Teaching European Cinema: The European University Film Award (EUFA) Project – Dossier

The dossier, edited by German film scholar Skadi Loist, contains an introductory presentation of the European University Film Award (EUFA) as well as nine texts in which lecturers from different countries who participated in the project with their students deliver insight into their study programs and teaching environments, the conception of their individual courses, their experiences during their classes on the EUFA and the challenges they encountered.

As a researcher and lecturer within a Franco-German study programme (B.A. European Media Culture at the Bauhaus Universität Weimar and the Université Lumière Lyon 2), I am intrigued by the idea of discussing film not only from two cultural points of view, but to see how this project can create a community and multi-perspective sense of learning even at a distance: the reports indicate that the very awareness of being part of a pan-European teaching project influences the discussions and learning experiences even of those participants that remain in their usual learning environments and national groups during the whole project.
Knowing that the same films are being seen and discussed by students and teachers in other European countries can give participants a sense of being part of a community and encourage them to anticipate and include perspectives from other national and cultural contexts in their reflections and discussions. Additionally, it can be assumed that writing the texts for the dossier encouraged teachers to reflect further commonalities and differences in topics, methodological, theoretical and pedagogical approaches depending on national cultural contexts and academic traditions.

The dossier is a fruitful resource for thinking about international cultural collaboration as it describes experiences with the transnational EUFA project from different points of view. It also contains reports on different teaching methods and learning environments in diverse national contexts and institutional settings. In particular, it provides best-practice examples for how to teach contemporary European cinema and how to develop and scrutinise together with students from different backgrounds criteria for the evaluation of films (and artworks in general).

Location	Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 14, Winter 2017, pp. 160–218.
Original language(s)	English
Existing translations
Length	59 pages
Project runtime	-
Institution of affiliation
Sponsor(s)

Name of contributor: Katja Hettich