Abstract
Against the backdrop of the century-long stigma associated with film in America’s English classroom, which persists despite its codification in the English Language Arts (ELA) standards, this study investigated the question: How do American high-school English teachers make sense of and instruct with film? Employing semi-structured interviews with 12 high-school English teachers who instruct with film, from suburban, urban, rural and private school settings, the findings suggest that the stigma staining film in America’s English classroom is systemic. Participants shared their view that film is not an inherently passive medium, and when purposefully and actively facilitated, it possesses unique and efficacious pedagogic promise. Employing strategies typically associated with teaching printed texts, maintaining high classroom expectations, and integrating twenty-first-century pedagogic technologies when teaching with film may allow instructors to fulfil film’s remarkable learning potential, and consequently subvert misperceptions of, malpractices with, and the stigma surrounding film in America’s English classroom.
Highlights
With the advent of the motion picture more than a century ago, film’s relatively short lifespan has not precluded a very rich and complicated history (Monaco, 2009), which is mirrored by its complex and controversial relationship with the American public education system
With a ‘focus on results rather than means’, leaving instructors, curriculum developers and states ‘to determine how the standards should be reached’ (National Governors Association, 2010: 2), most, like their national counterparts, eschew detailing precisely how film instruction in the English classroom should be done, resulting in scattershot implementation. This absence of guidance and uniformity, profoundly complicated by a significant dearth of preand in-service teacher training in media pedagogy (Marcus and Levine, 2007), has left many American educators largely unaware of the body of scholarship that exists in the field (Hobbs, 2004)
I begin by reporting on how the participants described experiencing and conceptualising film in the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom context
Summary
With the advent of the motion picture more than a century ago, film’s relatively short lifespan has not precluded a very rich and complicated history (Monaco, 2009), which is mirrored by its complex and controversial relationship with the American public education system. With a ‘focus on results rather than means’, leaving instructors, curriculum developers and states ‘to determine how the standards should be reached’ (National Governors Association, 2010: 2), most, like their national counterparts, eschew detailing precisely how film instruction in the English classroom should be done, resulting in scattershot implementation This absence of guidance and uniformity, profoundly complicated by a significant dearth of preand in-service teacher training in media pedagogy (Marcus and Levine, 2007), has left many American educators largely unaware of the body of scholarship that exists in the field (Hobbs, 2004). Over the course of two school years, from 2016 to 2018, I interviewed each participant once, with interviews typically lasting between one and two hours
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