Producing professionalization: analyzing the discourse of Adobe Premiere’s Learn More tools in shaping student practices

ABSTRACT As a supplement to its popular video editing program Premiere Pro, Adobe now automatically directs new users to its series Learn More tutorials. This move to have the tool teach itself not only has the potential to sideline in-person instructors, but, under the guise of ‘neutral’ technology, naturalizes the professionalization discourse in video production pedagogy. This discourse emphasizes technical, ‘job-ready’ skill building to the exclusion of critically-minded production activities aimed at analyzing texts or challenging hegemonic representations through alternate production. Via a walkthrough analysis, I track how the Learn More tutorials reproduce the professionalism discourse by navigating users toward specific production practices and outputs. Lessons on Premiere functions including color correction, sequencing, audio mixing tools consistently foreground a technical, ‘how-to’ approach to video production, ignoring valuable ‘why’ questions of meaning and representation. I conclude by calling for media production educators to interrogate seemingly neutral technologies like the Learn More tutorials. By locating these sites of reproduction and understanding the means through which they reproduce the professionalism discourse, instructors can work to negotiate or challenge production tools to better allow critically-oriented media production approaches to take root.