Holistic competency development and the significance of learning domains in audiovisual archiving education

摘要

Audiovisual archiving education programs prepare individuals to care for film, video, and digital media collections found in cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums. These programs combine traditional graduate education with significant experiential components to train students for work with moving images and sound material in archival and museum settings. Audiovisual archivist training requires a three-pronged approach that combines competencies drawn from the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning domains, blending conceptual, historical, and theoretical knowledge and soft skills such as communication and project management with training in hand and other sensory skills. Audiovisual education programs tend to be less explicit about requirements in expert handling and repair work (often referred to in the conservation profession as “hand skills”), sensory skills, and soft skills, however. While cognitive competencies are often stated directly through program documents such as course descriptions and syllabi, psychomotor and affective competencies tend to not be directly stated or are deprioritized in favor of development of cognitive competencies. This perceived gap establishes the need for making affective and psychomotor educational objectives more explicit in program curricula and requirements. In particular, learning objectives in the psychomotor domain have been neglected, which is problematic for a field that requires professionals to possess significant manual dexterity and sensory skills. This paper also makes the case for the design of a field-wide competency framework that accurately reflects the roles of the three learning domains and makes them equally essential for professional preparation in the audiovisual archiving profession.