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DR. C’s MEDIA LITERACY.
Teaching With Film: An Interdisciplinary Approach.
As the new semester began in Fall 2006, I received an email from a library media specialist in a North Carolina county. After an apparently somewhat acrimonious meeting, the use of motion pictures in the classroom was banned by the school board, until they could establish a coherent policy and procedures for using film.
What would Tom Edison say? Tom who knew a lot about technology and little about schools, had predicted in 1913 that “books will soon be obsolete in schools.. scholars will soon be instructed through the eyes..it is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture”.
Following a still familiar pattern, motion picture projectors found their way into our nation’s schools before teachers were trained in how to use them. Operating the machinery however was the easy part. In addition to knowing how to turn the equipment on, teachers had to know how to turn the kids on. As always, success depended upon the pedagogy much more than the program.
By the 1920s researchers documented the fact that visual instruction was receiving little financial support and there were uneven administrative practices. Today according to recent EPE evidence, only 9 states require administrators have technology proficiency for licensure- almost guaranteeing uneven practices in the acquisition & application of media & technology.
In 1923 F Dean McClusky concluded that “the movement for visual education will progress in direct ratio to the number of teachers trained in the technique of visual instruction…teachers must be given an opportunity to learn the advantages and disadvantages of visual instruction, through formal and informal instruction”.
Today, while the American film industry churns out movie after movies, those films ironically often have to leave the U.S to be valued as teaching tools.
In Australia, ATOM [Australian Teachers of Media] have for years now been developing compelling motion picture study guides to help teachers integrate film in an interdisciplinary manner across the curriculum.
It is a model the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Appalachian State University, took up in the 1990s. As one of our teachers said after being involved with the project: ‘I never realized how ineffectively I used film in my classroom until I created the movie guide. Now I see what a powerful teaching tool film can be”.
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SCENE Number 1.
Nova Scotia.
A snowy April morning. My speaking venue, a movie theater full of kids. The buses keep bringing them in. They stop in the lobby for popcorn and drinks and I apparently am their entertainment. No movie, but lots of movie talk.
It starts well. I project an image from GLADIATOR on the screen. “Oh I love that movie” a guy calls out. They always call out- pictures provoke them. So I run to this young man with my microphone and ask excitedly“ so what do you like about GLADIATOR.?” ‘
I liked everything but the end”, he tells me. So now he’s a critic. Could it get better than this? We’re just getting started and already they want to re-write the narrative.
I’m here as part of a movie festival to get them to talk and think about the art of the motion picture- to develop critical criteria. Now there’s a term that can be deadly for teens –but it doesn’t feel like that because we’re talking about their likes and their tastes and preferences.
When it’s over I stand in the aisle talking to some of the teachers about what they had just seen and heard. ‘I never knew they knew this stuff”, one of them tells me. ‘Did you ever ask them?”, I responded. |
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SCENE Number 2.
Eureka California.
A public library full of teens. It’s the end of a long day for them and they’ll be a restless audience. But I’m not worried. I ‘ve done this before. I know my material. I know my audience and I know they love media and they all have opinions and they all want to express those opinions. But they don’t know it all even the ones that think they do and I’ve got a trick or 2 up my sleeve.
So I bring up an image of Neo and Morpheus and we’re talking The Matrix, talking Trinity. Then they see an image from Star Wars- it’s Obi –they react. Obi stays on the screen and now I add Gandalf.
They react again. Finally we return to Matrix and Morpheus joins Obi and Gandalf on the screen. And the question appears: Can You Connect These Characters? And they do- they always do. And its not academic, its excitement and personal like my grandson’s connection to Bionicles. And they never use the word archetype but they always get the connection- the mentor, the guide, the wise man. Merlin I tell them and for a while we explore archetypes and stereotypes. As the end approaches- I challenge them. They see an image from The Wizard of Oz; Dorothy and her companions. They react. It’s still a classic.
“Did you know”, I ask them, that The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars tell the same story. ‘Yeah right”, a couple of them say dismissively. And that folks is when I know I have them. When I know I’m about to open their eyes and leave them with a knew way of looking at what they thought they already new. And it begins that way.
OZ opens with Dorothy living with her Aunt and Uncle. STAR WARS starts with Luke living with his aunt and uncle. Dorothy goes flying thru the air. Luke goes into space. Now they’re getting interested. “So they meet some folks along the way, companions on their journey” I suggest. I ask them who Dorothy meets. Someone yells out a Tin Man. Gottcha!
‘So I ask”, very carefully, “Does Luke meet a tin man?” Some of them start to say no, and then they get it and when they get it they want to share it and that’s when I project the image of C-3PO. And now the kids aren’t the only one’s intrigued. This is eye-opening stuff for their teachers too.
And then the icing on the cake. From the back of the assembly, so I can’t really see who says it, a young man in a fairly critical tone, asks very loudly, “Oh yeah, well why don’t you tell me where Darth Vader is in The Wizard of Oz then”?
And I’m saying to myself, this is too good to be true. Because before I can reply, a whole group of his peers in that library get up and answer the question for him.
And today, they’ll head home seeing things just a little bit differently than before. |
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SCENE Number 3.
Nashville.
Call it Movie Monday or Film Friday. The name doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for an entire day I get to see students engage with something they all love; all have opinions about. These kids are from private schools but it works just the same in the public schools-film speaks to all demographics.
I do a 50 minute overview in the assembly but for the rest of the day the kids work in small groups with a film scene no more than 10 minutes long and a set of questions to help them think about the director’s decisions, the use of symbolism, the language of film, film as historical evidence and more.
In the assembly we’ve touched on techniques: Voice Over Narration [think The Outsiders, Stand By Me , Summer of 42]. But we also got to detect gender bias-the domination of the male point of view and male storytellers. I tell the girls its all about marketing- that Hollywood figured out a long time ago that when it comes to dating, girls would go with a guy to see a guy movie, but good luck trying to get him to see a chick flick.
And some of the girls, they’re already dating-they’ve experienced this bias first hand. So I suggest they are either part of the problem or part of the solution and we need to identify movies that tell it from the female point of view. Can you do it? [Think Clueless, Spanglish, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants].
Later in the day when they’re presenting their reports we see a different type of bias at work. They have been working a scene from 2 different westerns. They’re studying film as historical evidence and representation. They have to figure out which film was made first and how and WHY the depictions changed from the first to the 2nd movie. And they get it. They’re only 13 but they know enough to figure it out. And so working with She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Soldier Blue, they correctly identify representations of the west as a place, the military/cavalry and Indians. They recognize a dramatic shift in depiction from the first to the second film. The soldiers are no longer the good guys and the Indians aren’t demonized. “But why did it change?” I challenge them. And the smallest of them, a boy standing up on the stage, tells us that it was about civil rights and Vietnam, the women’s movement and “things like that”.
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Driving Miss Daisy [1989]
Robert Redford directing.
Gandhi [ 1982 ]
They Died with Their Boots On [ 1941 ]
Director, Spike Lee.
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