Fear Eats the Soul: Working with Creative Content and Purpose in Media Practice Education

Abstract

The paper aims to outline the importance of linking personal experience with craft skills and creative expression, specifically through one or two educational approaches. The argument is that any profound learning of media skills and creative expression can only happen in the context of an awareness of purpose, and that if purpose does not stretch beyond simply getting a job—in what is after all a fickle business—then practitioners will be doing both the moving-image medium and its industry a disservice. The suggestion here is that FE and HE institutions are one of very few contexts in which the student of the medium has the required space and environment to gain access to this critical awareness of their work. In addition, educators, must make sure that they live up to this responsibility.