 My name is Lindy Redovi, and I've been teaching a 10-week module about African filmmaking at SOAS for more than a decade. It's called The Story of African Film, and it focuses mostly on fiction films by African filmmakers from the 1960s to the present day. And I'm Ifanie Awachiye. I was in The Story of African Film with Lindy Way when I was doing my masters at SOAS in 2016, and I've since contributed to the class as a guest lecturer. So Ifanie and I would really like to share with you today a few of the ways that we and others have tried to transform this module to make it more inclusive and inspiring. And what has been really vital in this process is our collaboration as equals. Because as Paulo Freire says, education as empowerment can only really begin when we all see ourselves simultaneously as teachers and students, when we see ourselves collectively as class members. So we'd like to suggest that teachers put themselves forward in class not as experts, but rather as curators with a particular positionality and lived experience that really should be foregrounded right at the beginning of a module. So for example, I now start my African filmmaking module by sharing the story of how I became interested in this topic in the first place. And I also share some painful personal stories about my own positionality and lived experience as a white classified South African from a family with anti-apartheid views. A positionality that makes me what I call a resistant beneficiary of the racist system of apartheid in South Africa. When teachers allow themselves to be vulnerable by sharing their personal stories and also being willing to learn from other class members, this can create an experience where students feel that their positionalities and lived experiences are acknowledged and valued. And they will be more likely to participate in the class. In teaching to transgress, Bell Hook says that this can create a reciprocal process where knowledge production as a practice is demystified and what can otherwise be an intimidating and even isolating space and creating a richer experience for all class members. So we'd like to invite you to take a few minutes now to think about your own personal story. How would you describe the story of how you came to the subject that you currently teach and study? Next time you teach your module, we'd like to encourage you to acknowledge and foreground your personal story as it relates to the course material and also to humble yourself in those moments when you do not share the lived experience that's represented in the material. We'd also like you to be sensitive to the complex and diverse positionalities and lived experiences of other class members and not to make assumptions about who class members are or stereotype them by asking them to represent a particular group. For example, black students are experts on our own lived experience, but not the black experience or the African experience. Though the knowledge we bring from our lived experience is significant, it's important that class members feel comfortable and invited to share when they feel able to and not required to. It's also important to respect students as partners in the knowledge and experience that they bring. It was working with class members such as Ifanyi that really made me reflect on how I was curating this African filmmaking module and on how important it is that teachers as curators give thought not only to the intellectual dimensions of a module, but also to the emotions that a module can provoke or inspire. It made me think about what the effects of viewing certain films would be on class members with different positionalities and lived experiences, whether the viewing of those films would be painful or inspiring. So for example, the first film that we watch in the module is Black Girl from 1966, which was the first film made in sub-Saharan Africa by an African, the Senegalese filmmaker Usman Senben. And although it's a fiction film, Black Girl actually tells a true story that Senben encountered in a newspaper in France, which is about a young Senegalese woman who had committed suicide because of the way that she had been treated by her French employers. So this material and the origins of African filmmaking bring up really stark and harrowing images of racism, sexism and domestic slavery. At the same time, Black Girl was one of the very first films that made a black woman's perspective on the world central. A film like Black Girl brings up a lot of emotions that can be empowering and inspiring or also painful depending on one's background. And if you teach a course that is not in the arts and humanities, we'd like to particularly encourage you to think about how you could bring films or fiction to really bring more emotional aspects of your modules into the classroom and to give space to class members to share those emotions if they wish to. Teachers should be particularly sensitive when presenting material related to the experiences of Africans and people of color in general, particularly when they do not share that lived experience. It's important to present the difficult, painful historical facts of slavery, imperialism and colonialism, but it's also important to present material which Bell Hooks would call education as a practice of freedom, a form of education that can empower students, inspiring them to change the world in positive ways. We'd like to give you a few minutes now to think about how you engage with the material that you teach. How can you ensure that for students who feel close to the material can engage it in emotional as well as intellectual ways? And we'd like you to also think about what resources you do provide or could provide class members with so that they can really curate the module themselves, making their own meanings out of the materials, coming up with their own interpretations so that you don't have to dominate the space by just lecturing at them.