The Social Uses of Classroom Cinema: A History of the “Human Relations” Film Series at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem (New York City), 1936-1955 (original) (raw)

Breaking into the Movies: public pedagogy and the politics of film

This article argues that how we think about education must extend far beyond matters of 5 schooling and include those spaces, practices, discourses and maps of meaning and affect produced 6 through a range of cultural and pedagogical technologies. We live at a time in which the educational 7

Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights, and Documentary Film

2016

The briefest of glances at this book's table of contents will tell the tale of George Stoney's influence on me as a film scholar. He instilled in me as a New York University undergraduate a fascination with the past, present and future of documentary film. His course, 'Documentary Traditions', was one of my last as a senior and left an indelible mark. Professor Stoney's detailed notes in my modest undergraduate film journal inspired me and are indicative of a thoroughly committed educator who was always seeking to learn himself. I was humbled to be in his class and have sought to emulate him in the classroom ever since. His influence on the documentary world is legendary and I suspect I will continue to return to his life and work as a source of inspiration. My world was rocked as well by the many energetic and brilliant film lecturers I encountered at New York University in the mid-1990s, especially David Lugowski, Peter Decherney and Joe McElhaney. Peter Decherney, in particular, deserves thanks for what has turned into a career-long advising session; his feedback on countless papers, personal statements, presentations and overall encouragement and friendship has been foundational for me and I cannot imagine being a film scholar without his help. The faculty in film and television studies at the University of Warwick rescued me from a low-paying activist gig in Seattle. My courses there with Richard Dyer, Ginette Vincendeau, José Arroyo and Rachel Moseley were inspired and dramatically informed my own pedagogy as a film studies educator. My relationships with Chon Noriega, Marina Goldovskaya and Eric Smoodin at the University of California, Los Angeles were and continue to be sources of inspiration. I thank all three for their friendship and for their encouragement during difficult times. My peers from my time at UCLA have profoundly shaped me as a scholar and have provided much needed emotional support through the ups and downs of graduate life, so thanks to

"Learning to Look: The Educational Documentary and Post-War Race Relations"

Introduction to my book, "Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights, and Documentary Film." Projecting Race presents a history of educational documentary filmmaking in the postwar era in light of race relations and the fight for Civil Rights. Drawing on extensive archival research and textual analyses, this book tracks the evolution of race-based, nontheatrical cinema from its neorealist roots to its incorporation of new documentary techniques intent on recording reality in real time. The films featured here include classic documentaries, such as Sidney Meyers’ The Quiet One (1948), as well as a range of familiar and less familiar state-sponsored educational documentaries from the likes of George Stoney (Palmour Street, 1950; All My Babies, 1953; and The Man in the Middle, 1966) and the Drew Associates (Another Way, 1967). The final chapters highlight community development films jointly produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Office of Economic Opportunity (The Farmersville Project, 1968; The Hartford Project, 1969) in rural and industrial settings. Featuring testimonies from farm workers, activists, and government officials, the films reflect communities in crisis, where the status quo was threatened by organized and politically active racial minorities. Ultimately, this work traces the postwar contours of a liberal racial look as government agencies come to grips with profound and inescapable social change.

A Social History of US Educational Documentary: The Travels of Three Shorts, 1945-1958

Film History: An International Journal, 2017

This essay studies three documentary shorts on schools in the US, France, and pre-mandate Palestine that were made in the wake of World War II. Reading documentation from film archives, manuscript collections, newspapers, periodicals, and educational curricula, I show how the shorts were produced for post-war internationalism and later repurposed by US film institutions within mid-century discourses of “progressive” schooling. Local historical newspapers reveal how organizations adopted, negotiated, and ignored distribution mandates when they screened the films. The history of the travels of these shorts provides new contours and ethnographic dimension to an expanding historiography of “useful” educational film.

[K-N-S] Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies

Because we lack an educational poetry which stirs the imagination and harnesses our power we are forced to push our school images our present school materials and organization to the breaking point, without conviction or results, but with a naïve faith in our past ways. But the past must be rethought, not reused. (Huebner, 1975/2000, p. 275) To be human is to create. (Phenix, 1975/2000, p. 329) During the late 1960s, a group of American curricularists and documentary filmmakers, notably Dwayne Huebner and Frederick Wiseman, worked to provoke the educational and political issues of their time. In turn, these public intellectuals sought to disrupt, among other things, the institutional borders and everyday realities of racialized segregation, infringements against individual rights, economic exploitation and gendered inequities within the institutions of schooling. The educational questions these filmmakers and curriculum theorists posed more than four decades ago continue to speak to...

Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies

2011

During the late 1960s, a group of American curricularists and documentary filmmakers, notably Dwayne Huebner and Frederick Wiseman, worked to provoke the educational and political issues of their time. In turn, these public intellectuals sought to disrupt, among other things, the institutional borders and everyday realities of racialized segregation, infringements against individual rights, economic exploitation and gendered inequities within the institutions of schooling. The educational questions these filmmakers and curriculum theorists posed more than four decades ago continue to speak to things that matter. Many of these curricularists, like Maxine Greene, Michael Apple, Dwayne Huebner, and William F. Pinar to name a few provoked us to question why some administrators, teachers and students (including the authors of this writing) remain couched in our own indifference and accede ourselves to the political, silent extensions of bureaucratic and technocratic discursive arms. Are ...

Media as Sentimental Education: The Political Lessons of HBO's The Laramie Project and PBS's Two Towns of Jasper

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2009

The Laramie Project and Two Towns of Jasper were TV movies created in response to two hate crimes. These movies were distributed as educational texts, with lesson plans and teaching guides, to K-12 classrooms across the U.S. This essay locates the discursive and institutional characteristics that allowed the movies to be labeled as educational texts, fit for classroom use, and evaluates the way these movies were deployed as pedagogic tools through an analysis of the educational guides that accompanied the movies. The guides make clear how the movies were deployed as a form of political education or citizen-production. While the guides state their intent to be the inculcation of critical citizens, they do so through a strategy of sentimental education that prioritizes feelings and relations proper to existing neoliberal structures. In this sentimental commitment to U.S. neoliberalism, with all of its entanglements in systems of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination, the guides fail their professed critical agendas.