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Review
| Celluloid Blackboard: Teaching History with Film, edited by Alan S. Marcus. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, 2007. 259 pages. $39.95, paper.
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| Historically-based feature films have emerged as potent shapers of public knowledge about the past. Infrastructure-smart classrooms with LCD projectors and widespread access to school and university media collections have created new opportunities for teachers eager to exploit film's advantages for student engagement. Yet, as the editor of Celluloid Blackboard points out, there is a decided "lack of research into this field," a lack this volume ably seeks to overcome through essays exploring theoretical frameworks for film analysis in the history classroom, evidenced-based examinations of student learning in classrooms using film, and reflective, experiential essays by teachers with long experience using film in their classrooms. |
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The theoretical section of the book opens with John E. O'Connor's concise restatement of his approach to analyzing films. While not advancing a great deal of new material, the essay serves to re-introduce a well-known and useful framework for helping students and teachers deal with film. In the essays that follow, Stuart Poyntz and Scott Metzger separately seek to test, refine, and extend the kind of film-as-history-text approach advocated by O'Connor. Each of these essays reminds us that films are useful as texts, but that they are a very specific kind of text, which requires teaching students reading protocols which can account for performance, visual communication, and dramatic license among other factors. Poyntz's reading of The Aviator (2004) focuses on contradictions and in the film's depiction of Hughes as a teachable moment that can lead to complex thinking about historical figures. Metzger focuses on The Alamo (2004) and The Patriot (2000) in order to develop a framework he describes as "pedagogical content analysis" that analyzes film content and viewer response along lines of "fact and fiction," "constructing the past and the people in it," and "reacting to the past." |
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The research section of the book reprints Peter Seixas 1993 essay from The History Teacher on how viewing features films on native-white relations can influence student perceptions of those historical themes. In this study, the researchers interviewed students after showing them films which were not a part of their regular curriculum. Building on this article, the three essays that follow in this section (by Alan Marcus and also Peter Meyerson and Richard Paxton) explore student learning over the course of a semester, comparing two groups of students of divergent socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Through the thick description of one expert teacher's classroom practice with films (Jeremy Stoddard), Marcus finds that context is key, with student reception of film influenced by the ways the films were introduced into the curriculum, by "students' faith in their teacher's choice of film," and by students' judgments of a "film's bias, perspective, and historical inaccuracies." Meyerson and Paxton argue that experiential differences rooted in sociocultural contexts create divergent epistemological frameworks for interpreting and judging historical films, implying that pedagogy must take these aspects of student prior knowledge into account when dealing with feature films. Finally, an essay by Stoddard concludes that feature film about the Holocaust can be useful in developing historical empathy among students when film showings are combined with careful pedagogy to mitigate the danger of overconfident identification with historical experience. That experience is always in many ways unknowable. In the final section of the book, two experienced secondary classroom teachers (Ron Briley and Stephen Armstrong) provide experiential reflections on their uses of film. In his essay, Briley recounts various successful combinations of film and classroom environment which can help students to better understand the 1960s; Armstrong recounts his experience teaching a film-based course in United States history, and the challenges of getting students to regard these films as texts. |
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Although aimed at K-12 educators, these essays contain many ideas useful to those teaching in the college classroom (especially those facing the challenge of getting engaging students really involved in survey courses). While the theoretical frameworks suggest interesting course and lesson possibilities, the pedagogical principles outlined in the evidence-based section are the strongest section of the book. They provide tested principles upon which to base good learning design. Each reminds us that context matters, whether it is preparing students in particular ways to view films, remembering students' prior experience, or challenging students to deepen their reading of a film's history. In nearly all fields of history education, we need more books like this, books which move our thinking, in learning theorist Mariolina Salvatori's apt phrase,. "beyond the anecdotal" and into the realm of pedagogical practice informed by effective research done in our own disciplinary ways of knowing. |
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| Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. |
Michael Coventry |
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