Shauni de Gussem

The Canon is a Curriculum: A Participatory Workshop on Diversifying Film Education

Workshop​

Who decides what students should watch, study, and emulate? In film education, the canon continues to reflect a narrow range of works shaped by Western, heteronormative, and structurally conventional traditions. This workshop invites fellow film educators to reflect on their own teaching practices and to experiment with ways of opening the curriculum to collective knowledge.

The workshop is based on the Extended Canon Project, developed within the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Re: Anima. Participants will be introduced to its methodology: a pedagogical intervention that reimagines curriculum design as a collective, political, and participatory process. By inviting student to contribute to a growing database of films by artists who identify as queer, disabled, or from marginalized regions and link them to the theoretical material during the courses, they become co-responsible for what constitutes valuable knowledge in their field. The act of building an extended canon not only decenters dominant aesthetic norms, but also foregrounds the canon as an ideological construct; open to critique, reconstruction, and debate.

Through collaborative exercises and collective reflection, this workshop aims to equip participants with concrete tools to reframe their syllabi and teaching strategies as open, political, and participatory spaces.
 

Shauni de Gussem is an artistic researcher at RITCS School of Arts (BE), a film lecturer at LUCA School of Arts (BE), and a freelance screenwriter. At LUCA, she also serves as expertise team lead Contextualized Creation and Academic Board member of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Film and Animation. She writes cultural criticism and gives public lectures on film, narrative and visual culture, creative writing, psychoanalysis, and literature.