Films about education provide many of the most popular interpretations of what teaching and learning mean in schools. An analysis of this medium reveals much about the historical, cultural, political, and philosophical dimensions of education. Timely and engaging, this book fills a gap for scholarly and informed public commentary on the portrayal of education in film, offering a wide range of conceptual and interpretive perspectives. Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Film explores several key questions, including: What does it mean to be a good teacher? How do these good teachers instruct? When is and what makes teaching complex? What constitutes learning? Do educational reforms work? The book’s interdisciplinary group of contributors answers these important questions in essays highlighting Hollywood, independent, and documentary films. Prospective and practicing teachers will engage with the thought-provoking educational issues raised in this book and gain insight into the complexities of teaching and learning portrayed in film.

Offers a fresh overview of teaching with film to effectively enhance social studies instruction.

In the earliest years of cinema, travelogues were a staple of variety film programs in commercial motion picture theaters. These short films, also known as "scenics," depicted tourist destinations and exotic landscapes otherwise inaccessible to most viewers. Scenics were so popular that they were briefly touted as the future of film. But despite their pervasiveness during the early twentieth century, travelogues have been overlooked by film historians and critics. In Education in the School of Dreams, Jennifer Lynn Peterson recovers this lost archive. Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, she offers fresh insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema and provides a new perspective on the intersection of American culture, imperialism, and modernity in the nickelodeon era. Peterson describes the travelogue's characteristic form and style and demonstrates how imperialist ideologies were realized and reshaped through the moving image. She argues that although educational films were intended to legitimate filmgoing for middle-class audiences, travelogues were not simply vehicles for elite ideology. As a form of instructive entertainment, these technological moving landscapes were both formulaic and also wondrous and dreamlike. Considering issues of spectatorship and affect, Peterson argues that scenics produced and disrupted viewers' complacency about their own place in the world.

"Alain Bergala's The cinema hypothesis is a seminal text on the potentials, possibilities, and problems of bringing film to schools and other educational contexts. It is also the passionate confirmation of a love for cinema and an effort to think of education differently. This book stages a dialogue between larger concepts of cinema and a hands-on approach to teaching cinema. Its detailed insights derive from the author's own experiences as a teacher, critic, filmmaker and advisor to the French Minister of Education. Bergala, who also served as chief editor of Cahiers du cinéma, promotes an understanding of film as an autonomous art form that has to be taught accordingly. Confronting young people with cinema can create friction with established norms and serve as a productive rupture for both institution and pupil: perhaps more than any other art form, the cinema enables a lived, intimate experience of otherness"--Back cover.