Teaching With and About Film and Museums (Jeremy Stoddard)

This comment by a North Carolina high school student was made in response to a clip from Ang Lee’s film Ride with the Devil (1999). The film, which portrays the Kansas-Missouri border battles that occurred during the US Civil War, was used by his history teacher to challenge her students’ conceptions of the Civil War so that they would begin to appreciate the complexities of race and slavery in American society at the time. The teacher clearly stated the objective for watching the selected portions of the film, prompted students’ thinking with questions prior to the viewing and then debriefed what they saw. (For more on this example, see Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies, Routledge 2010.)

This episode reflects what has driven my research into teaching and learning history with museums and media over the past fifteen years. I often observed students’ affective response to their experiences with media and at historic sites and wondered how these mediums could be used to engage them in aspects of the past often marginalized in textbooks and the official curriculum. However, I also frequently saw what Renee Hobbs has graciously called “non-optimal” teaching with these representations of history. Therefore, I have been particularly interested in the relationship between teacher and student epistemology of history and representations of history—that is, how each views the nature of history presented in film and museums—and the impact of these beliefs on teaching and learning.

My research into teacher decision-making and pedagogy with film suggests that teachers’ personal epistemologies of how film represents history and their own ideological views influence how they present film as a source to students. For example, I found that fiction was often presented as subjective and shown for particular pedagogical purposes, as a primary source or as a way to challenge common narratives students hold, as the episode above illustrates; documentaries were often portrayed as being objective sources akin to a textbook. This more problematic use of documentaries was particularly driven by the teachers’ selection of films that aligned with their own ideological views and therefore were presented as a “correct view.”

The Ride with the Devil example also reflects my particular interest in how film and historic sites can be used to engage difficult histories—those histories difficult to represent, understand, or engage the public in discussing. These are histories that challenge the national narrative of progress and freedom, include voices of marginalized groups, or challenge our assumptions about the roles of race, class, and gender in how we view the past. Alan Marcus and I conceptualized this in “The Burden of Historical Representation: Race, Freedom, and ‘Educational’ Hollywood Film” (Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 36, no. 1 [2006]: 26-35) as a model to examine how marginalized histories, such as those of slavery and Indigenous peoples, are presented in film. This work has led to a forthcoming volume, Teaching Difficult History Through Film, edited by Alan Marcus, David Hicks and me, with contributors from various disciplines who use theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory to present innovative pedagogical models for engaging students in historically marginalized perspectives.

The field trip and museum experience in history education has been similarly associated with non-optimal pedagogy, where teachers let their students roam and rely on docents to engage them. However, it is through film and visiting historic sites that many engage with learning about history long after they leave our classrooms. It is for this reason that Alan Marcus, Walter Woodward, and I researched what good pedagogy at museums or historic sites would look like and what role teachers and museum educators can play to help make these pedagogies a reality. This project led to our co-authored book Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies (Routledge, 2011).

One of the most important implications of this work for practice is the recognition that teachers need to both teach with, and also explicitly about, film and historic sites, emphasizing both the pedagogical power of these mediums for engaging students in the past and to develop the epistemic understandings of the nature of these representations and how they are constructed. This epistemic understanding in teachers promotes more thoughtful pedagogy and allows students to more easily transfer critical thinking strategies associated with historical thinking and primary source analysis to other representations of history, including the history film they watch with their family or the historical marker they pass on the way to school.