Escape, Confrontation, and Possibilities: Toward a Visual/Filmic Epistemology

Introduction

Through the experiences of teachers captured in these chapters, largely through interview data and analysis of classroom documents when available, this final chapter addresses the notion of a visual epistemology. This chapter explores the ways in which film operates in building knowledge and examines the potential salient take-aways in terms of film’s use in pedagogical processes, as well as those theoretical strands that are most striking for the ontology of film. Throughout this study, there has been a tension between and among materials which are honored culturally and prioritized by educational institutions, as well as a tension about the ways that meaning is communicated. There is additional tension when considering the wide range of standards that students are expected to master, particularly when a dominant discourse in education focuses on the deficits that students bring to their learning experiences, rather than the strengths.

For teachers in this network of studies, collected across a range of methods from 2016-2021, film was not the only text implemented in instruction, but it was certainly included as a text alongside a range of others. Film was an aspect of personal interest, and teachers expressed a love for the medium. Many teachers pointed to figures in their lives that had demonstrated the use of film as a textual space for possibility and for encountering concepts. In some cases, film was the central text of study, and at other times film was paired with another text that operated through a typographic semiotic system. In other cases, film was united with texts that operated in multimodal fashions, including the visual reading experiences found in graphic novels and interactive Internet tours of new locations. In the context of the pandemic, consistent instructional practices relied on yet another avenue of filmic delivery – the ways in which teachers were able to create and sustain connections and construct learning experiences via video conferencing platforms. This existence of film as a text in itself and alongside other texts is a potential implication of this work as teachers work across a range of texts, ever-increasing in their variety and expanding in their availability, for engaging readers and writers in ways that are authentic to the literacy practices that are practiced in society.

In this chapter, the author asks: Where does a filmic pedagogy lead? An additional question to probe might be: Where does film sit in the current educational spectrum of movements and motives?

In this author’s experience, technology has only grown and the accessibility and use of film as a text for learning and as a site for creation have grown as this accessibility has increased. In a relatively short span of time, the central feature of the author’s classroom became a screen, rather than whiteboard. It was these early experiences of technological transformation, and as well as the acknowledgement that there were moments in instruction in which film could create meaningful connections that led to the initial steps of inquiry. The ever-changing nature of information and communication, across digital and hybridized texts and platforms, is of particular note here. The dependence on such media entails a sense of its importance in the classroom, in educational standards, in regular educational practices, as well as the need to center rather than diminish a range of texts for critical and analytical consumption in the classroom. It is this active, critical, and analytical approach to film that unites it as a text with a range of texts in effective instructional practice. The move to compose is an additional feature and occurred in a variety of ways throughout the course of these studies, from teacher-created examples to student-constructed informational, animated, and personal narrative projects, to co-composing as teachers wrote film alongside students. At times, this composition was in addition to film as a paper-based means of responding or depicting through words and images, and at other times teachers centered the use of film as the medium for composition in itself.