Written by Robert L. Selman and Tracy Elizabeth
Almost from its advent, the film industry has eagerly taken great stories from literature, and translated them into major motion pictures. Nevertheless, even when financially successful, and, more surprisingly, even if critically acclaimed, to this day these well branded literature-based movies, with rare exception, have usually ended up consigned to the curriculum parking lot, or even worse, the educator’s doghouse. At least that has been the commonly received “narrative” sent out from the educational sector of our society. Sometimes critical of the quality of the production, and often loathsome of the changes in plot and characterization, educators have been understandably hesitant to use film industry adaptations of beloved stories in print media as “equal partners” in mainstream language arts classes. History and social studies classes are similarly hesitant. Of course, as one might suspect, the film industry’s counter-narrative is quite different, captured succinctly by Walt Disney’s now famous aphorism: “I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.”
But this may all be changing. Enormous box office successes with entertainment-oriented stories written primarily for adolescents, such as the Hunger Games and Harry Potter series, have lately motivated the entertainment industry to once again promote the adaptation of selections from the canon of middle and high school literature classics deemed educationally meretricious enough to make the course syllabus. Add to that the new ease of access to film media via streaming, etc., which cuts out the cost of a theater ticket and the buttered popcorn, and one can perceive a potential détente for this fraught partnership. But beyond the quality of the adaptations—whether graded by teachers (or parents) as an A- or a B — this greater access to film media content now affords instructional methods that can use cross media technologies to promote educational, ethical, and aesthetic knowledge and skills. Such is the case both in and out of formal educational environments, and across a student’s life span. The present research marks one--and our first--attempt to both implement and assess this possibility.
Recently, we designed a series of projects that explored how teachers evaluated a particular cross media/cross disciplinary educator resources designed to be implemented in middle schools. In our current study, we selected sixth grade language-arts classes from different regions of the United States (Western, New England, Coastal South), we analyzed in-depth interviews conducted with seven middle school (English) Language Arts teachers who had actively participated with us in an exploratory investigation of an intervention designed to promote early adolescents’ disciplinary knowledge and skills. We selected a piece of classic young adult literature, The Giver (1993), an internationally well-known and best-selling young-adult (fourth-grade Lexile reading level) dystopic fictional novel, authored by Lois Lowry in 1993. A tale drenched in social, civic, and political thematic content, it was adapted, in 2014, as a major motion picture released internationally.
Drawing from both the printed (book) story and the scripted (film) version of The Giver, as well as making use of purposefully selected film clips from the movie, we constructed an integrated set of fourteen discrete activities (curricular activity units, or CAU) that made use of curricular content residing in either the print or film media story depictions. In addition, we designed each of the activities for the educator resource to focus on one or the other of two primary types of instructional approaches: Type 1 activities: seven personal or individualized content writing assignments, or Type 2: seven interactive, small, student-centered group assignments purposefully designed to enable classmates to have academic discussions and debates with one another about issues, such as euthanasia or legislation against diversity, that are explicitly raised in the story.
Following the 3 to 5 weeks’ implementation of activities drawn from the educator resource, we held individual interviews with each of the seven teachers who participated in the study. We then undertook two separate analyses of the transcribed interview data. First, we performed a topical content analysis to reliably identify both the positive and negative evaluative responses (stances) which the teachers shared with us for each activity unit. This step included taking into account the teachers’ own instructional and curricular modifications. To verify our interpretations of the valence of their positions (or stances) for each of their implemented activities, as a second step within this preliminary analysis we implemented follow up check-ins with teachers (via email). All teachers participated fully. Second, using topical thematic analyses, we examined, and codified thematically the teachers’ various rationales for each of their curricular activity unit evaluations as they had discussed them with us during the interview process.
The research team members then tested this thematic code book for team member agreement on the emergent thematic codes uncovered during this analysis (e.g., themes such as Evidence of Positive Student Engagement in the unit, or Negative Academic Benefit to Students from the unit). Once refined, we successfully performed a between team-member inter-rater reliability analysis of the coded responses, achieving high levels of agreement codes assigned to interview comments. Finally, using the (reliable) thematic code-book derived from this second analysis, we aggregated these coded rationales of all the teachers’ comments across all the curricular activity units, and using a double-blind method of analysis to protect for researcher bias, we examined the teachers’ stances toward the activities, and their now coded reasons for these stances, in relation to the activities located within each of the two types of instructional strategies (individual student activities and interactive classroom curricular activities).
Across all evaluated units of curricular activities, regardless of the instructional type, teachers most often cited the theme Evidence of Positive Student Engagement as the most important justification for any given positively evaluated activity, even more often than the rationale, Positive Academic Benefit. Conversely, Student Boredom was the most often cited justification for teachers’ negative evaluations of any given activity. (Walt would likely have appreciated, if not predicted this.) Non-parametric quantitative analyses of the data suggested that the individualized types of instructional activities, e.g., a “self to text” persuasive writing assignment, generated evaluative comments by the teachers that were distributed as equally positive and negative, most often on the basis of students’ perceived engagement with the assignment. Teachers made few suggested modifications for this type of activity.
However, each of the interactive unit types that made use of facilitated class or small group discussions were heavily evaluated as positive. These “Type 2” activities also engendered the most teacher suggestions for specific modifications to fit the context and climate of their own classroom. Overall, along with some reservations and suggestions, we found that teachers perceived the educational potential of, and demonstrated the willingness to explore further, the use of a cross-media/cross-discipline pedagogical approach, particularly if the instructional strategies foster a high degree of student engagement and include a robust proportion of activities that involve peer interactive discussions of topics that are both socially and personally meaningful to the students.
There are many possible next steps. The evaluation, either casual or causal, of student cross- disciplinary learning and development in a cross- media design is among the most obvious. Such studies, particularly those that wish to unearth valid claims of evidence of student growth and development, even more so than the continued research with teachers (and parents), calls for evaluations with rigorous designs that can allow the interpretation of causal mechanisms should developmental differences in educational, ethical, or (a)esthetic outcomes prevail. In addition, we would need to take into account how various types of curricular units fit best with (the overlapping) educational, ethical, and aesthetic domains of knowledge and skills that are the fundamental pedagogical design of a cross media educator resource. For instance, what might be the variation in effects using Type 1 as compared to Type 2 approaches when youth debate one another about the different ways to design a bicycle (techno-educational, primarily) as compared to the diverse ways to design a societal policy (socio-ethical, primarily). Or, given the less than rave reviews of The Giver movie, how, nevertheless can a weak film be used in conjunction with a strong story told via text media to motivate the “reader’s” capacity for informed social reflection?
Another very important next opportunity is to seriously consider the applicability of our approach for youth learning across settings, e.g. in family discussions at home, in peer film and book clubs, as well as in a range of disciplines within the school curriculum. And for youth living across international boundaries. The Giver story is an interesting case in point: it is set in some vaguely depicted “future society,” one that although familiar, is, regulated in extreme ways unlike all contemporary ones (e.g., bicycles are the only mode of transportation, all color variation is banned). It is set in a bounded (read isolated) community that most of its members see as utopian, or at least, take for granted as designed for their optimal well-being. Only a very few community members (to wit, two) see the dystopic side. What might the discussion of this hypothetical society look like to students who grow up across countries with different sociological systems? What would discussion among and between youth drawn from across these societies look like and how might such discussions be held to the benefit of all involved?