Overview
When I started this process, I had the idea that I wanted to teach my students about different cultures through their cinema. I now realize I can also teach my students to understand a particular region's cinema through its culture. This symbiosis was a revelation to me, and I hope my students will delight in it as much as I have. Students can learn from the movies a great deal about a nation's or region's history, geography, and people, including their values, hopes, and fears, but to understand the way filmmakers express these through the cinema, it helps to know something beforehand of the culture from which these movies spring. In researching the cinema of Ireland, Iran, and Africa, I hope to uncover the artistic and cultural traditions out of which they arise in order to better prepare my students to appreciate their films. This unit is intended for a ninth-grade heterogeneous English class. Students of all academic levels from special needs to advanced will be grouped together in this class as our school does not "track" students according to ability. The class will also be demographically diverse. Although the majority of the students are white non-hispanic, there is a large minority (25%) of black students and a smaller minority of Latin-American students (5%). Other races and ethnicities make up less than 1% of our population. The unit should last approximately four weeks with classes meeting for 90 minutes five days a week. Suggestions for shortening and lengthening the unit are made where possible.
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