Journal Issue 4.1
Spring-Summer 2012
Edited by Agatha Beins, Jillian Hernandez, and Deanna Utroske
Editorial Assistant: A.J. Barks
Editorial Intern: Vera Hinsey

Film, Pedagogy, and Film Pedagogy: Introduction
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By Agatha Beins

Shara K. Lange brings us a lesson plan from the perspective of a documentary filmmaker and educator. In her class Documentary Research and Production students explore the issues related to producing and consuming documentary films by preparing presentations that put multiple documentaries in conversation with each other and with secondary sources. Because Lange's lesson plan presents a rich array of films and activities, we can easily revise and/or excerpt from it. For example, the section titled "Documentary Ethics & the Perils of Image Making" could be incorporated into courses that address issues of representation, semiotics, ethics, genre, and the power of film. And the questions included in the plan's different sections could help us examine films other than the ones Lange lists.
  Drawing the focus toward one film and asking us to look more deeply into current political matters, Shoba Rajgopal builds a series of activities and readings around Afghan Women: A History of Struggle (2007). In addition to sampling other film clips, Rajgopal integrates popular nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly writing, offering a multi-genre, multimedia approach to understanding and interrogating women's lives in Afghanistan. This juxtaposition allows us to investigate the media itself and to conduct a nuanced exploration of race, gender, and imperialism, both historically and in the present. Therefore, such a lesson plan would fit well with classes covering topics related to government and politics, ethnic and gender studies, postcolonialism, and media studies.
  The politics and practices of representation is a recurring theme in these lesson plans, and Özlem Sensoy artfully explores them through her cultural studies pedagogy. Popular culture and media are the subjects of her lesson plan, inspired by a class in which she used the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). Sensoy's method for deconstructing this movie involves a genealogy of representation activity that looks at a range of depictions of native "others" from a historical perspective. This activity thus demonstrates that Pirates of the Caribbean is neither benign or an outlier in the way it treats native peoples, and it disrupts students' assumptions that racism is a thing of the past. Moreover, as Sensoy notes, we can apply this method to other identity categories, depending on a course's content.
   Despite the focus in this special feature on college-level coursework, pedagogical practices frequently happen outside the boundaries of a conventional classroom. Anna Zailik's lesson plan takes us to the Youth Advocate Program in central New Jersey, where she worked with youth aged fourteen to sixteen. During a seven-week time period, they watched and evaluated four different documentaries for the purpose of deciding which one to show at a community screening, eventually choosing Presumed Guilty (2010), which chronicles two lawyers in Mexico attempting to free a wrongly imprisoned man. This lesson plan strives to draw connections between the films and students' own lives, reminding us that education can not only revolutionize consciousness but also lead to social transformation.
   Cumulatively, these essays and lesson plans present exciting possibilities for bringing films into our classes and other educational spaces. Not only do the contributions to this special feature challenge ideologies of racism, sexism, imperialism, and colonialism, they also give us concrete suggestions for doing so. The lesson plans included here are thus gifts and a challenge. Let us use them.