Dead Poets Society Research Articles

Adult Learning Celebrates 25 Years

Twenty-five years ago, in 1989, a U.S. postage stamp cost 25 cents, Simpsons debuted on television; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Little Mermaid, Dead Poets Society, and When Harry Met Sally projected on movie screens; and Duran Duran, Prince, Madonna, and New Kids on the Block sang their hearts out (The People History, 2014). Presidents Ronald Regan and George H. W. Bush resided in the White House, and Microsoft released OfficeSuite[R], a new software package including a spreadsheet, word processor, database, and presentation software. Internationally, the Berlin Wall fell, reunifying East and West Germany, and newly elected Prime Minister of South Africa, F. W. deKlerk, began the dismantling of apartheid. In September 1989, Adult Learning first appeared as a nine-issue-per-year journal, self-published by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE). As historical context, in 1982, AAACE resulted from the merger of the National Association for Public and Continuing Adult Education (NAPCAE) and the Adult Education Association (AEA; AAACE, 2014). At that time, according to Ralph Brockett (1992), AAACE inherited two periodicals-Adult focused on research and theory, and Lifelong Learning: Adult Years, focused on research to practice. In 1983, the journals' names changed to Adult Education Quarterly and Lifelong Learning: An Omnibus of Practice and Research. Over the years, the former journal's focus remained the same, but association members debated the latter's focus on research to practice, more specifically the amount of focus on research versus practice (Brockett, 1992). As a result, in 1989, Lifelong Learning ceased publication in the spring, and Adult Learning began publication in the fall. In the early years, Adult Learning used various Departments to organize the journal's content. For example, in the inaugural issue, Jeanette Smith (1989) titled the Editor's Notes Department Great Expectations and introduced the new journal to readers: Everything--almost--is new. new name, a new process of managing and producing the magazine in-house, a new association body--the editorial board for the magazine ... We want each issue of Adult Learning to contain a variety of practical, how-to articles that will help you, as an adult educator.... We want you to find every issue of Adult Learning usable information that affects you in your daily professional life. (p. 6) Other Departments included (a) President's Podium; (b) Up Front, introducing the issue's theme; and theme-related (c) Directions for Research and (c) Feature; (d) Time Out; (e) Resources; and (f) Personal Reflections. inaugural issue's theme was educating the workforce, and the Feature section included two- to three-page articles such as Elizabeth Dole's America's Competitive Advantage: Skilled Work Force, Governor Bill Clinton's The State's Role: Leadership & Partnership, Edwin Simpson's A Challenge for Higher Education, and Donald Jones, LTG, and Lenore Saltman's Educating the Military Work Force: Worldwide Initiative. Over the years, Editors included Jeanette Smith, Cheryl Poison, Ralph Brockett, Lilian Hill, Paulette Isaac-Savage, and Mary Alfred. Adult Learning continued to publish a wide variety of articles related to adult education practice with varying formats and production schedules. Common themes highlighted over 25 years included diversity and multiculturalism, international, literacy, teaching and learning, technology, and workplace learning. Although featured less frequently, other themes represented the breadth of the adult education field, including assessment, development, economics, environment, ethics, faith and spirituality, feminism, the future, mentoring, military, partnerships, peace, philosophy, politics and policy, and professional development. Today, Adult Learning continues the legacy of serving adult education practitioners. …

One Carp a Day at Walden Pond

After a short rewiev of the stereotyped charachters of teacher in last 25 years italian and american movies, the focus is centred on John Keating, the unforgettable Literature teacher in Peter Weir ‘s Dead Poets Society, looked with suspicion of sentimentalism when the movie arrived Italy in 1990. The sources of his nonconformist teaching method are inspected, the Emeroson and Thoreau trascendantalist philosophy, the invitation to seize the day by Orazio, both exposed to a risk of being misunderstood cause of them introduction in the mechanism of media manipulation. But the movie can help the reflection about new method which are not afraid of mixing advanced studies with midcult in order to reach students more powerfully. The most important thing is to come out from the backwash which from long period of time is reproposing always the same teacher stereotype: tired, disillusioned, disastrous. A new way of storytelling can work to appreciate the job of the many of us who, in spite of adversities and short recognitions, have not give up thinking, planning, experimenting.

General

‘Classics, is, to me, the unicycle of education. It isn't especially practical or useful… It won't get you a well-paid job in a fancy office, and it won't necessarily make you attractive to the opposite sex… But none of that is important compared with the simple fact that studying Classics is brilliant’ (253). So says comedian (and former Cambridge classicist) Natalie Haynes on her own one-wheeled whistle-stop tour of the classical world: The Ancient Guide to Modern Life. Haynes is an intelligent guide with a real passion for the Classics and a great sense of humour. The index gives a good indication of what to expect: The Office can be found next to Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Dead Poets Society next to Tertullian's De Spectaculis, and Barbra Streisand sandwiched between Stoicism and Suetonius. Chapter titles are inevitably playful: from ‘Thinking Allowed’ to ‘Frankly, Medea I Don't Give a Damn’ and the inevitable ‘There's No Place Like Rome’. But this is not just a book played for laughs: Haynes's discussion of Aristophanes (199–209) is keen to emphasize that entertainment and education, comedy and Classics are not mutually exclusive categories: as she shows, is it possible both to amuse and advise.

Love Foolosophy: Pedagogy, parable, perversion

Popular filmic and literary stereotypes of teachers from Brodie and Chips to Keating and Schneebly have not only reflected a public desire for radically innovative and perverse teaching practices, but also created those paradigms in ways that are not always readily identifiable or traceable. This article seeks to analyse tensions between traditional institutional protocols and contemporary populist opinion on the role of the effective teacher. In doing so, the article takes Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) as a primary example of those tensions and argues for a perverse ‘foolosophical’ view of pedagogical performance and a new appreciation for the necessity of ignorance in the classroom. Since ignorance and understanding are not taken as unambiguous antonyms, the article proposes that effective teaching and learning occur most effectively in the interstices between humility and hospitality.

If It Was …

IF it was a colorit would be red,determined and resolute.If it was a plantit would be an evergreen,always full of sap.If it was an animalit would be an eagle,able to fly higher and see dangers.If it was a sportit would be footballexpert on teamwork.If it was a senseit would be the eyesight,alert and watchful.If it was a filmit would be “Dead Poets Society”because he must seize the day.If the question was “who is it?”the answer will be “the anesthesiologist!”

Essaying Sam Pickering: An Interview

Essaying Sam Pickering:An Interview Mel Livatino (bio) Sam Pickering may well be the most famous American writer no one has ever heard of. As nearly everyone in the scribbling community knows, he was the model for the English teacher John Keating (played by Robin Williams) in the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society. But his books, like those of all familiar essayists, fall far short of bestseller-dom. And there have been a lot of them—twenty-two to date, with a twenty-third due later this year and another in the spring. Three of those books have been academic works, mostly in the area of children's literature. Nineteen have been collections of familiar and travel essays. One is a collection of essays about teaching, Letters to a Teacher. In 2004 an omnibus selection of his essays appeared, The Best of Pickering. His most recent book is A Comfortable Boy, a memoir that ends when he is in eighth grade and a member of the safety patrol. In press is Journeys, a collection of personal essays. He has thus far published more than 250 familiar essays and fifty-five academic essays in scores of the best journals in America. Three of those essays were selected for Robert Atwan's Best American Essays annual series (1987, 2005, 2006), and scores more were named Notable Essays of the Year. [End Page 33] Pickering was born (1941) and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and often writes about the small Tennessee town of Carthage, the home of his ancestors, which figures as both a real and a fictional place in his essays. His essays are sometimes about teaching, sometimes about "roaming." Wood, field, library, and classroom are his favorite haunts. Beneath place, however, Pickering's concern is always with the human comedy, which, in aphoristic and witty bursts, he penetrates to the core. His writing always comes at the world from unexpected angles no other writer occupies. Pickering was educated at the University of the South (BA, 1963), Cambridge University (MA, 1965), and Princeton (PhD, 1970). He taught at Dartmouth from 1970 to 1978 and has taught at the University of Connecticut since 1978. Livatino: Your main form of writing is the essay. In my experience almost nobody knows what an essay is, including a fair number of English teachers. They think it's something they were forced to write in freshman English classes or they think it's a magazine article or an editorial commentary. How do you define and describe the essay? Pickering: A decade ago a reviewer in the Hartford Courant wrote that readers should not fret about defining my ponderings but simply call them "Pickerings." For me a No Trespassing sign is an invitation to explore. As hedgerows surrounding fields are green with life, so I meander outside fences, poking at this and that, not concerned about genre. I don't mind being called an essayist because classifying eases understanding. Imagine a publisher advertising a book written by "Edward's Daddy," "The Man Who Mows the Grass and Walks the Dogs," or "An Ancient Who Shuffles Six Miles a Day and Calls It Running." Annie Dillard once wrote that "what you see is what you get." What I see and hear, what I stumble across and what stumbles across me, are what I write about. After class this morning, a student described another student, saying, "She's really nice. She lives near me, and she eats lots of beets." Two weeks ago my daughter Eliza said, "Daddy, you are the only old person I have ever really known." The next day I started a piece [End Page 34] entitled "Boring," my take on Eliza's remark being that I was tedious beyond endurance. Two days later, when reducing the rich chaos of life into useful declarative sentences made me weary, I ambled into the kitchen. Vicki was cooking dinner. "I'm tired of writing," I said. "And I thought I would come in and visit a while. Is that all right with you?" "Marginally," Vicki replied, the single word enough to start an "essay." In the 1960s when I was in graduate school, buddies dubbed me "King Bee." Would that...

To Teach and to Treat: Meditations on The Miracle Worker

To Teach and to TreatMeditations on The Miracle Worker Ellen Handler Spitz "It's less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better." William Gibson, The Miracle Worker When Dr. Gerard Fromm asked me to speak on The Miracle Worker at the Austen Riggs annual Creativity Conference in honor of playwright William Gibson, who passed away in November 2008, at the age of ninety-four, and who was a great friend to psychoanalysis, I demurred at first because I am not an expert on the life of Helen Keller, nor indeed on blindness, nor on disability; yet I have thought deeply about the film, and I hope that what follows may prove meaningful. It is, of course, a brilliant work, and all I can do is to offer a few of my own perceptions. I must emphasize at the outset that, in what follows, I shall be speaking about the 1962 movie with William Gibson's script, just as it is, and not its relation to historical fact. I shall be treating it sui generis, as a work of art, tout compris. Last term, my colleague Professor Jay Freyman, a classicist, and I taught a seminar on "The Nature of Learning and the Art of Teaching" at our campus of the University of Maryland. In it, we screened this film, as it seemed to us that The Miracle Worker had to be an indispensable part of our inquiry. But why? What makes it such an important and timeless classic on the nature of learning and the art of teaching? Ninety minutes long, black and white, deceptively simple, the film held our students rapt (the class, twenty Humanities Scholars, watched it together, as a group). Although they had already been captivated by a plethora of engaging material, [End Page 101] including films such as Goodbye, Mr. Chips, To Sir with Love, Farewell, My Concubine, Stand and Deliver, Dead Poets Society, The Paper Chase, and many readings ranging from Aristophanes, Plato, and Montaigne to Jacques Barzun, Gilbert Highet, and Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), I doubt that, for most of them, anything trumped The Miracle Worker. Our special focus was as stated, and, along with this particular film, we asked our students to read Montaigne's classic, justly famous essay of 1575, "Of the Education of Children," a supremely relevant text. Now, at Austen Riggs, the manifest focus is not on teaching and learning per se but rather on therapy and treatment. Which are different. Or are they? If they are different, how are they different and in what ways different? Bennett Simon, for example, has noted in Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece (1978) that Plato treats madness and ignorance as maladies of the same kind. Simon writes: "Plato's unique contribution is the ideal that man can achieve control over the irrational by a special kind of training and education." He adds that, "analogously, Freud's unique contribution was the development of [a method] leading to permanent, internal reorganization … a method of understanding, leading to self understanding" (207). This juxtaposition frames my essay. In pondering the film and what it portrays and in considering how different and similar these realms of endeavor are and in what ways they overlap—education and treatment, the teacher and the therapist—we might note that the Greek stem therap- carries the basic meaning "to serve." Hence, its English derivative "therapist" likewise carries the connotation of service, i. e., the therapist renders service to the body or mind of the patient. Indeed, the ancient Greeks so used the stem to mean "render medical service."1 Annie Sullivan, young and inexperienced (Helen Keller was her first pupil), is brought to Tuscumbia, Alabama by a set of desperate parents because their little girl, Helen, blind and deaf, needs to learn. The stakes are high. If she cannot learn, the alternative under consideration by her family is to send her to an institution that may destroy her spirit and possibly spell her demise altogether. Creating mayhem in her parents' gracious southern mansion, Helen appears to us on screen as a feral child—dirty, [End Page 102] unkempt, uttering...

Ekphrasis in reverse : the use and abuse of poetry in popular films

This paper discusses the uses and abuses of poetry in two recent, popular films, one American “Dead Poets Society” and one British “Four Weddings and a Funeral”. I aim to show how poetry travels from the field of high culture and is recuperated from obscurity by being quoted in these feel-good dramas. Flowever, along the transtextual path something is also lost, and rather than simple quotation, what happens to the poems in question is something beyond allusion, or even plagiarism, pastiche, parody, or counterfeiting - namelywhat Guy Debord termed détournement.

<em>Half Nelson</em> and Dialectics

For years, I have been writing about what I call which I define as films that are in some way, even incidentally, about a or a student. Most of the films that comprise the school film genre are set in the suburbs (or sometimes in small towns) and feature middle and upper middle class White students as the main characters. In these films, teachers are typically very minor characters (usually comical figures), if any teachers appear at all. As I have explained elsewhere (Trier, 2001), these suburban school films are very diverse in terms of genre, ranging from light-hearted romances (Pretty in Pink), fluff comedies (Clueless), Pygmalion stories (She's All That), cult classics (/ Was a Teenage Werewolf), celebratory youth-rebellion movies (Pump Up the Volume, Dazed and Confused), supernatural thrillers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Carrie), sci-fi tales (Disturbing Behavior, The Faculty ), dark-humor comedies (Heathers, Pretty Persuasion), spoofs (High School, Not Another Teenage Movie), and a few serious accounts of violence committed in schools (Elephant). The other main subgenre of school films, comprised of far fewer films than the suburban school film subgenre, features an educator in the main role. Though a few films have been made about principals--the most popular of which is Lean on Me--most of these films are about teachers. And among these films, most are about teachers who work in inner city schools (blockbuster exceptions are Mr. Holland's Opus and Dead Poets Society, which take place, respectively, in a suburban high school and a private school catering to White students from wealthy families). The classics of this subgenre of inner city school films about teachers are Blackboard Jungle; To Sir, with Love; and Up the Down Staircase. Blockbusters from the 1980s and 1990s include Stand and Deliver and Dangerous Minds. And the most recent popular addition to this subgenre is Freedom Writers. All of these inner city films that feature a or a principal as the main character are serious dramas in which the educators struggle to save their inner city minority students from the dangers and dead-ends of their lives (for a deeper analysis of this kind of school film, see Trier, 2005). And in these films, the educators always succeed, which has caused such films to be referred to as teacher films by academics who have written about such films (e.g., Ayers, 1994; Dalton, 1999; Edelman, 1990; Farber & Holm, 1994; and Paul, 2001). In this article, I will discuss the independent film Half Nelson (2006). Specifically, I will analyze the film's representation of the in terms of two main cliches of the teacher film. First, I will explore the way Half Nelson radically departs from the cliche of the ahistorical cinematic educators who appear in the savior genre. Then, I turn my discussion to the other main cliche that the film partially subverts, which is that Half Nelson does not offer a one-dimensional representation of an educator who is an unquestionable figure of moral authority, which is the case in all such teacher films. It is essential to state at the outset that I have conceptualized this article to be one that can be taken up as an introductory text that might initiate a pedagogical project designed to engage readers (1) either in developing a deeper analysis of Half Nelson itself, or in analyzing Half Nelson in relation to other savior films. The main effect of this decision is that I have necessarily avoided including spoilers (i.e., plot and character elements that, if divulged, would spoil the viewing pleasure for someone who has not seen a film), which means I have left much to be explored in the film. (2) However, in my conclusion, I suggest some potential discussion topics that are designed to focus attention on plot and character elements that I necessarily have not explored in my analysis. …

Philosophical reflections from the silver screen: using films to promote reflection in pre‐service teachers

This paper studies the use of four popular films (The Lord of the Rings, Dead Poets Society, The Matrix and The Simpsons) to promote philosophical reflections in pre‐service teachers. Based on a study of 25 pre‐service teachers in Singapore, the findings show that the teachers’ reflections fall under five main categories: (1) question and modify personal aims, beliefs, assumptions; (2) confront and solve personal and professional obstacles; (3) apply the implications to the local context; (4) consider the students’ specific educational needs, and (5) review and change personal instructional goals, methods and resources. This paper explores how the four films draw out different types of reflection in the teachers, and how the teachers’ reflections based on the films help to prepare them for the teaching profession in Singapore.

Websites of note

Websites of note

The Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI), an electronic musical wind controller for playing synthesizers

The Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI) is an electronic musical wind instrument with playing techniques similar to that of a trumpet. Invented by Nyle Steiner in the early 1970’s, it was designed to give the performer control of dynamics from breath pressure and the ability to make a humanly generated vibrato. Other musical paramaters can be controlled as well. It has a playing range of seven octaves (similar to that of a piano). When musical lines are played using this instrument (controller) connected to an electronic music synthesizer, the sound is much more natural sounding and expressive than when a normal musical keyboard is used. The evolution of this instrument from the pre-Midi era to it latest Midi configuration, principles of operation, synthesizer programming, and its wide use in movie and TV scoring will be discussed. The EVI has played featured musical lines in many major movie soundtracks and TV shows such as Apocalypse Now, Witness, Dead Poets Society, Fatal Attraction, No Way Out, Gorillas in the Mist, and many others. The EVI design has also been adapted as an Electronic Woodwind Instrument (EWI) by Nyle Steiner and has been manufactured and sold worldwide by the AKAI Co. in Japan.

Harold Bloom's All-White Dead Poets Society

Harold Bloom's All-White Dead Poets Society

The dead poets society: The copyright term and the public domain

In a victory for corporate control of cultural heritage, the Supreme Court of the United States has rejected a constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (U.S.) by a majority of seven to two. This paper evaluates the litigation in terms of policy debate in a number of discourses ? history, intellectual property law, constitutional law and freedom of speech, cultural heritage, economics and competition policy, and international trade. It argues that the extension of the copyright term will inhibit the dissemination of cultural works through the use of new technologies ? such as Eric Eldred's Eldritch Press and Project Gutenberg. It concludes that there is a need to resist the attempts of copyright owners to establish the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (U.S.) as an international model for other jurisdictions ? such as Australia.

Challenging the Cinematic Construction of 'Literacy' with Preservice Teachers

As a practicum supervisor in the teacher education program at UW-Madison, I designed many projects and activities around "school films". I define a "school film" as a film that in some way, even incidentally, is about an educator or a student. Some well-known school films are Dead Poets Society , Stand and Deliver , and To Sir, With Love . Some lesser-known ones are Waterland, Welcome to the Doll House, Small Change, and Maedchen in Uniform . In this article, I discuss a project that involved taking up the film Teachers (1984) for the purpose of problematizing practicum students' traditional, "autonomous" views of literacy. The project's goal was to introduce students to a "Discourses" orientation toward literacy through a combination of "reading" both print and film texts, writing reactions to these texts, and discussing these reactions and the texts during seminars.

The amplification of reason, or the recuperation of imagination: Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society

The question addressed here concerns the relation between reason and imagination: is the prejudice against imagination on the part of western philosophers, at least until Kant, justifiable? Or should we, following Kant in (the first edition of) his first Critique, regard imagination as being integral to reason? Moreover, was Shakespeare right, in A midsummer night's dream, about imagination preparing one for mature social and moral action? These issues are addressed here by way of an exploration of their cinematic dramatization in Weir's film, Dead Poets Society.

Amos among the ‘Dead Prophets Society’: Re-Reading the Lion's Roar

Amos 3.3–8 is usually interpreted as the historical prophet's self-justification before a hostile crowd. I employ this passage in a similar manner, but restrict the confrontation to a literary world created by a post-monarchic body of scribes and interpreters. These I label the ‘Dead Prophets Society’ (with apologies to the makers of the film Dead Poets Society). Their audience must supply the answers to the character Amos's interrogation on behalf of the textual audience. This situation forms the basis of a ‘trap’ which forces the guild to confront their own limitations vis-à-vis the ancient prophets, and still identify with Amos and experience the imperative nature of prophecy that the passage depicts.

Promoting innovations in geoscience education

Kenneth Verosub often begins a new semester of teaching geology courses at the University of California at Davis by having students stand on their chairs while he climbs on top of his desk. Actor Robin Williams, in the film “Dead Poets Society,” used this ploy to encourage students to think creatively, and Verosub's students invariably understand the visual reference.From his perch several feet above the floor, the mustachioed Verosub tells students, “I want you to get a different perspective on how to learn in a science class.”

Kreatiwiteit en Dead Poets Society: ’n kritiese evaluering

Creativity and Dead Poets Society. A critical evaluationAlthough the need for the development of creative thinking is mentioned in the latest White Paper on education, not much has been done to enable teachers and lecturers to stimulate creativity in their classrooms. In this article, the film Dead Poets Society is used to explore central issues related to the development of creative thinking. The film is treated as a visual case study of Mr. Keating’s approach to the development of creativity. In an analysis of the film his assumptions about creativity are retrieved, as well as the specific methods that he employed in order to stimulate creativity in his students. In the fin a l part of the article a critical evaluation of his approach toward creativity is offered in which both strengths and weaknesses of his approach are exposed. By doing this the problems and challenges related to the development of creative thinking are explored.

Saint Paul at the movies: the apostle's dialogue with American culture

Star Wars, Amadeus, A Separate Place, Tender Mercies, Grand Canyon, Tootsie, Ordinary People, Empire of the Sun, Pale Rider, Red Dawn, and Dead Poets Society--all these movies show concern for deep human issues also treated in the Bible. The films provide evidence that many of the apostle Paul's themes in his New Testament letters are relevant for today. Contemporary movies, according to Robert Jewett, influence many Americans more than their formal education or religious training. And, since Paul interpreted the gospel on other people's turf, Jewett believes that today his forum would involve the movies, a primary source of discovering and debating important moral, cultural, and religious issues. Jewett treats film and biblical passages with equal respect. He brings their ideas and metaphors into relationship so that new insights emerge about both the ancient texts and the American cultural situation.