Breaking into the Movies: Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Film

Abstract

This article argues that how we think about education must extend far beyond matters of schooling and include those spaces, practices, discourses and maps of meaning and affect produced through a range of cultural and pedagogical technologies. We live at a time in which the educational influence of the larger culture has become the major force in producing subjectivities, desires and modes of identification necessary for the legitimation and functioning of a neoliberal society. If pedagogy has become central to creating particular modes of agency, public pedagogy represents a new cultural politics in which pedagogy has become central. One such mode of public pedagogy is film. As a form of public pedagogy, film combines entertainment and politics, and a claim to public memory, though in contested ways given the existence of distinctly varied social and cultural formations. In this article, I argue that films not only provide a pedagogical space that opens up the 'possibility of interpretation as intervention', they also make clear the need for forms of literacy that address the profoundly political and pedagogical ways in which knowledge, practice, discourse, images and values are constructed and enter our lives. Central to this article is the belief that the decline of public life demands that we use film as a way of raising questions that are increasingly lost to the forces of market relations, commercialization and privatization. As the opportunities for civic education and public engagement begin to disappear, film may provide one of the few mediums left that enables conversations that connect politics, personal experiences and public life to larger social issues. Not only does film travel more as a pedagogical form compared to other popular forms such as television and popular music, but film carries a kind of pedagogical weight that other mediums lack. As a quintessential element of a screen culture, film offers a way to rethink both the importance of cultural politics and public pedagogy as central to what it means to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political.Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. (Arendt, 1977, p. 149) My memories of Hollywood films cannot be separated from the attractions that such films had for me as a young boy growing up in Smith Hill, a working-class neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1950s. While we had access to the small screen of black and white television, it held none of the mystery, fascination and pleasure that we found in the five or six grand movie theaters that populated the downtown section of Providence. Every Saturday afternoon, my friends and I would walk several miles to the business district, all the while making plans to get into the theaters without having to pay. None of us could afford to buy tickets so we had to be inventive about ways to sneak into the theaters without being caught. Sometimes we would simply wait next to the exit doors, and as soon as som...

Cinema and the "City of the Mind": Using Motion Pictures to Explore Human-Environment Transactions in Planning Education

“….suggests how important it has become as a site of cultural politics (Giroux, 2001, p. 587). In the view of Giroux, film analysis in the classroom should be "part of a broader circuit of power relations [and] expand the possibilities of multiple readings of texts while making visible how representations work" (p. 53). Activist bell hooks concurs, having found that her students were made more aware of discourses on race, sex, and class through watching films than they had gained from the readings she'd assigned (cited in Giroux, 2001).…”

Physical Education teachers (re)presentation in the movies

“…Resulta en cualquier caso llamativo que, siendo el cine un influyente medio de pedagogía pública (Giroux, 2011), se cuestione su valor heurístico. Este escrito emana, por el contrario, del convencimiento de que el relato fílmico, al igual que otros textos académicos no convencionales, es una fuente muy útil para conocer y comprender la realidad social, en este caso, la imagen del profesorado de EF.…”

Media analysis as critical reflexology in exploring adult learning theories

“…As Giroux (2002) opines, media functions as a form of public pedagogy by offering situations and contexts through which viewers can vicariously experience, critique, reflect, and learn about different social phenomena. In their review, Wright and Sandlin noted how popular television shows (e.g., Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) are common and useful narratives to examine representations of adult learning theories.…”