High-school cinema curricula: Evidence of new trends in education

Drawn from the author’s PhD, and originally published in Images Documentaires in 2000, this article presents an incisive portrait of the complex political and institutional history that led to the establishment of film education within the curriculum in French secondary schools. Mounting a detailed account of the nuances and successive developments within the field, this essay examines the chronology – starting within a post-war context – through which the successive influences of ciné-clubs, teachers, television, political movements and government interventions have shaped the form of curricular school-based film education in France today.

Six years of School of Media: Exploring specialist pathways for film education throughout students’ experiences of Scottish secondary school

Co-authored by Scottish secondary school teacher Kerry Abercrombie and film education practitioner Jamie Chambers, this article explores School of Media, a specialist pathway within a Scottish secondary school in which young people are able to engage with film education potentially throughout their entire experience of high school. First exploring how School of Media seeks to reconcile aspects of film education with Scotland’s national ‘Curriculum for Excellence’, this essay subsequently adopts a chronological perspective, detailing specific aspects of School of Media’s approach within each of the six years of secondary school. The essay concludes by emphasising the importance of enabling and empowering teacher-led approaches to film education within Scottish classrooms.

Table of Contents: Film Education Journal 4(2)

Issue information for Film Education Journal 4(2).

Cross-media, co-creative and current: New strategies for educating talent for Danish children’s film and television in the 2020s

This article analyses recent developments in Danish film and television education through a case study of a new training initiative for creating content for children and young audiences. Following an outline of traditional training and career trajectories in the Danish screen industries in general, and for working with children’s film and television specifically, the case study investigates the guiding ideas behind Manuskriptskolen for børnefiktion (‘The Cross-Media School of Children’s Fiction’), which was established in 2020. The school marks a new approach to Danish film education in several ways. First, by creating a training ground focusing on a specific audience, rather than on screenwriting or film-making more generally. Second, by thinking of content for this audience as fundamentally multi-platform and teaching students storytelling across different media from the outset. Third, by insisting that creating content for this audience calls for having knowledge about the current lives of young people and their media use, and encouraging strategies for engaging or even co-creating content with them. The article builds on qualitative interviews, document analysis and observations at industry events as part of the research project Reaching Young Audiences: Serial Fiction and Cross-Media Storyworlds for Children and Young Audiences.

The English Language Arts hundred years’ war: Subverting the stigma of film in America’s English classroom

Against the backdrop of the century-long stigma associated with film in America’s English classroom, which persists despite its codification in the English Language Arts (ELA) standards, this study investigated the question: How do American high-school English teachers make sense of and instruct with film? Employing semi-structured interviews with 12 high-school English teachers who instruct with film, from suburban, urban, rural and private school settings, the findings suggest that the stigma staining film in America’s English classroom is systemic. Participants shared their view that film is not an inherently passive medium, and when purposefully and actively facilitated, it possesses unique and efficacious pedagogic promise. Employing strategies typically associated with teaching printed texts, maintaining high classroom expectations, and integrating twenty-first-century pedagogic technologies when teaching with film may allow instructors to fulfil film’s remarkable learning potential, and consequently subvert misperceptions of, malpractices with, and the stigma surrounding film in America’s English classroom.

Excitement lies elsewhere: Teenage film-makers and popular culture

When teenagers are given access to digital media equipment, their teachers and film club leaders may hope that they will take the opportunity to make films of personal significance. Instead, young people often choose to engage in a parodic dialogue with popular culture, in a process which feels more familiar and/or comfortable to them, providing as it does a creative space unburdened by expectations of sincere expression. From a survey of numerous short films made in Scotland, it is evident that the use of pastiche and parody facilitates both progressive and reactionary perspectives, often within the same film. Exploring a series of detailed case studies of films made by young people in Scotland in the early 2000s, this article argues that parody can provide for young people an aesthetic distance from personal expression, which, ironically, is unexpectedly revealing of generalised teenage sociocultural attitudes.

Learning from film to theatre and from theatre to film

This article explores the possibility of combining educational approaches to film and theatrical drama to enhance teachers’ confidence in creative, transmedia and multidisciplinary approaches to learning. A detailed case study is explored – a short teacher training event which utilised certain media literacy resources to inspire and familiarise teachers with the language of images, while seeking to demonstrate how simple media devices can be used to connect film- and theatre-based pedagogies. Overall, the article considers ways in which teachers can obtain the confidence within a short time to integrate approaches inspired by film-making into their teaching in connection with their students’ enthusiasm for, and expertise in, digital media.

Sixteen years of ‘Cinema in progress’: Exploring Cinema en curs’s holistic approaches to film education in conversation with Núria Aidelman and Laia Colell

Established in Catalonia in 2005, Cinema en curs is now one of the most significant film education projects worldwide. This article places selections from interviews conducted in early 2021 with project founders and directors Núria Aidelman and Laia Colell within a critical context drawing upon international considerations of film education, including previous explorations of Cinema en curs. Discussion is separated into two distinct yet interconnecting sections: first upon the institutional and media-ecological contexts in which Cinema en curs takes place (and the complex considerations informing the project’s shape and manner of delivery that arise from these contexts); and, second, upon the different cultural, aesthetic and political priorities that inform the project’s approach to methodology and pedagogy.

Exploring the application of practice-based research on affective cinema to the teaching of creative cinematographic techniques within UK higher education

This article outlines an exploratory approach to the delivery of film practice education, as developed and tested with a second-year undergraduate module in cinematography. Students were provided with two existing creative sound pieces composed by a professional sound designer within the context of an AHRC-funded practice research project entitled Affective Cinema. These aspects of sound design inspired and informed the students’ work, while allowing them to focus upon the module’s key learning outcomes as related to camera and lighting skills. Above all, the approach allowed for aspects of the film theory synthesised through the preceding research – and pertinent to the nature and unique expressive potential of film – to be partially absorbed and learned by the students through practical experimentation, thus becoming an embodied, tacit practitioner knowledge. In this respect, I argue that such approaches help transcend the fraught divisions between film practice and film theory.

Children coping with COVID-19: Intersectional understandings of film and media access in a crisis

As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns across the world, digital access has become paramount, as most aspects of education have moved online. Drawing together five case studies located in South Africa, Argentina, the Netherlands, India and Ethiopia, this article assesses the role of film education during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the impacts of digital access. We examine multimodal forms of film education, and how these were used to inform, entertain and educate children during the crisis by the varying work undertaken by the organizations. Applying theories of intersectionality, we address the need for context-specific approaches to film education, focusing upon the impact that the societal and individual contexts had on the dissemination of film education in each country.