Making the Most of Bad Times: Integrating the Media, Funding, and Teaching

Streaming Verstehen: Whither Feature Film in the Classroom?

“…Educational film and similar products, such as documentaries and news reports, found a natural home in the sociology classroom. The merits of educational film drove some early conversations in Teaching Sociology (Cheatwood and Benokraitis 1983; Stoll 1973), a dialogue that remains active, particularly given that technological change renders a wide variety of audiovideo materials ever more accessible (e.g., Andrist et al 2014).…”

“…Class time, of course, is limited, and viewing a long-form film more often than not will take at least an entire class session. Some negotiate this problem by, like Tipton and Tiemann (1993), holding a time outside of class in which students gather to watch a feature film (e.g., Cheatwood and Benokraitis 1983; Collett, Kelly, and Sobolewski 2010). While film series should always be applauded, this is often a lot to ask of many students, especially of nontraditional students.…”

“…Although it is debatable whether the use of feature films in the classroom was truly a “rage,” their use continued. Cheatwood and Benokraitis (1983) reported on their successful sociological film series on “Images of Women in Film,” Fails (1988) extolled the virtues of using Casablanca to discuss Weber’s analysis of social power, and Burton (1988:265) noted how the “revolution” of the videocassette recorder made showing films in class easier than ever (also see Tipton and Tiemann 1993). On topics such as race (Loewen 1991), ethnography (Leblanc 1998), Mexican American experience (Valdez and Halley 1999), and more, film was engrained in select sociological classrooms.…”

“…Second, not only is technology changing but so are classroom politics. For some time (e.g., Cheatwood and Benokraitis 1983), feature film has been one means of developing an empathetic understanding, or verstehen, of others in the sociology classroom. And with calls to, for example, decolonize pedagogy (Hook 2012) combined with the ways in which sociology classes can promote empathy (Rockwell et al 2019), analyses of feature film, empathy, and technological change are prudent.…”

Toward a Video Pedagogy

“…The advent of VHS in the 1980s and then DVD in the 1990s made more films available for teaching than ever before, but content still had to be physically procured and played at fixed location—which was often in class and in full length (Snelson and Perkins 2009; Streeter 2011). Therefore, actual film use tended to be restricted to few instructors, employed rarely or in special classes, and limited to familiar choices obtainable with least effort—namely, Hollywood movies or popular television programs (see e.g., Burton 1988; Cheatwood and Benokraitis 1983; Dowd 1999; Fails 1988; Loewen 1991; Misra 2000; Scanlon and Feinberg 2000; Smith 1982; Tolich 1992; Valdez and Halley 1999).…”