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Using Feature Films to TeachHistory and Social StudiesJohn Hunter Gunn aa Department of Secondary Education , E-mail:b Youth Services, Queens College/City University ofNew York , Flushing , NY , 11367Published online: 31 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: John Hunter Gunn (2010) Using Feature Films to Teach Historyand Social Studies, Theory & Research in Social Education, 38:4, 647-650, DOI:10.1080/00933104.2010.10473443

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2010.10473443

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Book Review

Using Feature Films to Teach History and Social Studies

Marcus, Alan S., Metzger, Scott A., Paxton, Richard J., & Stoddard, Jeremy D. (2010). Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies. New York: Routledge, 198 pages, $38.95 (paperback), $130.00 (hardback), $38.95 (eBook), ISBN 978-0-415-99956-4.

Reviewed by JOHN HUNTER GUNN (johnhuntergunn@hotmail.com), Department of Secondary Education and Youth Services, Queens College/City University of New York, Flushing, NY 11367

Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies offers important conceptual tools that can help teachers and teacher educators use feature films more effectively in their classrooms. The authors outline eight teacher-created history units that mostly rely on feature films for source material. They also recount observations of the teaching of these units, and they offer critical commentary on them. The schools and classes in which the units are taught are sketched, and teacher thinking about their instructional choices is relayed. Undoubt-edly, teachers will find much in these units they will want to incorporate into their teaching repertoires, and they will appreciate the authors’ reflections on teachers’ instructional choices. Teachers may even be motivated, singly or in teams, to explore the curricular possibilities of the conceptual tools the text offers.

The most important and useful distinction the authors introduce is between the use of film as a primary and secondary source. Primary sources films are analyzed as a source of information about the time of their creation. For example, Bonnie and Clyde is included in a unit as a source for studying the 1960s, not the 1930s. As secondary sources, films are used as sources of information about the periods they depict. The Alamo is used as a source of information in a unit on Westward Ex-pansion. It is a good bet that when feature films are used in classrooms in the United States they are most often used as secondary sources. For this reason, the idea of using film as a primary source is so important: Introducing the concept and providing examples suggest new opportu-nities for teachers. The use of film as a primary source seems more likely to lead to “historical film literacy,” which is the central instructional goal the authors promote in their text. The authors define historical

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film literacy as the “skills and dispositions that empower students to look at movies set in the past critically as historical documents, not just entertainment” (p. 6). They also provide examples of questions to critically reflect upon films as historical documents:

Historical film literacy revolves around empowering young peo-ple to recognize, describe, question and analyze a film’s purposes and themes. Why is a history movie telling a story about an era in a particular way? Why are certain perspectives emphasized and deemphasized and others de-emphasized or ignored? Whom does the movie want the audience to cheer for or against? What perspectives on the past does the movie encourage the audience to empathize with and why? What moral reactions about the past does the movie aim to evoke, or provoke in viewers? (p. 7)

The development and dissemination of this concept are tremendously important because its practical use by teachers could have substantial benefits, including the promotion of students’ increased interpretive competency, autonomy, and engagement with social studies.

Three units use film as primary sources: the unit on the films of the 1960s; the unit with the film The Jazz Singer and others to explore the social construction of race; and the unit on the Hmong, which treats the film Gran Torino as a primary source. These units allow students to form generalizations about their subjects (the 60s, racial conscious-ness, the perceptions of a minority culture in the United States) by comparing the treatment of them in multiple films and print sources. In the most fully developed unit described in the text, students in an Anthropology class are shown Gran Torino twice: first at the start of the unit and again after reading two ethnographies of the Hmong, viewing two video documentaries that address challenges facing the Hmong in the United States, and watching the film, The Killing Fields to understand the context of Hmong migration to the United States. The authors suggest that film can be used to develop empathy for a “misunderstood and marginalized people” (p. 32) through the use of sources that show multiple perspectives on the marginalized group. This example of using multiple sources to develop a rich understand-ing of a critical social issue, in this case empathy for a misunderstood minority culture, is exemplary.

Secondary sources are used most effectively when students are given the opportunity to reflect upon or become aware of their nature as interpretations. This occurs when students are given diverse interpreta-tions of an event, which can result in cognitive dissonance, motivating students to form their own higher-order interpretation of the event. In the five units where film is used as a secondary source, multiple sources are included in the units, but students are not given diverse sources to

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reflect upon the central interpretative film offered. One suspects this is due to teachers’ primary use of film to cover content and the time constraints they perceive or actually work under. In the unit on the rise of totalitarianism, students are offered one source, the film The Wave, from which they are expected to derive an interpretation of the rise of totalitarianism and with which they are then asked to explain mid-20-th century totalitarian regimes. Other film sources are included in this unit, but these sources are provided to introduce different concepts and content, not to offer a different perspective on the rise of totalitarianism. In this case, the goal of the unit is categorized as “perspective recogni-tion” and is considered as an aspect of empathy. The film Swing Kids is offered as the only source for different perspectives during the rise of the Nazis. Adding other sources to this unit would have clarified the interpretation of perspective recognition offered in Swing Kids.

Another example of a unit that uses film as a secondary source is the unit on Westward Expansion with the film, The Alamo. Much is made of the fact that the film gets the facts right and puts “the conflict at the Alamo into a broader strategic and political context” (p. 103). Yet, there is little sense that it might benefit students to offer another interpretation of the relation between events at the Alamo and “the larger strategic and political context.” The authors recount that the teacher gave students a primary source that is included in the film to show how “secondary sources are created based on primary sources” (p. 103). One wonders if students took away the message that secondary sources offer objective accounts of events. Although the authors ulti-mately comment that the teacher might have included multiple sources of information to promote historical film literacy, they also suggest that this may not have been possible because of the students’ low level of reading abilities. It is well documented that students who are tracked in low-level classes are most likely to receive instruction that might be described as transmission (Goodlad, 1984). Given this, it seems vitally important for teachers to scaffold the use of film for students with vary-ing reading abilities. One would imagine that teachers would embrace the opportunity afforded by film to engender higher-order thinking in students who are struggling readers. In the case of the unit on Western Expansion, the adoption of the film The Alamo as a secondary source is rationalized on the basis of the low level of literacy of the students. The text would have been improved with greater attention to the use of film for higher-order thinking with struggling readers.

In addition to the critiques delineated above, it would have been useful to include more discussion of the student learning outcomes for these units and more discussion of instructional techniques. A closer look at students’ interpretation of film as source material might help teachers to explore the question of whether or not the persuasive quali-ties of film as a media constituted of imagery need interrogating in a

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way that printed words might not. In their introduction, the authors identify film as characterized by a particular blend of “realism and creativity to produce a special mode of storytelling” (p. 6). Whether students need additional instructional strategies to critically reflect upon the realism of film or to become aware of film makers’ perspec-tives in films identified as “historically accurate” is an area that needs further development.

Using film to convey historical information often means that students do not get a chance to reflect upon the interpretive nature of secondary sources or to compare diverse interpretations because the films consume so much instructional time. The introduction of the ideas of treating film as primary sources, of making transparent the interpretive lenses or perspectives embedded in secondary sources and the notion of historical film literacy are significant offerings as these ideas could significantly aid in the increase of the cognitive demands in classrooms for students of all ability levels. They could also enable students to interpret images and ideas they may not be aware are af-fecting them. In the end, the goal of historical film literacy could assist in the never-ending struggle to legitimize depth over breadth in history or social studies curricula. This book offers a provocative and emerging effort to incorporate film into social studies curricula.

Reference

Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

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