| This study examines the educational promise and pitfalls of history feature films (commercial motion pictures targeted at a mass audience that take place mostly or entirely in the past) used as instructional tools in the classroom. It opens with a review of relevant literature, identifying three scholarly frames (historians' perspectives, historical thinking/collective memory, critical media scholarship) that help conceptualize the educational potential of history movies.;The dissertation offers two distinct but related analytical components. The first component illustrates a way of evaluating history films along six pedagogical functions (content coverage/period representation; historical construction/social construction; empathy/moral response). This pedagogical content analysis framework is tested on three recent movies: the 2004 version of The Alamo, The Last Samurai (2003), and The Patriot (2000). The second analytical component is a case study of four film-based lessons taught in actual social studies classrooms: a grade 8 teacher showing the 1977 television miniseries Roots in U.S. History; a grade 9 teacher showing the 1994 Chinese-language film To Live in a unit on communism; a grade 9 teacher using a portion of Legends of the Fall (1994) for a lesson on WWI; a grade 10 teacher showing The Pianist (2002) during a unit on WWII and the Holocaust. Analysis of the cases explores what these film-based lessons accomplished in terms of learning about the past (using the pedagogical content analysis functions) and speculates why these teachers chose to use the films in manageable, safe, and teacher-directed ways.;The study closes with a discussion of why history teachers are attracted to using movies in their classrooms. Dramatic and memorable history feature films have tremendous power to help students visualize and care about the past. History movies also can distort or simplify the past in the minds of young learners when film-based lessons do not provide them with sufficient content support and opportunities for meaningful intellectual engagement. Yet, the circumstances of schooling---limited time, student absenteeism, interruptions and distractions, assessment demands---get in the way of adventurous teaching with history movies and impel teachers to limit student engagement within safe, manageable boundaries. As seen in the four cases, the typical purpose of using history films in the classroom is to provide extra visual reinforcement of content covered by traditional means (lecture, textbooks). The dissertation also considers the place of history feature films in historical literacy. It posits five competencies that history movies are well-suited to help students develop: learning and using content knowledge; analyzing historical narratives (interpretations); considering cultural positioning (of filmic texts); discerning presentism in accounts of the past; historical empathy (recognizing historical perspectives and caring about the past). The study concludes by suggesting directions for further research and by recommending that history/social studies teacher preparation include explicit preparation in the use of film. |
