Children and Education in World Cinema

Rationale

Teachers have had success having students write their own screenplays. In the article, “Everybody Wants Somebody to Hear Their Story: High School Students Writing Screenplays,” the two authors had students read screenplays, focusing on writer’s tools like imagery and point of view. To reach the core of their story, the students answered questions like “What is the scariest/weirdest thing that has ever happened to you?” and completed fill in the blanks: “It is the story of ______=character, who goes through ________=conflict.” They then storyboarded their ideas. Their teachers had them think critically about images and non-print media. Given cues for collaboration as well as their own think time, students produced their best ideas. Their personal connection to their stories was important; students often drew from their own experiences; daydreaming led to research. One student commented “If you can see it, you can write it.” According to Peter H Johnston: “People narrate their lives, identifying themselves and their circumstances, acting and explaining events in ways they see as consistent with the person they take themselves to be.” And so, although we will be watching and discussing films from around the world, the final creative project of each student should be close to something in the realm of their own lives. The class covered by the article had judges select the screenplays worthy to be produced.¹ Our local university’s film department may have a professor available to help teach students how to film their stories.

To develop ideas for a screenplay, flash fiction will help students build small ideas from mentor texts. Katherine E. Batchelor and April King taught a unit on reading and writing flash fiction which they describe in “Freshmen and Five Hundred Words: Investigating Flash Fiction as a Genre for High School Writing.”  They recall having success in giving students the opportunity to think about issues beyond the text that will later be brought into their own texts. They also used flash fiction to teach inference. Inference is an important skill that can be connected to analysis. The teachers used music that told stories and reminded students that plots are well structured events. At-risk students being taught this 10-day unit enjoyed breaking the rules of the genre. They relied heavily on mentor texts, whereas college prep students enjoyed learning ambiguity. Reading like writers, and writing like flash fiction readers was emphasized. The unit was also connected to research the students were obliged to undertake so they had some facts from which to build their stories. Yet, it is not information that gives ‘flash fiction’ its reputation. Sensual aspects dominate. With the students in this class, an image often led to a story.²

Teaching films has been successful in majority minority schools in the past. In “The Social Uses of Classroom Cinema,” the author examines the teaching of film at a high school in East Harlem from 1936 to 1955. Students demonstrated facility in discussion after viewing films and insight into the problems in the films shown, even challenging the choices made by directors. Youth was conceived as a functional whole rather than according to theories that isolated their various identities. “How can we help [adolescents] to relate [their] personal problems to broad social developments and the culture in which they live?” was a question the instructors asked. Films were selected for their emotional power and complexity to encourage open ended discussion and reflection. Students led discussions. Problems were seen in their complexity, and pat solutions were dismissed. Real world contexts and motives were apparent to the students. In at least one English class, students wrote essays about housing after watching a fictional film. Students reported feeling like “experts” on weighty subjects like racial prejudice and violence, class bias, and intergroup inclusiveness. The author concludes by pointing out that though youth are often absent from official history… 

Their stories are indeed there to be found, and they are worth telling because they provide insight on youth both as significant social groups (laborers, consumers, etc.) and as active participants in the emergence of new structures of power that concern them…Franklin teenagers brought their local understandings of social problems of unemployment, delinquency, substandard housing, ethnic intolerance, and racism to HR film discussion. This expanded their agency as students—their ability to have a voice on the most pressing issues of their culture and times—and expanded the role of film, a powerful tool for helping students explore the social and cultural roots of human behavior.³ 

The students featured in this article were able to recognize their own culture and the dominant one.⁴

Schools and students can learn about themselves and societal problems from film, but can creativity be taught? In “Teaching Creativity: A Practical Guide for Training Filmmakers, Screenwriters, and Cinema Studies Students,” the author asks that question, although his subjects are college-aged students. The author helps us narrow down the elements of creativity: 

Besides native intelligence, attributes such as (1) “fluency,” defined as “an unusual and spontaneous flow of images,” (2) “receptivity” and “insight,” which are akin to what William James called “sagacity,” and (3) the motivational ingredient, “zeal,” the passion and enthusiasm that keep the artist up all night to solve artistic problems.⁵

We’re getting closer to a notion of an individual artist’s identity and culture when the author states that artists succeed “by creating a personal idiom or aesthetic, an “individual code that deviates from the conventional rules” but that has some relation to the human condition and all its fixed formulas, codes, and clichés.” This article is worth revisiting as it asks “what are the extant pedagogical barriers that prevent the emergence of latent talent?” noting that it may have to do with the combination of ideas, which students will be asked to practice recursively in their writing for this unit.⁶

Lastly, good vibes will direct student interest. Perhaps as much weight should be given to the feeling involved in the films, as to a film's logic and thought. In “FEELING CINEMA: Affect in Film/Composition Pedagogy,” Colleen Jankovic begins by discussing a Hal Hartley film and states: “Does Surviving Desire mean to suggest that learning destroys pleasure? Or perhaps that pleasure, when it too closely touches scholarly inquiry, becomes complicated, diluted, and unmeaningful?” She continues:

All we can say for certain is that the emotion felt by the spectator will emerge from the totality of formal relationships she or he perceives in the work. This is one reason why we should try to notice as many formal relations as possible in a film; the richer our perception, the deeper and more complex our response may become.⁷

Jankovic also juxtaposes “analysis” to passive spectatorship, suggesting both are needed to appreciate film.  She emphasizes the movement of film, comparing it to the movement of emotion. Her thinking may be important to this unit in that she asks questions about film and learning, such as: “Teaching cinema challenges us to consider with our students: can we be critics and spectators at the same time?” and “How might student affect (particularly when drawn from and explored through personal experience) be seen as a productive and even productively disruptive motor of critical thinking about film?” This article also asks us to consider structuring the process of viewing films: 

As a result, the primary challenge for students became writing, reading, thinking, and viewing analytically and emotively.… Asking students to keep a log of their personal responses, such as laughter, confusion, and boredom, to a film viewed in class is one way to incorporate and draw attention to their viewing experience that can lead to more in-depth discussion of particular moments of the film that can then be formally analyzed.⁸

Jankovic sees in film, “An opportunity to interrogate affective response and to show the relationship between seemingly private opinions and broader cultural positioning.”⁹ She uses descriptive writing assignments and otherwise delays analysis to teach film. She is interested in films showing, and students making, value judgments.

Jankovic believes that the understanding of affect in student responses to film is important to delaying their judgements, and she suggests having students complete descriptive writing responses.¹⁰ I take up her suggestion for this unit as an opportunity for students to discover themselves and their cultures, to begin to talk about social problems, and to connect their home identities to expressive and academic identities.