| More and more scholars agree "that in the current postmodern world of Post-World War II popular culture is the dominant means of communicating knowledge" (Earle, 1999, p. 121). Informed by cultural studies' assertion that "we have to acknowledge that for the most part, the relationship between the audience and popular texts is an active and productive one" (Grossberg, 1992, p.52), and puzzled by the lack of research into what an audience of prospective teachers, with an arguably heavily invested interest in the topic, might think of popular culture images of teachers, this study explores the question: What do preservice teachers think of and do with the images of teachers and teaching they receive through Hollywood films?;Using an initial questionnaire and reflective questions, and building to individual interviews and group movie nights with 16 participants from an Ontario Faculty of Education, I let my audience have a voice to express what these film images mean to them, rather than assuming that textual meaning can be imposed on them by producers, or even perceived through researcher voice alone. I then argue that although there are occasional (and predictable) cultural frames of reference which act as triggers for more naive reactions, preservice teachers are generally sophisticated viewers; they usually "get" the stereotypes, the lack of reality, the pat Hollywood setting up of the star/hero, but they desire to imitate the star anyway; and or they "get" that the problems highlighted in many teaching scenarios in Hollywood movies are there simply to make the star/hero look more heroic, but they fear those problems anyway. In other words, this project seeks to show that awareness of the conventions of the Hollywood 'teacher movie' images does not always (or even often, lead top a critical disengagement with those images, and preservice teachers engage in defiant negotiation between their sophisticated media awareness of the problems with Hollywood images, and their refusal to apologize for using those same images as vehicles to clarify both their 'aspirations' and their 'apprehensions'.;This project therefore fills a noticeable gap in the research on teacher image in film, especially in terms of a cultural studies understanding of the importance of popular culture, in that it goes beyond assessing viewers as passive, active, or somewhere-in-between consumers of images to assessing what to do with the possibility that encouraging active viewing does not in of itself solve the problem of influence. Faculties of Education, my conclusion will suggest, need to recognize that deconstructing images of teachers in film is not enough. |
