is chapter 5, which includes an example of a projectbased investigation (Stop Motion: Being Precise About the Uncertainty of the Design Process by L. Koutsoumpos).It describes a case study that uses video production to register the development of a design project.The analysis of the data evidences the way that video helps students to reflect on their own learning process.Taking into consideration that for this case study students were given the choice of executing the video exercise (multimodal) or not, the chapter presents the theoretical and practical implications of the use of video in documenting the progress and development of a project, but there is no evidence or reports on the other group.It would have been interesting to compare the retrospective process of the focus group with that of the students that did not choose the video project or that used another method to represent their project process.
Research on vicarious learning from videoed tutorials is dealt with in Chapter 6 (Learning by Watching Others Learn: Vicarious Learning from Videoed Tutorials by S. Geertshuis and N. Rix).It primarily reviews research on observing others learn in tutorials, and shares practice-based knowledge and recommendations to ensure that peer teachers can implement a vicarious learning approach through the use of videoed tutorials.This study provides a good outline of the pedagogical implications of videoing tutorials and different strategies used by teachers to stimulate active engagement and dialogue.The option of video is regarded as an alternative to face-to-face tutorials, and potentially it offers an approach that permits students to learn by watching videoed tutoring sessions.
Chapter 7 (Video and the Pedagogy od Expansive Learning: Insights from a research-intervention by P. Moffitt and B. Blight) contrasts with the previous chapters, since it does not centre on a specific use of video for learning or teaching specific knowledge or skills.Instead, it seeks to conceptualize how, why and when people use video as a mediating artefact in pedagogical praxis.Although it covers a more uncommon aspect of video use in learning and teaching context, it offers little instruction that can be applied and transferred to a learning and teaching context.
In the second part of the book (Video, teachers, and practice) there is a shift of attention and the teacher and their professional development become the object of study.Stensness and Calder look into how collaboratively developed videos can be used in a flipped-classroom professional learning program to improve self-efficacy in chapter 8 (Flipping professional Learning Through Videos in Mathematical Education).The authors construct a valuable framework of flipped learning, which is valued as a model that facilitates teacher self-efficiency, individual scaffolding, and interaction with peers.
Chapter 9 (Video as an Instructional Tool in Transforming Teachers' Pedagogical Practices by I. Yuen Fun Gong and S. Kuang San Tan) discusses the outcomes encountered when integrating exemplary videos depicting teachers' practices and behaviour in their classroom context.In this case the video illustrated teaching practices, which were used as a reference point and model to implement key teaching actions and assist novel teachers to improve their own pedagogical practices.One of the strengths of this chapter is that it uses video to simplify teaching context by highlighting specific descriptors of the teaching actions (i.e.Providing clear explanation, concluding the lesson, empowering learners, etc.).Furthermore, the exemplary videos focus on positive and negative pedagogical practices facilitating the teachers to discern both strengths and weakness of their teaching instruction.
The next chapter (10.Examining an Activity System of Learners, Tools and Tasks in a Video Club by T.Barnhart) is devoted to the analysis of classroom practice and it describes the application of a video club, in which teachers meet to evaluate recordings of classroom practice.It is another example of video-based professional development, in this case the video club proved to be a good tool to display authentic models of instruction and an opportunity for teachers to analyse and reflect on classroom practice intensively.This study sheds some light on how to plan and implement effective teacher professional development sessions using video-based resources.
Chapter 11 (Te Ara Motuhenga (Documentary Pathways): Developing Video-Based teaching and Learning Resources for Documentary Practice by C. Milligan, A. Zalipour and J. Nicholson) is primarily focused on the research context concerning documentary as a learning resource.The project draws from the documentary Te Ara Motuhenga (Documentary Pathways), which serves as a valuable audiovisual document to create video-based online teaching and learning resources.The authors provide a detailed account of the approach followed to develop the different video-based modules as means of course instruction.Special attention is devoted to the organizational factors that facilitate the practice-based learning of documentary making.
Finally, the last chapter offers valuable practical insights into video making for teachers (A Practical Guide to Video-Making for Teachers: Key Principles and Tools by S.P. Gedera).It provides useful knowledge regarding the practicalities of using video, which are essential to create or use video for pedagogical purposes.In contrast with the other chapters, this last research is not based on a specific course or subject, its findings can be transferable to other areas, and it contemplates videobased content as means to enhance higher education students learning experience in a transversal way.
Overall, the authors of the book present a valuable and enriching understanding of a cutting-edge area of education, film pedagogy.The different chapters provide the reader with different innovative practices; teaching and learning models; and frameworks indispensable for applying technology-based and video-based practice in higher education contexts to promote the achievement of applied skills in addition to theoretical and conceptual content.Video-based learning is regarded as a motivational method, but it also responds to the exponential increase of media consumption and current learner's tendency to interact and communicate through multimodal modes.Although the focus is on video pedagogy, the book presents secondary underlying methodologies such as project-based learning (PBL), the flipped classroom model, collaborative learning and blended learning.Thus, it brings together the validity and versatility of the use of video in a challenging current higher education context that demands a broadening of methodologies that integrate technology and media.
The authors cover different scopes of video use in diverse educational contexts and subject syllabus, with meaningful critical insight about the practicalities, challenges, course design and benefits of it.In particular, some chapters (2,3,5,11,12) look at the practical application of video-based methods, providing indepth descriptions and analysis of the process, alongside the implications, outcomes and challenges encountered.Although the book succeeds to exemplify uses of video in tertiary education and can be seen as a useful resource for those who seek pedagogical innovations involving the use of technologies and video-base tools, there are other chapters that fail to provide the same standard of analysis and could be further examined and expounded with a more solid view of video pedagogy.The deep specificity of some of the chapters can hinder comprehension some times, or fail to define clear learning outcomes.Consequently the reader is left with abstract aspects of a specific educational field, but making it difficult to know what to extract from it and how to apply such outcomes to their teaching and learning practice.Furthermore, while there is some reference to how video helps enhance understanding of L2 and fosters fluency, there are no direct cases or research on the use of video for ESL (English as second language) teaching and learning.The book is missing one of the pioneering discipline that uses video as a pedagogical tool: second language teaching, and it would have been interesting to read some studies that made reference to ESL.It also fails to mention audiovisual translation (AVT), which is a crucial scope of video use in education.It is a shame that it does not include research on neither discipline, since they are an indispensable part of video pedagogy and broadly investigated fields with remarkable outcomes.Ultimately, the book is a worthy attempt to expand the global lenses of the use of video and multimodal learning to open pedagogical opportunities.

AURA CANET ALIBAU
Assistant professor at the University of Balearic Islands, teaching English for Specific Purposes.She is a doctoral candidate at the University Complutense of Madrid.Her research focuses on audiovisual as a pedagogical tool for teaching and learning ESP.Her line of research comprises video-based instruction, multimodality and technology-based second language pedagogy.Canet Alibau, A. (2022).Book Review.Film Pedagogy.Theory and Practice, edited by Dilani S. P. Gedera and Arezou Zalipour.Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature, 15(3), e1110.https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/jtl3.1110https://revistes.uab.cat/jtl3/