Meyerson, Peter M., and Richard J. Paxton. “Stronger than the Classroom: Movies, Texts and Conceptual Change (or Lack Thereof) Amidst Sociocultural Groups.” (2007)

Complementing the work of Seixas and Marcus, this chapter reports on a study by Peter Meyerson and Richard Paxton in which they ask how the sociocultural milieu in which students view film influences what students learn from film. They also explore how this learning from film influences what students learn from traditional texts. Meyerson and Paxton compare how a group of Native-American adolescents and a group of European-American adolescents differed in their responses to activities which asked them to represent their epistemological criteria and framework theories in relation to movies as historical sources. These activities focused on the topic of Westward expansion of the United States in the 19^th century and included viewing segments of Dances with Wolves (1990) and Far and Away (1992).