A History of Film as Method

Introduction

This chapter includes an examination of the historical development of film as a pedagogical method before examining the individual qualitative methods that have been employed the construct the series of studies presented throughout this book. The purpose is to frame the methods and methodology for these studies, as well as to present information about the development of film in the classroom over time. The author’s examination of film is positioned within qualitative methods and methodology, carried across multiple projects that have closely examined the use of film in secondary classrooms. This chapter will supply further details on the framing of these studies before the author considered their collective implications more fully in subsequent chapters. For readers unfamiliar with this distinction, the author notes that methods that are particularly useful for qualitative researchers and which were employed in this network of studies. That is, interviewing, document analysis, observation, and critical/reflective/reflexive journaling. The use of observations was spare throughout these studies as access to educational sites proved to be difficult at times; teacher recorded reflections were a helpful element that the author used to gather further data. These methods are useful in completing research related to the larger umbrella-term considerations of qualitative methodologies. While there a number of qualitative methodologies to explore (see Bhattacharya, 2017), the particular methodologies the author used are expanded on in this chapter. This work operates on the constructivist notion that there are multiple realities and experiences among human beings, and that heuristic, exploratory, and inquiry-driven methods taken up within the guiding structures of foundational methodologies are useful for gaining insight into the lived realities of people.

In larger view, this book is a collection or confluence of three studies; the first, an ethnographic pilot study focused on the use of film in rural schools (conducted in 2016 with three teacher participants); the second, a phenomenological study that was published in dissertation format focused on the same topic, but with greater specificity (conducted in 2018-2019 with five teacher participants); and the third, a qualitative interview analysis of the teachers who continued to maintain connections with the research, and who continued to explore the use of film, in and beyond the 2020-2021 academic year. This final study presents the on-going work of four teachers from the original studies, with the addition of two teachers new to this work. Each teacher who took part worked at the 6-12 level, with one teacher from science education, four from social studies, and the remaining teachers from either an English/language arts course or blend of English/language arts and social studies.

In each of these studies, particular contexts and purposes have shaped the ultimate design of the research projects that are collectively presented here. Not the least of these contexts is the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in some educators moving from critical digital literacy approaches to triage methods of attempting to maintain connections with students. The implications of the pandemic in terms of film-based and multimedia instruction will be examined in a later chapter. Many of the teachers in the study lived in and worked in rural Appalachian settings, with only two teachers serving in urban/metro settings in the southeastern United States.

The author draws upon these studies collectively offered throughout these chapters to offer an examination of the use of film as a central text, a concept that, for the purposes of this work, is located in auteur theory endemic to French New Wave cinema and further defined later in this chapter and throughout the text; particular examination is given to the textual use of film for literacy instruction. Auteur theory highlights the unique contribution of the director of a film, often as director and writer, and centralizes the authorial practices of the director. In these studies, the classroom teacher acted as a secondary director, staging the presentation of the film or parts of the film in the context of a classroom and for the purposes of literacy instruction.