Assignment paper no 15

Paper-15

Name: Ramiz M. Solanki

M. A. Sem:- 04

Roll No. 27

Batch: 2017-19

Enrolment No.2069108420180051

Paper: Mass Communication and Media Studies

Assignment Topic: Role of Cinema in Education

Email Id: ramiz.solanki39@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English MKBU

in today's day and age, education has transcended the traditional and orthodox methods of teaching. Gone are the times when using technology for imparting knowledge seemed like a distant dream. A product of this technological development, the modern concept of utilizing movies as a tool for providing education continues to find new suitors with each passing day. With textbooks often failing to entice the younger students, combining learning with a source of entertainment seems like the ideal way of getting the most out of them. While this method has its own set of critics, the pros outweigh the cons.

How movies can help in learning

Using movies to teach can definitely be a challenge, but when carried out in a proper manner, it boasts of numerous benefits. Unlike texts, movies enable students to learn visually. The movie Gandhi, for example, allows a student to view a recreation of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a paramount figure in the history books. The visual clips provide a greater understanding of the time and era as well as the lifestyle of the historical figure than simple words. Additionally, movies are not limited in the way books are. They occasionally go beyond the curriculum and touch upon topics which might not be part of the course but important nonetheless, like the class and gender conflicts forming an inherent part of 'Gandhi'.

The interest factor

Interest is an important factor of learning. On a general level, many students respond better to watching movies than to reading which helps in keeping them interested and prevent them from getting easily distracted. This is especially effective for those who are not motivated readers and prefer videos over the written word.

Subtitled videos have also proven to substantially improve reading and literacy skills. And with so many novels getting film adaptations, teaching the subject of literature has become more versatile. Students can choose which medium of studying they prefer and even start a healthy debate on which version they found better and why.

For some students, learning through films is actually a boon. Even those with the severe learning disabilities have shown a response to movies and can relate to them. Students belonging to deprived backgrounds, without books to learn from at home, often show the inability to read properly but still willingly and excitedly talk about movies they are familiar with and which they relate to. With the film industries growing diverse by the day, more and more films are starting to cater to the preferences of different types of people throughout the world by being relatable. Films can be considered as a 'universal language' which overcomes the barrier of textual learning for all backgrounds.

Challenges ahead

While there is no questioning the fact that movies can be a competent method of education, there are still several challenges it needs to overcome to be accepted universally. The older generation still hasn't come to terms with the educational aspects of the cinematic universe and many parents still carry the perception that screening movies is an inadequate form of teaching.

For the more conventional teachers, adopting a new method can be an arduous task. Thus, proper training and support need to be provided to the teachers to ensure they're capable and confident. At the end of the day, proper planning is essential for this method to be an effective tool and the choice of movies needs to be careful and precise for the student to actually learn something by the climax. If this method overcomes the challenges to a certain extent and continues to grow at the current rate, a future dominated by full-fledged cinematic education could well be on the horizon.

When the school film club planned to take an autistic boy on a trip to London's Leicester Square to watch War Horse, his mother was worried. He wouldn't make it through the tube journey, she warned, let alone the cinema experience. Having survived both by keeping his anorak zipped well up over his nose, the boy was asked what he thought of the film. "It was very interesting," he replied. "I put my hand up to my face when the horse was stuck in the barbed wire and it was wet. That's never happened to me before," he added, revealing how for the first time a film had moved him to tears.

The power of film to make an emotional connection and how best to enable people to experience this power through education was the theme of a roundtable discussion hosted earlier this month by the Guardian in association with Filmclub, part of the new charity Film Nation UK, which aims to put film at the heart of children and young people's learning and cultural experience.

Special needs teacher Liz Warne's story of the cinema trip involving the Orchards community middle school in Worthing, West Sussex, was one of numerous examples cited by speakers at the debate of how film clubs had helped break down barriers – emotional and otherwise.

There was the way the film club at Whickham School, Gateshead, had brought together children from very different family backgrounds when culture clashes between them meant their relationships elsewhere could be volatile. There was the showing of the film Duck Soup – its simple narrative and black and white photography allowed children on the autistic spectrum to watch a film with their peers and for the first time laugh at the same moments. There was the thrill of children with severe learning difficulties at Beacon Hill academy in Thurrock, Essex seeing themselves inserted into scenes from You've Been Framed and projected on to the wall. And then there was the elective mute at another school who spoke to her teacher for the first time to ask to audition for a place in a film they were making, and who has since proved a star performer.

Film clubs are being run in more than 7,000 schools, with 220,000 young people watching, discussing and reviewing film. This service provides, for free, a curated catalogue of DVDs, curriculum-linked guides, film-making tutorials and a members magazine. It also offers masterclasses in film-making, reviewing and programming, and gives film club members the opportunity to post reviews on its website.

It merged with the young people's filmmaking charity, First Light in September to form Film Nation UK and is funded by a number of organisations including the British Film Institute, which awarded £26m lottery funding

Jane Fletcher, schools support director at Film Nation UK, said film watching, understanding and making was a fantastic opportunity, and also a cultural entitlement. "At the end of four years of funding we are hoping to show the validity of that, so film becomes accepted alongside literature, art and music in schools and in the broader world."

A key value of film in education, the roundtable agreed, was that it was a leveller. Samantha Evenson, who runs two primary school film clubs, said: "We have children who have no books at home but immediately have confidence talking about film because it is something they have engaged with already. With a book, they may think they don't have the level of experience needed or feel they aren't bright enough to talk about it."

Even children with severe learning difficulties and disabilities who struggle with any kind of academic curriculum can often relate to film, said Andy Terrington, post-16 team leader at Beacon Hill academy: "Film is a universal language."

As a result, it can be used to spark discussions about issues that could be difficult to tackle, such as racism or homophobia said Joe Goff, a year 11 pupil who runs the film club at Lawnswood secondary school, Leeds.

And Malcolm Richards, a tutor at New River college, a pupil referral unit in Islington, north London, said there was a small group of films, such as Bullet Boy and Kidulthood, telling stories that young, urban kids strongly related to. "Those films are really, really important and can act as a gateway to film literacy," he said. While many explored adult themes, so had to be handled sensitively, it was nevertheless valuable to show they were as valid and open to analysis as a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Denise Rose, a facilitator for Mouth That Roars, which helps young people who would not usually have access to media equipment make their own films, said many were misrepresented in the media and saw themselves as victims, or in terms of negative stereotypes. Critiquing the way films were constructed and the decisions made by producers could therefore be empowering, whether it involved analyzing the news or EastEnders.

Popcorn was important as a way of creating a real cinema experience and enticing children to engage, agreed those who ran film clubs, as was giving pupils some kind of ownership of the club, which often meant allowing them to help decide what to watch. But it was also valuable to encourage them to try films they were not automatically drawn to – and feel free to be critical or won-over. Children at one film club were persuaded to watch The Truman Show by the mantra "risk it for a biscuit" – but once the biscuits were finished, they found themselves gripped by the story.

Many cited examples of how skills and teaching techniques employed in film clubs had spilled over into the curriculum, whether it was getting students to produce animation storyboards in literacy lessons or using films to introduce a lesson topic.

This is something the new merged charity plans to develop further, along with training teachers, face-to-face and online, to help them make better use of the film resources available to them.

But the roundtable agreed it was about more than education. Fletcher said the British film industry was booming, and it was important that young people from all backgrounds became involved, for the sake of the industry as well as themselves. "What we are hoping to do is open up the film industry so less traditional young people look behind the scenes and think 'Maybe I could do that,'" she said.

Noel Goodwin, an education programmer for young people at the British Film Institute, said it was also about careers beyond films. "There will be more and more jobs out there that involve the creation of digital content and require basic film-making techniques," he said.

Roundtable participants recognised that unpaid internships remained a problem and that deeper outreach was needed if young people from all backgrounds were to access the opportunities available.

Resources were also an issue for some. Richards said that while he had a projector and a room to show his students films, he had nothing for film-making – something that the new charity hopes will be a bigger part of school life in future.

He said it was important to gather evidence of how valuable watching and making films could be in order to strengthen the case for support. "We all know how Filmclub is fantastic," he said. "But having to convince an executive head teacher or someone from the local council is more difficult."

Goodwin argued that the government also needed lobbying to ensure that film was embedded in the curriculum and that film studies were considered as viable an option for pupils as music and art.

But Abigail Moss, deputy director of the Literacy Trust, pointed out that with the end of both the numeracy and literacy strategies, film was now the only national strategy programme to be supported in schools.

There was another reason for optimism too – the natural film-making talent of many young people. Some of the films posted online by teenagers who had made them with minimal equipment in their bedrooms were of astonishingly high quality, noted several roundtable participants.

Nick Foxell, an independent film-maker, said that regardless of its value for acquiring skills or a future career, film-making could be hugely empowering. "We all know the big screen has a magic," he said. "It bestows authority and validates people's experience."

References.

(Swain)

Bibliography

Swain, Harriet. Film Can Have a Leading Role in Education. 19 November 2013. 05 April 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2013/nov/19/film-education-learning-tool-inclusion>.