| Abstract: | As a practicum supervisor in the teacher education program at UW-Madison, I designed many projects and activities around "school films". I define a "school film" as a film that in some way, even incidentally, is about an educator or a student. Some well-known school films are Dead Poets Society , Stand and Deliver , and To Sir, With Love . Some lesser-known ones are Waterland, Welcome to the Doll House, Small Change, and Maedchen in Uniform . In this article, I discuss a project that involved taking up the film Teachers (1984) for the purpose of problematizing practicum students' traditional, "autonomous" views of literacy. The project's goal was to introduce students to a "Discourses" orientation toward literacy through a combination of "reading" both print and film texts, writing reactions to these texts, and discussing these reactions and the texts during seminars. |
