Using Film in the Classroom/How to Read a Film

Background and Relevance

Emeryville

Emeryville, a small city of less than 1,200 residents, rests in the near-center of the Bay Area, a region in California known for its diversity and social politics as much as its wide income gap. Emeryville’s location is unique in that it is both the literal and figurative center of the Bay Area with its high-income sister cities, like San Francisco and Marin, to the west and cities better known for their poverty and crime, like Oakland and Hayward, to the east. Due to this distinct location, Emeryville and its school district, is often called home to families and students from a variety of backgrounds.

Emery Unified School District contains only two schools. Anna Yates serves as the district’s K-8 school and Emery Secondary School, currently servicing students out of an interim building, as the 9-12 high school. The 2015-16 school year will see the opening of the Emeryville Center for Community Life (ECCL), which will serve as both a K-12 educational facility as well as a community center for the parents and families of Emeryville. Although plagued with set-backs and financial woes, many teachers and families alike are hoping the ECCL will be an opportunity to start fresh as many critics have often argued that Emeryville’s educational apparatus lacks the rigor, resources and instruction that is required to ensure that students have a competitive edge in a workforce that becomes more demanding each year.

Author Information and Areas for Professional Growth

After finishing my 4^th year teaching 11^th and 12^th grade English and 10^th grade World History I feel I have gained a degree of clarity and insight into my own teaching that I have lacked in prior years. Towards the end of the 2014-2015 school year I was able to take an honest inventory of my instructional capacity and pedagogy as an English teacher and make more informed decisions about instructional gaps that will need my attention before the next school year. As I will outline in more detail below I would like to focus on integrating critical lens theory into my curriculum. For this unit, I will use the psychoanalytical critical lens. Secondly, I would like to meet the needs of my visual learners by integrating film and video into the classroom as a both a viable central and supplemental tool for learning. I believe this unit will allow me to explore both of these areas for pedagogical growth and strengthen my English curriculum.

Student Population

Emery Secondary School’s student population has steadily declined from 220 students in 2013 to approximately 160 students as of 2015. According to school-ratings.com, ESS has an API score of 625 and state ranking of 1 (lowest) out of 10. On average, 65% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Approximately 10% of students are classified as special education and internal benchmark testing has a significant number of 9^th and 10^th grade students reading and writing at a 5^th and 6^th grade level. With regard to student demographics, 63% of students identify as African American and 22% of students identify as Hispanic or Latino. Furthermore, 10% of students identify as Asian, many of whom are of middle-eastern descent.

Areas for Student Growth

Unfortunately, the areas in which students require the most growth are foundational to academic success. These areas include reading, writing and critical thinking. More specifically, the fact that students are often reading below grade level makes asking and expecting students to read classic literature, as suggested by the Common Core appendixes, difficult and arduous at times. With regard to composition, students’ macro-level writing is often sufficient, with students demonstrating a basic level of understanding of organization and structure. However, student trends in writing have highlighted a lack of command with grade level writing mechanics and conventions. Lastly, a majority of students often have difficulty with critical thinking and considering thought-provoking prompts. Students generally find more value in obtaining the right answer than in the process of attempting to answer the question. Furthermore, although students can identify evidence, many students frequently have a difficult time utilizing evidence as a means to formulate and defend a claim.

Application and Relevance

Academically, this unit is relevant to my students because it will allow me to improve reading comprehension by varying the medium in which classical literature is usually delivered. By utilizing the 2013 Baz Luhrmann film adaptation of The Great Gatsby along side the original text, I will also be strengthening my students’ ability to effectively analyze the literary elements presented in both text and film. Utilizing film along with text will not only improve student comprehension around the narrative of The Great Gatsby, but will also encourage critical thinking in that students will be exposed to a variety of similarities and differences between mediums that will stimulate discussion and deeper analysis of the form, function and intention of the author and director. More so, coupling the text and film with reading and viewing strategies will gives students a stronger foundation to record, organize and archive their discoveries as they develop arguments and opinion on the themes found in The Great Gatsby. Lastly, by introducing students to the psychoanalytical critical lens theory, students will develop an approach for which to analyze the characters, decisions, actions and desires in The Great Gatsby. This will thus strengthen students’ ability to make connections to the text on a personal, global and universal level.

Personally, examining The Great Gatsby and the value systems that are central its story will help students wrestle with their own questions surrounding values, morals, ethics and integrity. Students will become more intellectually mature as they make value judgments on characters and deconstruct the decisions, motivations and fears of each character. This process will not only encourage critical thinking, but also illustrate the complexity surrounding what it means to be successful, happy and ultimately, human.

Unit Overview

Primarily, this unit will center on students analyzing the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann using the psychoanalytical critical lens theory to consider the values and morality of its characters as products of the Jazz Age. By doing so, students will also learn about film techniques and how film can be a powerful visual medium in storytelling. Students will read the original text concurrently with segmented clips from The Great Gatsby film adaptation using reading and viewing strategies as a means to increase comprehension and content mastery. Students will learn how film techniques can reinforce text-based discoveries and inferences using, in this case, a psychoanalytical lens theory. Students will specifically be examining characters’ value systems, moral compass, motivations, fears, decisions, actions and destinies in an attempt to draw general conclusions about America in the 1920’s, as F. Scott Fitzgerald saw them, and, possibly, compare those findings to similar topics in contemporary America.

However, this unit is primarily concerned with the film component of a larger unit on The Great Gatsby. Thus, the strategies and approaches outlined in this narrative may be better relied upon to act as complementary to, rather than sufficient for, a text-based approach to The Great Gatsby in its own right.

The length of this unit should cover a span of seven to nine weeks, including assessments, in my 11^th grade English class. This includes the time required for students to read the entirety of the text. Students in my classroom will be given approximately four hours per week in block schedule classes that meet Monday, Wednesday and Thursday in intervals of 110 minutes.

Role of Film

For this unit, I will be segmenting the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby into “chapter scenes” to be used as a learning tool concurrently while students read the original text.

Specifically, students would use the film to consider a number of topics. For one, students will compare and contrast the characterization and character development as staged by the author and the director. They will examine the ways in which director Baz Luhrmann depicts Fitzgerald’s characters’ motivations, desires and fears along with their integrity, morality and values. What type of mechanisms, systems and form (specific to film) are used to accentuate and reinforce these traits? How are lighting, focus, camera position, color and direction used in each character? Furthermore, what is the significance of the director’s use of film technique and actor’s performance when considering these characters’ psychoanalytical dossier?

By using the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation of The Great Gatsby as a vehicle for analyzing the story’s themes and underlying social commentary, students will learn how film can be its own medium for effective storytelling. Secondly, using film in conjunction with text will increase students’ reading comprehension and content mastery surrounding The Great Gatsby and Critical Lens Theory.