CHICAGO–Twenty-one teachers sit in a small movie theater here watching a quick, dialogue-driven scene that culminates with Mark Zuckerberg, as played by actor Jesse Eisenberg, getting dumped by his girlfriend.
Larry Knapp, a film professor at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Ill., pauses “The Social Network” and asks the teachers why they think Zuckerberg is wearing a gray Gap sweatshirt.
They throw out varied analyses: It shows that Mr. Zuckerberg does not want to stand out—he’s uncomfortable in public. It’s an all-American brand and, as the inventor and CEO of Facebook, he embodies the American dream. It symbolizes the “gap” in communication between him and his girlfriend.
These educators, who work in a wide range of subjects and grade levels, are participating in a five-day intensive “film camp” through Facets Multimedia, a nonprofit arts organization in Chicago. The camp is a small-scale effort to promote the use of film studies in the K-12 classroom.
While film-studies classes are common in higher education, the idea that a film should be taught as an academic text with younger students is still nascent.
“That doesn’t mean teachers are not showing film,” said John Golden, the author of Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom. “They’re absolutely showing film. But in terms of giving kids the language to talk about and learn film, there’s very little pedagogy going on.”
Critical viewing, a foundation of film literacy, is more than just putting on a movie or showing the film adaptation of a novel. Like critical reading, it’s a way of analyzing the components of a text and the choices made during its creation—key emphases, film-studies proponents point out, of the Common Core State Standards.
Of those teachers who are teaching critical viewing in the classroom, most tend to be English teachers, said Frank W. Baker, a consultant in media-literacy education and the author of Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom. Nearly all film literacy is being taught at the high school level, he said.
Proponents of media studies, like Mr. Golden, also an English teacher and instructional specialist in the 46,000-student Portland, Ore., district, argue that critical viewing of film should be an essential part of instruction—not just something taught by film buffs at the high school level. Students are bombarded by visual images, said Mr. Golden, especially now with the proliferation of mobile devices to view them on. They’re “subject to so much manipulation,” he explained, including stereotyping, veiled biases, and false claims. “I don’t think we can say students are literate anymore if we’re not giving them the language to talk about visual media and film.”
Analyzing ‘Texts’
Jessica Keigan, an English teacher in the 44,000-student Adams 12 Five Star Schools in Thornton, Colo., received an undergraduate minor in film and spent a semester interning in the film industry in Los Angeles before becoming a teacher. For her, it was only natural to incorporate film into her classes. Now in her 11th year of teaching, she uses film about 25 percent of the time in her English classes.
Ms. Keigan explains that she typically uses film “as a springboard for critical reading.” For instance, when introducing students to the different “levels” of literary analysis—from simple recall to complex thinking—she often starts by showing the Pixar short film “Boundin’.” After watching the four-minute short about a dancing sheep who loses his wool, she begins by asking students questions about the storyline. She moves on to questions about “what the filmmaker is doing symbolically” and then about how the film compares with other hero stories the students have seen or read. “Film gives me a chance to teach the thinking skill without having to do the reading skill as well,” she said.
Edna Camacho, an English teacher in the Weslaco Independent school district, which serves 19,000 students in Weslaco, Texas, initially began using film as a reward—students watched “Of Mice and Men” after completing the novel. Soon after, though, “I realized I could’ve done a lot more with the film if I used it as a text,” she said.
Now, she pairs novels and films with similar themes to hone her students’ critical-thinking skills. For instance, her students read the book Night by Eli Wiesel and watch the movie “Life Is Beautiful,” both of which center on Jewish characters’ experience of the Holocaust. She asks students to find similarities in the relationships in the stories, to look for archetypes in each, and to consider what the author or director does to evoke feeling. “The same type of figurative language you use with literature, we use with film,” she said.
Another way to exercise critical thinking with film, Mr. Knapp told teachers at the film camp in Chicago, is to have students look for motifs, or distinctive patterns. Mr. Knapp illustrated that by showing the opening credits of Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” in which an American flag burns until only the shape of an X is left. The teachers identified “reinvention” and “a changing America” among the motifs illustrated by that image. “If you set up this way of looking at a film,” said Mr. Knapp, “usually students will start looking for other motifs.”
For Ms. Camacho, one of the great benefits of using film is its accessibility. In the cases of students with learning disabilities and English-language learners, she noticed that film “kind of loosened them up. … It opened the door for them to start conversations in class.”
Mr. Golden said he sometimes refers to film in the classroom as “the great equalizer” because it gives even the most reticent reader a chance to display understanding and deep thinking.
Common Core Tie-Ins
The higher-order thinking skills that students learn in analyzing film transfer to other mediums, say film-instruction proponents. “In my absolute gut, I’m convinced it makes them stronger readers when we talk about print text,” said Mr. Golden. When asked to analyze, for instance, tone in the novel The Great Gatsby, his students have already “used and practiced and discussed in really accessible terms those literary devices in film.”
And while studying film in K-12 is far from widespread, the new Common Core standards could breathe some life into the idea: The English/language arts standards require students to analyze texts of all kinds, and several standards mention film as an example text type.
“Analysis is the word of the day with Common Core,” said Ms. Keigan. “You’re reading to understand the deep symbolic meaning of a text.” Film and other art forms are good ways “to practice those thinking skills.”
Mr. Golden said the standards’ push for nonfiction could lead to more teachers showing documentary films. However, because the standards that mention film ask students to compare two presentations of a text, he worries that teachers will simply show film adaptations of books. “The problem for me is [film literacy] is not explicitly called out as much as I’d wished” in the standards, he said.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which is designing computer-based tests aligned to the common standards, plans to include items asking students to “read and analyze one digital source,” PARCC spokesperson Chad Colby wrote in an email. That source could be “a video, a narrated slide show, a podcast, etc.”