End Page

The World in the Contemporary Education Dialogue

15(1) 111–116
Classroom: Using Film © 2018 Education Dialogue Trust
SAGE Publications
as a Pedagogical Tool sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0973184917742250
http://ced.sagepub.com

Samina Mishra1

Abstract
Using the experience of teaching film in the International Baccalaureate
programme, this article presents the intellectual and emotional learning
that film can enable as well as the possibilities of using film as a peda-
gogic tool for the collaborative construction of knowledge.

Keywords
Collaborative learning, children and technology, film and art, window
and mirror, India, subjective, self-expression

What do we believe is the purpose of education? To my mind, it is

about understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit, about finding
a way to be a part of that world while being who we want to be. We live
today in a time of simultaneity, and so it is possible for us to inhabit
multiple worlds at the same time; for example, watching an American
sitcom on the mobile phone while travelling on the Delhi metro and
then emerging to walk around in Chandni Chowk where hawkers sell
the latest tech accessories in front of crumbling medieval buildings.
Not only do we traverse multiple worlds in that one experience, but we
also see that the experience of the world for the vendor on the footpath
of Chandni Chowk is very different from our own. And so, in these

1
Independent Filmmaker, Writer and Teacher.

Corresponding author:
Samina Mishra, 264/1, Gulmohar Avenue, Jamia Nagar, New Delhi 110025, India.
E-mail: saminamishra@gmail.com
112 Contemporary Education Dialogue 15(1)

globalised times, it is critical that education should also be about

understanding the world that is inhabited by others. Seen from this per-
spective, education is, in the evocative metaphor used by Emily Style
for curriculum, ‘window and mirror’. Education as a process must be
the window that opens up new ideas and spaces in the world for students,
and it must also be the mirror that reflects their experiences of the
world. Nothing does that better than films.
Films can bring the world into the classroom. They can carry stories,
voices and images that in life may be far removed from us, both as docu-
mentary and fiction. Films are about inner lives and outer worlds. They
help us reaffirm our own selfhood and feel connected to others, and show
us the magic of discovering the unseen and the unheard. This is the per-
spective I try to hold on to in my practice as a documentary filmmaker.
There is another valuable lesson I have learned from my documentary
filmmaking practice—that the experience of making a film is not
complete when the film is finished. It is complete only when the film has
been screened for an audience and when people have discussed it, and
perhaps even then it continues to evolve the more often it is screened.
Dialogue is a critical part of filmmaking, and I have learned its value as
a documentary filmmaker. As I have moved into teaching, it is this learn-
ing that has stood me in good stead. A classroom where there are many
voices engaged in conversation is alive with possibility and the potential
for knowledge-seeking. It is a space where learning and teaching take
place. Film can easily and effectively be the tool that makes the class-
room come alive.
I have been teaching the International Baccalaureate (IB) Film
programme for just over two years now at Pathways School Noida.
While I teach only Grades 11 and 12, being present in a school regu-
larly means that I have the opportunity to interact with children of all
age groups. Conversations with them present all kinds of possibilities
to me. Talking about the use of films in the classroom, a Grade 6 student
told me, ‘Using videos is fantastic. Firstly, no one likes listening to the
teacher. With videos, we learn much more. We can easily follow the
pace of the video. We are not dependent on the teacher’s pace that can
sometimes be slow, sometimes fast. . . ’ Notwithstanding the student’s
easy disdain of the teacher, a trait commonly found among many students,
her next comment revealed just how smart and aware of her students
this teacher was.
‘There was a book called Wonder,’ the student said. ‘It looked really
boring; no one wanted to read it. But then the teacher showed us a trailer
of the book. It was also being made into a film, and everyone was hooked.
Mishra 113

I finished the book that day itself . . .’ So, in the simplest way, film can
be the easy hook, the line that draws the kids in, and then the teacher can
take over. It can never replace the teacher, but it can make her job easier
and more effective. But there is more that film can do.
Today’s students are part of a visually literate generation, brought up
on a steady diet of images and icons. They have an instinctive under-
standing of visual language; they can easily comprehend what a close-up
means or what a hand-held shot is trying to communicate. They may not
be able to articulate this understanding, they may not even have consid-
ered this consciously, but they know that a close-up means that ‘this is
important, look at it closely’ or that a scene shot with a hand-held camera
is meant to draw attention to a presence behind the camera. This is visual
language or visual communication in its simplest, unspoken form. For
this generation of students, much of their learning comes out of this
knowledge or understanding and is closely linked to their relationship
with technology.
It is, of course, important to remember that in India, children in school
encompass an extremely diverse population and so their relationship
with technology is not uniform. For the more wealthy children, their
audiovisual diet comes to them in highly personalised ways, on their
laptops and mobile phones. For other children, it is delivered via the
television set and signage. For us, as the generations that came before
them and as those who had to consciously learn the language of images,
it is a struggle to comprehend this generation’s dependence on technol-
ogy, and often our anxiety about this can blind us to the fact that they are
attuned to the demands of the world in which they live, which requires a
high level of visual literacy. The same student told me about watching
videos on issues such as anti-bullying, Internet safety and anger manage-
ment. ‘All these make me think like I haven’t before,’ she said. ‘It really
goes deep into you, the music and everything. . . ’ Her comment points to
the ability of a film to evoke an emotional response that can lead to
reflection about the world and one’s place in it. This can be seen in a
recent pedagogical exercise at Pathways School Noida.
As the film teacher, I asked my Grade 11 students to do their very first
film exercise on the prompt ‘Me, Myself’. I laid down some parameters
for them—the film had to be 1-2 minutes long; it could not have any
dialogue; it could have some text and some music. One of my students
experimented freely and created a lovely little film, strong on metaphoric
images, like those of her writing and then throwing the pages away, of a
hand of an unseen person offering her a peeled orange, of her walking
with a friend at night and of her taking the crumpled pages out of the
114 Contemporary Education Dialogue 15(1)

dustbin. These images are linked by a series of self-portrait shots. In the

first, her face is painted completely black and she is looking serious, and
in the last one, the paint has been completely washed off and she is smil-
ing. For our film class, it was a very successful exercise because it exper-
imented with creating connotative meanings through images and the
narrative created by joining them in a particular order.
When I showed the film to some teachers, one of the Hindi-language
teachers asked if she could use it with her students. My student and I
readily agreed, and she devised a lesson plan around the film. She was
delighted with how it went. The film prompted her students to share dif-
ferent perspectives in the class discussion. One said that the film was
about the filmmaker revealing different layers of herself. Another said
that it was about moving from darkness to light in the larger context of
women in India who are still oppressed in many ways. Another thought
that it was about focusing on small things in one’s life and not on the big
issues. Yet another said that it was about memory and how to live your
life based on what you remember. For the teacher, this understanding
reaffirmed that:

Every student is unique and they interpreted the film very uniquely. Everyone
expressed their different points of view and the beauty was that everyone
was accepting of each other’s point of view. Not a single student said that
ma’am, that particular student was wrong. As a teacher I can say that the film
was very helpful in developing their thoughts. It was easier to bring out the
individual uniqueness of each child because we were talking about a film.
That the film was without any dialogue was a plus point. The emphasis was
on images and not words, so the students could interpret [these] and express
[themselves] more freely.

Film is a subjective medium, and as a form of self-expression it can

encourage subjective self-expression among students too. Of course, all
artistic expressions are subjective, and textual expression is certainly not
free of subjectivity. But the visual does encourage a different kind of
subjectivity, a subjectivity that is free of the boundaries set by words
and vocabulary. While film language does have its own vocabulary,
meaning in a film can be understood emotionally as well as intellectually.
So even if you do not know that long takes result in slowing the pace of
a film, you can respond to the pace itself by saying ‘It made me feel. . .
’, while another viewer may express a completely different feeling.
By allowing this kind of discussion in the classroom, we can acknowledge
that learning can happen not just intellectually but also emotionally, and
Mishra 115

that an emotional and sensory response can, in fact, lead to an intel-

lectual reflection.
This process also lends itself to the idea of the subjective construction
of a narrative—a critical aspect of education, especially the teaching of
the social sciences, which is deeply concerned with understanding social
structures and processes, and with the importance of different points of
view. For example, my student’s film could be used to talk about the idea
of a young girl being asked to think about her individuality and to express
this essential aspect of herself, while linking it to the larger idea of
how many women are still not given the space and opportunity for self-
expression. That opens up a discussion on gender, class, region, religion—
the nuts and bolts of the social sciences.
What this also does is influence the pedagogical practice in the class-
room. By bringing films into the classroom, teachers can work together
with students to understand, appreciate and critique, thereby building on
both learning and analysis. The subjective emphasis means that film
works as a resource that equalises the relationship in the classroom and
allows for a collaborative construction of knowledge. The teacher’s
point of view is no greater than that of the student’s. Again, this is, of
course, possible with text as well. Indeed, it is more about the teacher’s
approach in the classroom. But is there something in film that can affect
that approach? When she first saw the film, the Hindi teacher said to me
that she did not realise that ‘our kids think so deeply’, our kids meaning
the students in our school. The film had acted as a window for her, pre-
senting a new idea of the children with whom she works, and it had also
acted as a mirror because it reflected the world she inhabited along with
these children.
In a recent discussion with a group of children between the ages of 11
and 16 years about what they respond to in films, I heard the reiteration
of the metaphor of window and mirror in their words: ‘I like films in
which I can relate to something that happens to the character or that the
character does . . .’; ‘I like films that make me see something new or
something different. . . ’ Books, too, can do that, as can all art. But we
need to recognise that this generation of children is growing up in ways
very different from ours and that their engagement with ideas often
comes in bite-sized videos on the Internet. So instead of lamenting their
obsessive use of technology, perhaps we need to draw on that interest
and introduce them to other kinds of films that can present multiple per-
spectives of and on the world. We need to re-imagine the purpose of our
classroom and see that a ‘fun’ activity—which is how most kids respond
to films in the classroom—can also mean serious learning.
116 Contemporary Education Dialogue 15(1)

As teachers, we need to hold on to what my colleague who used my

student’s film in her classroom told me: ‘Film is a medium that we can use
to connect students to society and to develop their skills so they can con-
tribute to society. They can understand themselves and society better, which
as teachers is our foremost responsibility to encourage and nurture.’