Although various articulations of the IDT program’s goals exist and vie for attention within curricular planning among faculty and within teacher-student dynamics of the classroom, each individual class is informed by the instructor’s own rendition of the IDT philosophy. The IDT curriculum thus has coherence to the degree that IDT professors, with their diverse backgrounds and research agendas, agree upon those goals. Amidst this chaos (and the additional confusion introduced by way of the divergent expectations of extra-departmental classes), it is this instructor’s sincere hope that students are able to chart a path that matches their educational goals — as well as confounds them in unexpectedly productive ways.

My own approach to teaching within IDT is a product of my training in a film school that teaches classical and avant-garde technique alongside theory, history, and ideological analysis of industry technique in order to prepare students for careers within Hollywood, non-commercial cinema, or academia. Adopting a similar model for IDT, I view the program as the melding of training ground and research & development house for industry; yet, I believe the program still allows a place for the individual with pursuits outside of traditional commercial practice.

An oft-told tale passed along to me by a film production instructor about a former USC film student involves an unusual short film that stood out among other students’ clumsy and derivative attempts at storytelling. This film was almost entirely abstract or non-representational as shapes and colors, all cast in a curious metallic sheen, captured attention as they moved on screen and appeared to twist and melt away only to be replaced by new forms. Despite the absence of story, the elusive shapes engaged the audience’s attention as the undulating colors momentarily promised the revelation of worldly representation before resolutely defying identification, sliding gracefully into greater and greater distortion. Seen today, the film is strangely reminiscent of contemporary digital morphing techniques and the aesthetic of transforming metallic forms that seems to be quite popular within Hollywood’s cyborg tales. Of course, such technologies were not available at the time that this cinema student — a young Francis Ford Coppola — made his film. In fact, as the camera slowly pulls back in the final frames of this one-shot film, a quite simple technology is revealed to be at work — the reflective and softly curved surface of a 1950s Chevy chrome bumper moving through traffic. In short, as this story suggests, often times the study of visual communication may involve breaking moving images into their component parts, analyzing the form’s inherent visual interest. Such experimentation may take the apparent form of the avant-garde, an aesthetic that provides a foundation for and continues to feed into successful commercial and artistic practices. Too often pre-professional programs rigidly imitate industry practices without encouraging the types of formal (and I would add theoretical) exploration that are essential to the learning process.

Although IDT includes training in the use of certain software packages, the emphasis is on independent learning so that students garner the skills necessary to embark on a continual learning process as software tools undergo rapid change. Additionally, the program is designed to instill certain generalizable and marketable skills in the areas of design, critical thinking, and computer programming. However, in order to prepare students for jobs that extend beyond that of a technician or practitioner, the curriculum exposes students to media history and theory, areas of study that are used to position digital culture within larger, mappable histories of media development and cultural change. Additionally, the program’s curriculum is infused with certain political and ethical concerns used in the critique of standard industry practices. As a place for theory-guided experimentation within digital media, IDT addresses the new media industries as an inchoate entity that may be influenced by the ethical engagements and experimental work of the next generation of industry leaders and media developers. Thus, while IDT students’ extra-departmental classes in cognitive science, management, and computer science may help students to become better instructional designers, project managers, and Java developers, IDT’s integration of cultural theory and media history is designed to vivify the new media industry’s future in the same way that the theoretically-engaged avant-garde has always served as a source of regeneration within mainstream practice and as a space of conscience and alternative vision outside of and in dialogue with commercial production.

As instructors, we sometimes fail to make visible the fruitfulness of the above-described practices and the profitability of combining theory and practice. In fact, the marriage of theory and practice is quickly becoming a cliché in conversation among new media scholars; yet, mastery in integrating the two within our pedagogy has been slow in coming. Due to the infancy of new media, examples of this profitable union, examples that might make the benefits of combining theory and practice more palpable to students, are often difficult to locate. Additionally, within IDT specifically, the either/or division of classes into theory and production tends to foster a false division of the two. And strangely enough, we the faculty then wonder why many students have difficulty building strong bridges between theory and practice within their masters projects. It should also be said that some students resist this philosophy of theory/practice integration in a narrow-minded pursuit of résumé fillers and perhaps in a misunderstanding of IDT’s goals. It is our responsibility to better clarify the goals of the curriculum, and I hope that the above paragraphs help to do so.