When I can’t express what I really feel I practice feeling what I can express. —Nikki Giovanni sing films to teach historical time periods, people, or events is not a new idea. Many of us remember the strategy from our own grade school days. The You Are There filmstrips seemed to be especially popul...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.623.3696 http://worldroom.tamu.edu/Presentations/Making History Come Alive/Making History Come Alive CD/Articles/Media Literacy/Historical Literacy, Reading History Through Film.pdf |
| Summary: | When I can’t express what I really feel I practice feeling what I can express. —Nikki Giovanni sing films to teach historical time periods, people, or events is not a new idea. Many of us remember the strategy from our own grade school days. The You Are There filmstrips seemed to be especially popular among the teachers who taught social studies to my generation. The premise of the series was to show students what a par-ticular time period was like. However well-intentioned those showing the filmstrips might have been, most stu-dents ’ memories of the film strips, including mine, generally never went beyond the contest over who would be allowed to operate the projector, the loud beep that signaled it was time to advance the filmstrip, and the phrase “and you are there ” iterated at the beginning and end of each strip. In many classrooms, filmstrips and 16mm films, for the most part, have been replaced by videocassettes and DVDs. However, the advances in technology have not led to a similar evolution in the ideas of what historical films are and how they might be effectively used in a classroom. Each semester, over a period of four years, I assigned students (pre-service social studies teachers seeking certification at the secondary level) who were placed in either a U.S. history or world history class to make a list of the films that their mentor teachers (or other teachers in their building) showed in class. They listed a number of documen-tary type videos shown on topics ranging from ancient Egypt to the geography of Antarctica. Other documentary type videos included several PBS broadcasts and an episode of ABC’s 20/20: Is Amer-ica Number 1? (1999) with John Stossel. Several popular films were on the list |
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