Re: tips for teaching? (3 responses)

From: "Konkle, Amanda S" <[email protected]>

List, 

I really appreciate your thoughtful responses and the debates about teaching that have been raised. 

I second the idea that discussing terms and guiding the students beforehand are important -- this is something I'm discovering midway through this semester, so I probably won't implement it until next semester. I also think the idea of demonstrating close analysis of a clip in front of the class can be helpful in terms of showing students how to think. 

I have found that students aren't that "into" older films, but they also don't like some of the more recent films I've assigned. I've decided that there will always be at least one student who hates each film and at least one who loves the same film, so I've told them that I want them to leave class understanding why film scholars have singled each film out as worthy of study. My students actually had the best discussion of the semester over Rashomon, so I think there's something to be said for watching a very unfamiliar film.  Their confusion and anger at the characters led them to really dig into what  the filmmakers were trying to communicate. 

Again, I appreciate your insights, and would love for the discussion to continue. I just wanted to re-engage in the conversation. 

Amanda


Amanda Konkle
Doctoral Candidate, English
University of Kentucky

[email protected]
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From: "Frank, Michael" <[email protected]>

a few hit-and-run [perhaps hit-or-miss] observations

1.  showing complete films in class would be the equivalent, in a literature course, of having the students read novels during class time; NOT  . . . "reading" the text -- whether it's a novel or a movie -- is homework, although scheduling a public showing out of class time so that everyone can have the experience of watching a film together is great if you can manage it
1a.  . . . . but showing short clips in class, and even showing them more than once, to call attention to specific details is very important

2.   i agree with tony - most textbooks have their own agendas, and unless your agenda corresponds exactly a textbook is likely to lead away from where YOU want to take the course . . . and they ain't cheap . . . easier to choose materials - essays, reviews, chapters - that do the work you want and distribute them when you need them

3.  tony is of course right that "often academics scorn films that are the most popular with the most people" but whether this is appropriate or not is a tough question . . . if you believe that there are legit distinctions to be made between art and commerce, and also that film has claims to at times achieving the former status, then making these differences explicit and in fact part of the course's program seems not only OK but necessary . . . OTOH, if the point of your course is simply to unpack the devices - cinematographic, technical, psychological, rhetorical, narratological - that have been used by successful filmmakers, then showing films the kids already love seems OK  . . .  [but i think it worth keeping in mind that if we wanted to build our teaching around the moving image narratives that most occupy our students' lives then the anchors of our courses would be commercials and, yes, porn]

4.  in my judgment, for most intro students learning "how to read a film" is much more important than learning about film history - unless of course the aim is to use film as an index of important cultural/historical development . . . deciding in advance which [if either] of these to foci will be at the heart of a course is critical

in general, though, i find most of tony's observations dead on target

mike
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From: Kenneth Nolley <[email protected]>

This has been an interesting thread for me to watch this term, since I am in my last semester of teaching after more than 40 years of teaching film classes.  I am not sure that I have a lot of advice, but I have learned something about what works for me.  I should add at the beginning, that this has turned out to be a long post.

I want to begin by echoing several comments that have already been made.  One of the most important things we can do is to model a passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously critical engagement with film.  If I am not demonstrating those things, I don't see them coming back to me in my students' responses.  I don't expect students to value exactly the things I see, but I am not seeking agreement from them; what I want is to see evidence of their passion and enthusiasm put in service of rigorous, careful criticism.

I have also learned that what works best for me is not to try to make any film class do everything.  For years, I have taught a history of cinema course intended both as an introduction to film study and as a broad introduction to the world of mainstream narrative.  When I started teaching that class decades ago, there were decades fewer to cover, of course, and at some point in the late 80's, I began to think about dividing the class into two parts.  After considerable thought, I decided to narrow the focus of the course to charting the rise of classical narrative;  in turn, I developed a new class on films that challenged classical narration in all sorts of ways.  That class embraced both the the avant garde all the way back to the 1920's and the formally experimental wing of the European and Asian art cinema.  

The change turned out to be liberating for me.  I realized that teaching these two things in the same class was pulling my students in different directions and that I had never been successful in making sufficiently clear to them how different these two kinds of filmic experiences were.  The cleaner line that resulted from the division made both classes work better for me and for my students.  The same was true after I pulled documentary out and devoted a separate class to it.   I have told my students for years that they were likely to find it easier to write the required number of pages on a paper assignment if they narrowed their topic instead of expanding it.  I shouldn't have been surprised to see that my classes worked better when I narrowed and defined my focus better.

I try to match my film lists and numbers of screenings to the particularities of the class I am teaching.  In history, my students do a forced march through two films a week because I want them to get a lot of films from a lot of traditions under their belts.  In some classes in the old days when everything was on 16mm, we did two screenings a week of the same film, so that students could get used to the process of seeing a film and then re-seeing it after they had developed an agenda of things to look for.  On several occasions, taught an upper division seminar class on one or two films to which we devoted an entire term.  That became much easier to do when I could ask students to buy their own VHS and later DVD copy of the film.

And this leads me to try to connect with Leo's and Mike's comments.  Although I envy Leo's set up and heartily wish that we had something like that, the best I have managed is a nice theater with stadium-style seating, a very good digital projector and an excellent sound system.  The attraction (perhaps particularly of the latter) has brought quite a good percentage of students to most of my screenings, even though some of them (and many on some occasions) see the films on their laptops at times convenient to them.

I mourn the fact that the shared experience is less commoon, although the clips we watch together in class often offer tantalizing hints of what shared laughter or fear or sadness can be like.  But I agree with Mike that students' current viewing habits do not necessarily represent a loss of seriousness or engagement, but rather can represent a different kind of engagement.  In literature classes for years, I have urged students to read 19th century poems or novels by their computers with Google at the ready.  When with a few key strokes they can answer instantly the puzzlement that they have over a word or phrase that is foreign to them, why wouldn't I want that?   No other professors in the history of human beings has ever had students with such a powerful tool at their fingertips, and I would like them to put the text down for a second and use it.

I find that I prepare for class with films now the same way that I do with books, stopping my personal screening in the middle to look up something that occurs to me--something that often serves to enrich and inform the rest of the film when I return to it.  I urge my students to study films the same way. When students tell me that they are having a difficult time keeping themselves from getting so sucked into the story that they forget to pay attention to the images and sounds that constitute that story, I urge them to watch a sequence with the sound off, or to freeze the frame at each cut, so that they can really see, really study a sequence.  Or I urge them to turn the sound off and turn away from the screen and just listen to the way sound is managed in a scene.  The same devices that allow them to control the way that they see the film also allow them to do effortlessly what only editors with a Steenbeck flatbed editor could do years ago.

I know that my students pause the film to get on Facebook, to call their friends, to do all sorts of things that I can't imagine, but I have found that if I model a critically engaged form of digressive reading, they are more likely to include that strategy in their own already digressive reading of films. 

But above all, the most powerful thing I have found that I can bring to my students is my own passion and commitment to film and my love of sharing that excitement with them.

k

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