Gaining insight into teaching profession by using film: a preservice teachers’ experience

Abstract

Films can be used as instructional tools in higher education in different disciplines. In the context of teacher education, films with and about teachers and pupils are valuable resources for learning about the teaching profession. The purpose of this study is to examine the pre-service teachers’ reflections on a film with an educational content and message - The Triumph (The Ron Clark Story, 2006). One research question guided the investigation: What are the students’ cognitive and emotional gains for the teaching profession as a result of watching this film? The participants consisted of eighty-two second year students, enrolled in an initial teacher education program at a Romanian university. At the end of a one-semester course, named Pedagogy (Instruction and Students’ Assessment) pre-service teachers were invited to watch a film and then to reflect about it, by completing an open-ended questionnaire. The responses were analyzed through the content analysis technique. Examples of comments made by preservice teachers are presented and analyzed. The results show a range of understandings gained by future teachers through the use of the film.

Preparing Indonesian pre-service English teachers’ readiness to teach through teacher-themed movies

“…Movies have been used in many various contexts, for example, in Turkey (Elmas et al, 2019;Gezer, 2020;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011;Kontaş, 2016), Israel (Eilam & Poyas, 2009), the United States (Webb & Kapavik, 2017) and in Romania (Cretu, 2019). These studies also investigated pre-service teachers in various learning disciplines, for example, involving pre-service teachers of English (Eilam & Poyas, 2009;Gezer, 2020;Halim et al, 2019), and science, social studies, and mathematics (Cretu, 2019;Elmas et al, 2019;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011;Kontaş, 2016). Several studies reported that movies could prevent pre-service teachers from the reality shock of the future teaching profession (Cretu, 2019;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011).…”

“…These studies also investigated pre-service teachers in various learning disciplines, for example, involving pre-service teachers of English (Eilam & Poyas, 2009;Gezer, 2020;Halim et al, 2019), and science, social studies, and mathematics (Cretu, 2019;Elmas et al, 2019;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011;Kontaş, 2016). Several studies reported that movies could prevent pre-service teachers from the reality shock of the future teaching profession (Cretu, 2019;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011). Movies were believed to be influential and inspiring (Gezer, 2020;Webb & Kapavik, 2017).…”

“…Movies could help pre-service teachers prevent reality shock in their future teaching profession (Cretu, 2019). Movies were reported to provide some projected scenes that were related to real-life teaching or school situations (Cretu, 2019;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011) and give inspiration for creative solutions to educational problems (Fennell, 2013). Teacher characters in movies may also positively contribute to the pre-service teachers' idea of the teaching profession (Kontaş, 2016;Webb & Kapavik, 2017).…”

“…Furthermore, in pre-service teacher literature, movies have been quite widely investigated, for example, to investigate pre-service teachers' self-efficacy (Elmas et al, 2019;Halim et al, 2019;Kaşkaya & Ünlü, 2011;Webb & Kapavik, 2017), motivation (Kontaş, 2016;Webb & Kapavik, 2017), academic theories (Eilam & Poyas, 2009), and teacher professionalism (Cretu, 2019;Gezer, 2020). Likewise, investigating the use of movies in preparing pre-service teachers' readiness to teach may be strategic.…”