Our Cinema: exploring the development and proposal of a new programme of vernacular-based film education in Scotland

Abstract

This article explores the development of the Our Cinema project in Scotland: a revolving annual curriculum of film education for upper primary and lower secondary age children in state schools that, at the time of writing, is approaching a pilot phase. Discussion explores the project’s origins in France’s Cinéma Cent Ans de Jeunesse, and its relationship with the Catalan film education project Cinema en curs, before focusing in particular upon how a school-based programme of film education might seek to explore vernacular conceptions of cinema, through a focus on dialect, place and the lived experiences of participants. The article concludes by offering a detailed, concrete proposal of a film education curriculum, comprising two years (each broken up into 32 weeks) of creative learning activities.

Don’t teach: exploring the irreducibilities of film education through Japan’s Children Meet Cinema project in conversation with Etsuko Dohi

“…The use of such simple, lucid means to illustrate a profound, fundamental aspect of cinema as a mediumthat the audience themselves actively collaborate in the act of cinema (mirroring Alexander McKendrick's [2006: xxxv] observation that 'film is a medium … [and] it is my habit to remind students that film is not just something up there on the screen -it's a happening in your head … it must end as it began: a response in the mind of a single viewer') -recalls Alain Bergala's (2016) similar propensity, as glimpsed in moments both in The Cinema Hypothesis and in CCAJ, for establishing crucial points of access to deep aspects of aesthetic comprehension that are nonetheless direct, simple and relatively easy for 8 year olds and 28 year olds alike to understand (Chambers, 2018(Chambers, , 2022b. As Dohi continues, 'if there are a hundred children, and they are watching Hedgehog in the Fog, there is not one film but a hundred here.…”

“…Here, we return to Pasolini's discussion of the cinematic real (Stack, 2018). As I have discussed elsewhere (Chambers, 2022b), encouraging children to become aware of the expressive properties of the people and places around them would seem in itself inseparable from cultivating an appreciation for the irreducible qualities of the image. In these terms, the believable within cinema remains a complex interface between aesthetics, a pragmatic approach to resources (using what we have), and efforts to empower young people by quietening the onlooking self in order to tune in to the singularities of experience and identity.…”

Co-creating film education: moments of divergence and convergence on Queen Margaret University’s Introduction to Film Education course

“…Applicants to PGDE programmes in music, drama and art will also, generally, be expected to have demonstrated some relevant work experience, such as youth work, volunteering or previous engagement with schools and young people in a professional capacity. As has been outlined previously within the Film Education Journal (Abercrombie and Chambers, 2021;Chambers, 2022;Daly et al, 2020), film remains in a liminal space in the secondary curriculum in Scotland, primarily as part of media studies, for which no formal teaching qualification is required. Generally speaking, teachers of media studies move from teaching English or drama into this space, which often results in a lack of teacher confidence regarding their existing knowledge and skill set.…”

Vernacular cinema, self-concept and the perceptual–conceptual shift: exploring conversations between film education and developmental psychology

“…Craig (1990: 219) describes how, while for Marx, myth is 'something to be unveiled, torn aside so that the real can stand forth and be recognised for what it is', for Nietzsche, 'the need is to recover the mythic identity that makes action possible … we need to attach the broken particularity of our existence to some myth that will return to us the sense of the universal significance of our actions'. Within the vernacular approach to film education we have outlined elsewhere (Chambers, 2022a), it is not always easy to disentangle the realist, naturalist aesthetics of cinema in which young people are encouraged to pay attention to the material properties of their immediate surroundings on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the sense of fabulation and myth afforded by cinema as a space for young people to present their experiences in a manner aligning with positive self-concept. In our experience, and as discussed elsewhere in regard to children's film-making in Scottish classrooms (Chambers, 2022c), this is frequently embodied through a sense of wish-fulfilment and happy endings that may serve to present aspects of the ideal self, as complexly entangled with the more naturalist, neorealist or quasi-documentary register of drawing from one's own surroundings.…”

“…The conversations that gave rise to this article were motivated by a desire to explore the broader, interdisciplinary validity and resonance of certain hypotheses arising from a decade of teaching film to learners within primary, secondary and higher education. These hypotheses, each related to the central notion of a vernacular cinema -a cinema seeking a localised focus on dialect, place and lived experiencehave been discussed in detail elsewhere (Chambers, 2022a), and have subsequently been embodied within the proposal for a detailed new programme of film education aimed predominantly at young learners within Scottish primary classrooms from the ages of 8 to 12, entitled 'Our Cinema'. Our Cinema is premised upon the hypothesis that encouraging young people to recontextualise the interwoven activities of watching and making films within their own lived experiences (particularly regarding dialect, identity, place and community) may simultaneously foster parallel benefits in social, emotional, cognitive and broader academic development.…”