Children and Education in World Cinema

Classroom Activities:  Ten Days

I imagine this unit taking place as a creative entry point to the school year.  You will have just finished conveying and negotiating the routines and agreements of your classroom: that everyone is responsible for classroom dynamics, that the engaged voice is always changing in dialogue with a world beyond itself, that you control your grade by your labor in the classroom, that you know you’re working by documenting your progress, and that homework happens only in preparation for the next day’s class.  Please keep in mind that the films I have chosen are not requirements, but the lines of inquiry and activities could be useful for whatever thematic unit you devise.  Film itself is an educational site.⁹⁹  

Essential Questions:

How do shots and space interact when making a film? OR How does space resist (limits + possibilities) when shooting a film?

Are the essentials of education, freedom and discipline, part of my school experience?

Day 1

Topic (Film):  Pedagogy of viewing (get used to juxtaposing and comparing clips) and the shot, attention training

Topic (Education):  Freedom and discipline into

Film Clips: touching the full genre spectrum, show the following set of clips:

• Linda Farrell Reading Rockets reading lesson (video)
• fashion class clip from Frederick Wiseman’s High School (overtly political documentary)
• Herr Bachman’s conversational, dirty-talking style in Herr Bachman and His Class (more observational documentary)
• gaining trust scene in Stand and Deliver (Hollywood)
• opening classroom scene in Where is the Friend’s House? (art film).

Prepare for tomorrow:  Read the “Go Ask the Mice” chapter in Tom Brown’s The Tracker. 

Day 1 will begin with a questionnaire that asks some simple questions about personal film history and appreciation to activate prior knowledge:  What are the films in your childhood that had the biggest impact on you?  What was a film you saw over the summer?  How much did you love it?  Does it interest you why you love it, yes or no?  Answer why for either yes or no. Finally, What makes a film great?

Discuss these answers as a class, and define critique as the art of loving.  Set students up to understand that this unit is designed to promote critical thinking about schooling and to give them some experience with filmmaking to become active viewers.  It takes investment time to specialize in film, so our efforts are beginning experiments with shots and space.¹⁰⁰  We are training our attention, and when viewing films and clips, we are willing to be duped by the illusion of reality in order to have any chance of being a good critic.¹⁰¹  These are similar attention skills we bring to literature to help us remember and find patterns.  Students will be given simple graphic organizers to structure their thinking, and let students know ahead of time the days that you will screen whole films in class.  I plan to have zoom showings on the evenings of those same days because of how important it is that we have these films in common and how pivotal a re-watch can be.  This should also reinforce early in the year that presence is expected for learning, more than attendance. 

Give students a preview and an example (teacher version?) of the capstone learning experiences of this unit.  First, deliver a sequence of three, one-minute shots that capture the general essence of a place with “an abundance of complex perceptions and sensations.”¹⁰²  The three shots require a chaser of two short writings:  a making-of learning process essay and a paragraph detailing takeaways from the feedback the class provides on share day, Day 10.  Students should know that their grade will not be based on the quality of their shots but how they write about their learning process.  The second celebration of learning will be a critique of their schooling, written in the genre of film criticism, which should include autocritique (critiquing one’s own ideas about education from Day 2 of the unit).  For extra credit, students can keep a dream journal over the next two weeks.  Humans are image makers, so we want students to attend to the films they are already making.

Day 1’s clips are chosen to demonstrate genre traits, even though we hold interpreting and analyzing more artistic films as our North Star.  The root of respect is “to look at,” so we provide students with a Truth Chart to respect the clips and record their observations of each clip under the labels:  What truth is intended and why?  What is twisted/shaped/reinvented?  What is simplified?¹⁰³ Allow students free reign to record, but unpack this chart after each clip.  Post-discussion, students can take some time to add to their boxes.  This will be a slow methodical process, but the clips we choose should function as stand-alone pieces.  Their “extraction is felt like suspense,” so they are really teasers for films we will touch base with again throughout the unit.¹⁰⁴  This chart is already getting students to play with how film and types of film transform reality. 

When you reach the last clip of the day, take the opportunity to define that a shot happens uninterrupted between cuts.  Let students use the word wall for its intended purpose–students displaying words that they encounter throughout a unit.  A word wall is student led, though we would certainly like to see “shot” up there to set the tone.  As an exit ticket, students should write about which clip showed the least student freedom (choice) and discipline (the ability to act on choice).

Day 2

Topic (Film):  Critical response and the resistance of the real

Topic (Education):  Film as public pedagogy–how film enables conversations that connect politics, personal experiences, and public life

Film Clip:  Opening school scene of The 400 Blows

Prepare for tomorrow:  Read a critical review of 400 Blows from imdb.com.  Look for the New York Times, Austin or Philadelphia papers, or Slant Magazine.

After a reading check in which students name and describe the kind of education they discovered in The Tracker, Day 2 begins with getting students into their interlocking groupings for the first time.  There will be only one activity that is done in a group context in this unit because filmmaking is a personal pursuit even though it takes many people to get a film to the projection booth.  Our groups exist for sharing ideas, leading discussions, and impromptu presentations.  In their little communities, on big sticky notes, students should brainstorm what they see as problems with public schooling in America, a context with which they are familiar.  Groups will then rotate to the next group’s sticky and write below what they think are the values in society that led to those problems or the values in society that need to be there to solve them.  Groups will return to their original sticky, and after a few minutes of group reflection, they will present on whether or not they agree with the values statements attached to their work.  This kind of spontaneous presentation is typical of college classrooms, so students need practice. 

Students will then move into their film groups to try to solve the kind of problem that can arise for filmmakers on the set.  I’m sure you can do better than this situation, which actually happened at a shoot at my house in support of our school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors (the “Somewhere That’s Green” sequence):  The goal of today’s shoot is to capture a very particular scene of 1950s American suburban bliss with the white picket fence, garden, fantasy family, the works.  Your plan is to film a scene where the family is watching TV and eating TV dinners, but the house you’ve secured for filming doesn’t have a TV.  How do you troubleshoot to arrive at a reasonable shot that includes the realities of the house at which you’ve assembled all your actors? Does your choice help you secure a shot that meets your goal?  Why or why not? 

As you’re setting up the clip from The 400 Blows (the scene at the very beginning of the film), bat around the decisions the groups made.  Drive home the point that there are so many possibilities for how the film can look until the filmmaker makes a decision, and then all those little filmed takes get combined to make something new:  not exactly the plan, but an approximation, a conversation with life.  When we say film represents reality with reality, we mean unpredictable, resistant life.  Shots anchor us in this new reality.  They are the fundamental unit of filmmaking.

Our next version of a critical response comes in the form of an Exchange of Experience chart.  Students relate what they see in the clip to other works, a sense of tradition in the public domain, their own lives, and their imaginations.  We can think of this as the next step beyond:  “Have you seen The 400 Blows?”  “Yes, I liked it!”  And the next steps, further down the page, will be analysis (parts to whole, narrative structure + texture), interpretation (coming up with abstract meanings), and applying theory.  These are all parts of criticism, but here, students are starting to build a network, and films spark connections, mirroring culture as they construct it, using the lure of entertainment to provoke thinking about charged issues.¹⁰⁵  When we get a chance to close read a scene, which goes beyond the gist (initial thinking for what it’s about) to the main idea (what the filmmaker wants the audience to take away), we only get to main idea through sustained massaging of complex enough text.  We create text-dependent questions, moving from general understanding to key details, then structure, author’s purpose, then inferences and opinions, arguments, and intertextual connections.  I fear that even the softest iteration of critical response throws kids in the deep-end of this close-reading framework that my district uses, but I want students to grasp early and often how film is connective tissue.

Maybe you watch the clip twice, the first time for general understanding and the second time for how the camera captures the space, where it lingers, how it moves.  Then, as a class you can go back and postulate why.  Is this a good space that supports learning?  Make sure that students recognize that the public domain slot of their chart includes what Truffaut is trying to say about school, what our childhoods do for us, and what makes a good adult.  The other tricky section of the chart has to do with imagination.  Students can imagine ways that schooling could look different; after observing the rigid rows and the teacher’s demeanor, they can judge what doesn’t work and imagine what the opposite approach looks like in practice.  Students should also start to imagine what it was like to film this scene.  Why did a shot end where it did?  Where would the camera need to be placed?  How was the frame organized to account for the elements flowing across it?  How are the actors accounted for in the frame?  What limits did the filmmaker place on his power to manipulate the objects in the world caught on film?

I would collect this work, and publicly post student responses heading into Day 3, during which we will watch the whole film.  So to avoid minimum effort and to celebrate engagement, teacher and student can reflect on the work and learning already happening.  This moment of reflection is a data conference and a chance for students to self-assess.

Day 3

Topic (Film):  Realism vs. Montage

Topic (Education):  Bildungsroman

Film:  The 400 Blows

Prepare for tomorrow:  Update 2-page spread and leave some room for the ending tomorrow.

Day 3 is the first day that will be spent entirely watching a film, Francois Truffaut’s first film, which is largely autobiographical.  Historical data on The 400 Blows is widely available, but it is a defining film of the French New Wave.  Bergala cautions us to show films without fuss because we want students leaving their comfort zone on their own terms.¹⁰⁶  Reflect on yesterday’s responses for 10 minutes, and then press play.  In an hour and a half block, the film will carry over into the next day.

This year, I learned about a practice called a two-page spread.¹⁰⁷  They are typically used for novel study, but I’d like to employ it for films, which after all, try to imitate the scope of novels.  Students write on the back of one page and the front of the next, spanning the page break, to show that they are thinking about what they are watching.  You could cue students with a loose framework to jumpstart them.  Less prescriptive:  think idea, image, narrative.  More specifically: 

• Is there anything that goes against the rules of the film? Where are the bumps?  How can you justify why the bumps are there?  The exception will tell you what the rule is.
• What challenges the viewer of the film?
• Where does the film put its effort?
• What is the film’s attitude toward its subject?
• What is the stabilizing element of the film?
• What is diversion, and what is equipment for life?
• If this film is a Bildungroman, how does Antoine come of age?

These two-page spreads are an exercise in note-taking, one of the gathering skills of interpretation, a creative reaction to a piece of art, a piggyback on comprehension.¹⁰⁸  They should be as unique as the people making them.  My two page spreads are typically full of quotes, sticky notes, and doodles.  I also tell students that they can gossip about characters in their spreads, which should be completed after watching the whole film. 

We do want to bring one classic film debate to bear as soon as possible in the unit, and that is realism vs. montage.  Realist cinema relies on long takes, shooting on location, depth of field (the amount of the screen in focus), and total image offered.  Montage just means editing, the more controversial side of which is expressive (the juxtaposition of images instead of the images themselves).  Cuts are integral to filmmaking however, because they aid storytelling by structuring relationships, constructing meaning, and breaking down a space so it is recomposed to strong effect within the film.  Cuts also help time pass. Because we are preparing students to compose shots, they need as many schemata (knowledge structures) as possible in order to act.  Schemata influence the number of choices educational freedom can take advantage of and they dictate the amount of effort acting in the world takes.  The instructions for viewing The 400 Blows could include enjoying the film but also looking for particularly strong images (called icasticos) or visually oppositional shots that go against the grain of the rest of the film.  Look for the timing of cuts.  What is surprising to you?  Where does the filmmaker’s curiosity take him?  Where does the filmmaker linger?  And look for clusters of images–what goes with what.  What could these pseudo-repetitions, these events that rhyme, mean?  Make note of these moments, so you can take the class back there tomorrow.

Antoine Doinel’s interview close to the end of The 400 Blows stood out to me.  He is dead center in the shot, and it serves to emphasize that the adults in his life have never really listened to him.  The three prostitutes in prison repeat with difference with the three little girls isolated from the boys at the Observation Center.  For a 1959 film, I read this image cluster with a feminist lens:  women are either shunted to the side or used by men, and both amount to a punishment.

I have very intentionally included an older and a newer French film in this unit to stay with one culture, not ours, even as we travel the globe. 

Day 4

Topic (Film):  Similarities/oppositions, texture

Topic (Education):  Childhood experiences

Film:  The 400 Blows

Prepare for tomorrow:  Take a picture that represents where you are from.  You will use it tomorrow.

On Day 4, finish The 400 Blows and give students time to finish their 2-page spreads.  Before the final sequence that starts with a soccer match, ask students to write down on a digital bulletin board how they think the film should end.  Truffaut also struggled with this choice. After “Fin” hits the screen, allow students’ thoughts to congeal before talking about what they noticed and viewing certain scenes again. This dialogue will not be completely student-led, but a discussion later in the unit will be.  At this point, students need to hear the terms of film from the teacher as well as hear themselves say them.  Films are puzzles, so we are puzzlers.  Shots and objects have webs of meaning we are trying to touch and vibrate, to say something exact about a highly regarded film using precise language.  Just as I ask students to provide a page number when citing a book during Harkness discussion, we must use the power of dragging the playhead on the video progress timeline to note where particularly key scenes begin or end.  As their teacher, I need dazzling familiarity with the film, finding scenes quickly.  Ideally, students have scenes they want to see again, but if not, guide them to what they might learn to love.  I might kick it off by comparing the opening to the closing of the film.  Why these choices?  How did we get from one place to another?  Or I might talk about how space, especially the family’s cramped apartment, is telling a story.  Or I might use the stolen typewriter to speak on Antoine’s skills with language.  We want students reading as imaginatively as they sometimes write. 

Talk, an unrehearsed intellectual adventure, is the right speed for aesthetic consideration that helps students become more self-conscious of how to achieve imaginative goals.¹⁰⁹  This conversation could introduce new vocabulary as well, such as texture.  While mise en scene happens at the level of shot, texture refers to impressions of the film as a whole, but the registers of texture look similar:  acting and dialogue, setting, lighting, camera compositions and movement, sounds, music, special effects, and editing.  When talking texture, we focus on technology (how was it accomplished), techniques (artistic possibilities), and individual style (overall feel + pointed use of strategies).  Mise en scene (placement on stage), basically equates with what the audience sees in a shot, aligning with a filmmaker’s vision.  Mise en scene is visual storytelling that includes decor, lighting, space, costume, and acting, all on a continuum between naturalistic and theatrical.  Because we are focused on filmed space vs. real space for this unit’s creative analysis/output, asking the texture analysis questions above will be helpful.

Download this information at opportune moments in your leisurely, pattern and texture-based conversation, modeling “film as film” thinking.  Students will end the class period revisiting the film review they read two nights ago, answering an exit ticket about the language they noticed the critic using, as well as if they agreed with the critic or not.  Sending students in search of a piece of criticism was deliberately done to show them that not just teachers curate learning experiences; they can too.  That being said, it might not be a bad idea to have a few solid options on hand for students to borrow.

I don’t want to lose sight of education on Day 4.  Antoine Doinel is based on Truffaut’s childhood self; so what is Truffaut’s attitude (tone) toward that very personal subject matter?  Values and knowledge are constructed in schools and in our homes of origin.  Can students relate to any of Antoine’s learning environments, the city included?  The following questions could also work as secondary prompts for tomorrow’s journal:

• What makes a good old person?
• How do children in film imagine the spaces around them?
• How do children put the world together?
• What worlds are overlapping
• Looking at the boundaries that distinguish what makes sense vs. what is considered disruptive, how does the conflict shift?
• Looking at difficult histories, where and how is the beauty?
• What images make you conscious of yourself?

Day 5

Topic (Film):  Immanent analysis (using film to question inconsistency in society’s rules and systems)

Topic (Education):  Exposure to educational theorists

Film Clip:  Opening 12 shots of To Be and To Have

Prepare for tomorrow:  Take a photograph of the same subject as last night’s photograph.

Students will start Day 5 with an Anti-harmony journal:  What do you disagree with about young Antoine’s early education in the home and inside and outside school?  This journal has students thinking in writing before jumping back into their little community, education-oriented groups for curated research in stations.  I suggest that you bring to bear education theorists who have influenced you or who have your attention presently.  I also suggest that not all of the stations are reading-heavy; use some infographics and artifacts.  Students should know ahead of time that these stations are designed to give them food for thought, fresh ideas about the potentials of education and how people theorize the field.  Do the stations elicit any education negative examples from student schooling experience?  If values define the goals that motivate action, are there any values articulated in the station work that would motivate active learning in students?  When I teach the unit, I plan to supply stations with a version of the following:

• Comparison of the United States education system to Finland’s, which is widely thought to be the best. A Google search will yield infographics.  I plan to read some Pasi Sahlberg.
• Montessori’s writing on punishment and rewards. Maria Montessori, whose first schools were in poor neighborhoods in Rome, is a major theorist, and students may have seen Montessori schools in the area.  Hers is the only complete educational system designed by a woman.
• Examples of Fernand Deligny’s wander maps and his concept of the network. Deligny, an anarchist educator, observed and worked with autistic children in the hills of France.  His writing is a wild combination of animal analogies, art interpretation, and politics, but he was undeniably on the side of his students.  The wander maps trace the pathways of his students and become part of their identity.  It was Deligny’s idea for The 400 Blows to end with Antoine running to the beach.  That’s a great film-educator connection.
• John Dewey’s writing on interest and discipline. We teachers poach from Dewey’s constructivism all the time, but it pays to go to the source.
• The Reggio Emilia documentation process and the ethics of encounter. Reggio Emilia schools are named after a small town in Italy.  The town has a theory of education!  Could our towns do the same? 
• Anecdotes from A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School, a free school in Britain. He ran his school with radical ideas about freedom (no required classes) and the psychology of working with difficult students. 
• A set of Friedrich Froebel’s gifts. Froebel is the man behind Kindergarten.  The gifts are sets of items to be used in creative play.

Teachers will need to pollinate groups during this activity, but students can be given a chart with questions applied to each station:

• What knowledge counts?
• What legitimates the social situation?
• How would agency be defined?
• What are the educator’s thoughts about the future?
• How does the knowledge presented relate to your power of self-definition?¹¹⁰

Stations always take time, but leave time toward the end of class to watch the first 12 shots of the documentary To Be and To Have.  It is thought that the style of a film is a template visbile after the first 12 shots.  This doesn’t mean that the filmmaker’s first 12 shots will wind up at the beginning of a film, but in a similar way, our earliest childhood experiences shape us.  This is why the director’s vision for the film and students’ visions for their lives are so imperative.  Count the shots out together as a class and have students pepper the excerpt with what they think the feeling structure is.

The exit ticket for the day is for each student to share the image of where they come from with another member of their ensemble (film group).  For their partner’s still image, the task would be to engage in pleonasm:  use more words than necessary to describe the image they were privy to.  We want students reaching for meaning and invention.  Economy of language comes after finding something to say.

Day 6

Topic (Film):  Floorplan, camera placement, framing, blocking

Topic (Education):  Grading and competition

Film Clip:  Throwing the papers out the window scene in The Family Game

Prepare for tomorrow:  Read a critical review of The Class from imdb.com.  Look for the New York Times, Austin or Philadelphia papers, or Slant Magazine.

Day 6 is when I get nervous.  My professor in college told me I don’t have the eye for being behind a camera, but I have to trust in my students’ digital-native status and the process thinking that is the backbone of our approach.  Today’s activity will take the whole class.

A floorplan is more useful than a storyboard because it actualizes the technical concerns of invading reality and bringing it out.  Student ensembles will be given the set-up of a scene from a film, and using four copies of the floorplan of your classroom that you provide, they will plan four shots to tell the story, noting on the floorplan the camera position, any camera movement, blind spots, and where the actors will stand.¹¹¹  Here are some questions to guide the exercise:

• Where to begin and end the shot?
• Where to place the camera?
• How to organize or frame the elements that will be flowing across?
• What limits does one place on one’s own power to manipulate the objects in the world caught on film?
• How should one incorporate the actor?

And here is what generally what happens in one scene of The Family Game, a satirical look at the wealthy middle class in Japan:

The teacher starts handing back papers to the class and starts with the lowest grades first.  The class becomes animated and begins to clap in unison. The student with the lowest score walks to the front of the class with a paper bag on her head while students laugh.  The teacher then starts balling up the next lowest scores and throwing them out the window onto the playground, where the students have to go to fetch them.

Students will use phone cameras (turned sideways) to capture the 4 shots they planned without actors present, dropping these images into a document. The final step of this activity is to get students to take the same shots again, but this time actors are included.  Students should also drop these images into the same document, and write about what changed when actors were introduced and what choices, placements, and approaches would change as a result.¹¹²  Students are playing with point of view when placement and approach change.  The teaching experience of making a shot, that is engagement, coherence, and putting choices to a test, are tried in the group setting once before students are expected to create three one-minute shots of their own.¹¹³  Spatial concerns will vary from classroom to classroom; I, for one, will need to tape fake windows to the wall.  And parts of the classroom could be contested between groups.  Groups do, however, work at different speeds, and they can help each other when actors are needed. 

Before students complete a paragraph comparing their two images of the same object, using yesterday’s pleonasms as a jump-off and deciding which image is more fertile, we will watch the actual scene together to discover how the filmmaker’s imagination manifested.  Students should provide oral feedback about which shots stand out the most and postulate why.  What do they wish they had thought of?

Day 7

Topic (Film):  Rhythm, editing, equilibrium

Topic (Education):  Teacher demeanor, student dignity, multicultural classrooms

Film:  The Class

Prepare for tomorrow:  Update 2-page spread and leave some room for the ending tomorrow.

Films can take us outside of the classroom, but are we squandering that trait of films because the unit’s films are very classroom based?  I hope not–hope, a necessary companion to critique.  Before you press play on our second and final screening day, ask students to prime the pump with what they learned reading in preparation for today’s class.  The Class falls somewhere between a documentary and a narrative feature because the teacher in the film was a teacher who wrote the memoir.  The student actors in the film are actual students who improvisationally put the scenes together around loose criteria.  This influences the rhythm, which is the essence of cinema, helping characters give the impression that they have escaped the screenplay.¹¹⁴  The Class was filmed with three cameras, a strategy which communicates the simultaneity and criss-crossing sightlines of a high school classroom.  This film is also French, taking place in a contemporary, multicultural suburb of Paris, and there is one shot in particular, a latecomer to the class presenting his self-portrait, that to me, resonates with Antoine’s interview at the end of The 400 Blows.  Films talk to each other.

We want students thinking about the same film analysis questions that we have touched on before:  around texture and similarities/oppositions.  The characters in this film are complex, and students will hone in on the nuances of teacher and student interactions.  What does and doesn’t work in teacher/student relationships?  Some questions geared specifically to this film can guide students in their two page spreads.

• How does film make the world visible to us?
• It has been said that there have been two major problems tackled with cinema: moving from the country to the city and the role of women in society.  Does this film deal with either and how?
• A screaming man is not a dancing bear (Aime Cesaire), which is to say that life is not a spectacle. Does anything feel like a spectacle in this film as opposed to truth and relationship?
• Does the film keep its equilibrium from beginning to end and around its central idea? Can we account for asymmetry if it exists?
• Is this film primarily aesthetic or social? Does it capture life or produce meaning, or both?
• The classroom as a set is handled very differently in The 400 Blows and The Class. How might we characterize those differences?

Today’s film is 2 hours long, so it will continue into Day 8.  Students should know that they will lead the film discussion tomorrow.  The ending of this film deserves some silence to land in the viewer's mind, so be mindful to leave that space free of teacher talk.¹¹⁵ Teachers can always improve at timing and silence. 

Day 8

Topic (Film):  Poetry of the shot, ambiguity

Topic (Education):  Listening for what is behind what is said

Film Clip:  Any scene in Where is the Friend’s House?, or revisiting scenes in other films.

Prepare for tomorrow:  Bring in a shot from a film you love that you find to be a poetic image.

Day 8 must begin by finishing a less poetic film, and students should again receive time to finish up 2-page spreads before students lead the film discussion.  Though the teacher will operate the computer, navigating to shots, he or she should also be prepared to give the class feedback, less on the quality of comments than on how the conversation was conducted.

With half of class left, move to the poetic image, which I think is easier to understand than written poetry but harder to talk about.  In written poetry, diction and syntax are arranged just so, line breaks produce tension and shape the poem, and shifts in tone provide clues to how and what a poem is arguing.  There is high school curriculum language to unpack these poetic qualities.  Poetic images also ask us to pay attention and re-see.  Things slip into place.  Poets, like Perseus, look indirectly at the world, and toting Medusa’s head, carry reality with them.¹¹⁶  In poetic images the composition is exact, but this precision asks the audience to accept a certain amount of ambiguity while following a director’s gaze as it freely associates.  Read slowly, poetry moves swiftly in terms of how ideas happen simultaneously, and poetic images also demand taking in a lot at once.¹¹⁷  Of course, imagery in images occurs without the barrier of language, but our physical senses are engaged.  Just because the sensations that some films brandish are big and distinguishable does not mean their imagery is more effective.  Some filmmaking can be heavy-handed, lacking subtlety and assuming little thinking ability on behalf of the audience.  We can either try to eat the mystery (figure out what the poetry means) or embrace contradictions which can indicate radical acceptance, yet often be part of a struggle to change. 

Again, we need to study shots, flexibly using the questions and terms of this unit.  Where is the Friend’s House? by Abbas Kiarostami is Iranian cinema, a very poetic cinema that draws from the poetic, rather than narrative, heritage of their literature.  For each shot you choose, set up mini-debates about whether we should eat the mystery or embrace the contradictions of the image.  Play devil’s advocate to these changing positions that students are occupying.  Pay particularly close attention to depth of field this day and how it structures viewer attention.  We aim for interpretation by thinking about the role of the zig-zag path, the out-of-sync education conversation with Ahmad’s grandfathers, and the film’s obsession with doors and windows.  Create one more simple chart to support your focus scenes.  Observe, describe, respond, and connect are the column headings.  Remember, interpretation wants abstraction, something introduced to the film from the outside that can be proven with evidence in the film.  This is not a straightforward step, and it requires a range of life experience and training.  But perhaps begin with the point of Ahmad’s journey, which seems to be solidarity in the midst of much buying and selling.  Tell students to let what interests them most about the film take the lead in terms of what to interpret.

If time allows, Day 8 ends with a choice of challenges.  Either students can write about an experience they’ve had in order to speak freely about another topic, or they can go on a field trip around the school building trying to get a shot that constructs a place that is not realistic–an ambiguous shot of the school that doesn’t translate to our image bank of schools.

Day 9

Topic (Film):  Political statements

Topic (Education):  Theory Production

Film Clip:  Wiseman’s High School

Prepare for tomorrow:  Students knew this was coming, but their 3-shot sequence is due on Day 10.

Entering the classroom, students should post their poetic images on a digital bulletin board.  Take a few minutes to connect to yesterday’s lesson and connect with students over shared film experiences.

School is inherently moral, not commercial.¹¹⁸  School is not about winning at all costs, privatization, efficiency, flexibility (losing self), or accumulation of capital, though there is room for being competitive, fiscal training and taking time seriously.¹¹⁹  As citizens, we have to practice two things:  syntony (participation with the world) and focalization (constructive concentration).  We need freedom for both and self-discipline for both.¹²⁰

By consuming the films and texts that we have in this unit, there are many sides to education in the collective conscience.  Show several more intentionally political segments from High School.  Day 9 is about composing theory, symbolically acting on our observations and sense of justice.  Back in little community groups, students will devise a system of ideas to explain what they want the values of their education to be.  These principles could be used to name practices, guide actions, and transform society, the last of which is the whole point of schooling. bell hooks says that, “Theory must serve collective liberation” and “the production of theory as a social practice can be liberatory.”¹²¹  I want to demystify the word theory, and so I limit, for now, the exposure to too many theories that can be applied to reading a text (feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, etc…even though they aid knowledge production).  If students are struggling to bring their experiences and films into Day 9, then assure them, “Use how you don’t want to be treated to think about how you do want to be treated.  Use how you’ve felt underserved to think about what would serve your future.  What does freedom look like in American public schools?  What would help me cultivate my internal discipline?”  Groups will return to the large group with ideas, and we will look for consistencies and ways to collapse categories.  Teachers can ask about reframing some of the language during this discussion, but the principles should come from the students.  They are becoming “pioneers in abolishing the drudgery of life” by shaping their own experiences.¹²²

There are many reasons why school reform is difficult.  Seymour Sarason’s work on this topic is illuminating, but students, like principals, need to be trained for change and realistic expectations.  Revisit the educational theory that students develop throughout the semester.  The rest of Day 9 can be spent on the educational writing capstone mentioned above.

Day 10

Topic (Film):  Viewer feedback

Topic (Education):  Documentation

Film Clips:  Student shots!

Prepare for tomorrow:  Written components of 3 shots: coalescing feedback and making-of process essay

Already this unit includes more out-of-class work than normal, so like yesterday, the last day allows for writing time in class.  But first, students will share the three one-minute shots they filmed and provide written feedback to their peers.  Let the feedback charts mimic the interpretation chart from Day 8, and provide physical copies to the student on the hot seat to receive feedback immediately and more personally.  This is a moment of celebration; cultural value has been created.  Students have made something which is its own form of documentation, but students will also articulate their learning, bringing educational value to our interpretive work.¹²³  I’ll be bringing in popcorn, even though ours is no popcorn cinema.