Cinema in the classroom

Connecting with moving images

Subha Das Mollick

Every well-made film leaves a lasting impression on the spectator’s mind. The follies and foibles of the movie characters make one a little wiser, perhaps a little better equipped to face life, a little more insightful about human nature. But cinema is not only about people. Cinema can bring out the secret lives of birds and bees, microbes and cancer cells. In other words, in addition to being a great entertainer, cinema can be a great teacher of lives and livelihoods, concepts and processes, ideas and ideals. However, this educative power of cinema has remained largely untapped by the community of educators in India.

Way back in 1984, Prof. Yashpal, who was then the Chairman of UGC, initiated Countrywide Classroom on Doordarshan. The idea was to take quality education to remote corners of the country by tapping the potential of the audio-visual medium. Production centres opened up in different universities. Training sessions began in right earnest, not only on the fundamentals of cinematic techniques, but also on the special powers of cinema to give life to inanimate objects through stop motion animation techniques and cinema’s magical powers to slow down an action that happens in the blink of an eye and speed up an action to bring out the drama in the germination of a seed and blooming of a bud. Some of us adventurous teachers, who volunteered to explore the new medium, were shown Dr. Edgerton’s experiments in stroboscopic effects and 16 mm films on different science subjects. In a film on ‘frames of reference’, principles of relativity came alive on screen through various cinematic tricks. These rare films acted as triggers for me to delve into this medium that offered infinite possibilities to make abstract concepts more tangible for the spectator. A whole new facet of cinema opened up in front of me. The medium presented itself in a new personality, far removed from the glamour and glitz one usually associates with cinema.

We began experimenting with the VHS camera. Our initial amateurish efforts to bring alive on screen the abstract concepts in textbooks did not yield the results we had imagined. These video films were unable to ignite the imagination of the students when they were played in class. We, as content creators, realized that we had a long way to go if we were to grab the attention of the nation with our content. By the late 80s, courtesy, the National Network of Doordarshan, Indian students had already been exposed to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, David Attenborough’s Living Planet and J. Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. These programmes set the bar for educational television. If we, the third world content creators, could not aspire to rise to these standards of production value, then we should be able to compensate with something equally engrossing and enticing. In other words, we had to find our own Indian formula for educational television. Prof. Yashpal had negotiated for prime time slots for the Countrywide Classroom programmes on the National Network. The onus was now on ideators and producers to do justice to these slots.

Lack of funds became a major impediment in attaining desired heights in production standards. While the budget for a Bollywood film was nothing less than one crore rupees, the budget for an educational film was not even 50,000 rupees. That is when it dawned on me to take a second look at the commercial films. If so much resource is sunk into the making of each of these films, perhaps these can be worth a little more than mere popcorn viewing. My friend, who is an English teacher, told me that she used portions of the film Godfather in her classes on Julius Ceasar. Students fathomed the idea of revenge and connected to the psychology of the man seeking revenge more easily through Godfather than through the Shakespearean text. My friend assured me that if I looked closely, I would be able to mine useful material for science lessons too. And she was right!! Back to the Future had released in 1985. The film begins dramatically with the speakers bursting with the sound played on full volume. The physicist in me saw this scene as a spectacular demonstration of sound as mechanical energy. From the energy of sound waves to conservation of kinetic energy and momentum to harnessing the energy of lightning and comparing this energy with the energy in a plutonium nucleus, Marty’s journey to 1955 and back to 1985 could be read as a textbook of energy transformation and conservation. When Home Alone was released in 1990, I found in it enough material to teach simple machines*.

I felt that I had hit a goldmine. At the time, VHS cassettes of these popular films were easily available. So one could occasionally arrange for classes in the audio-visual room of the school or college and have a good time with the students doing physics with popular films. One could pause the film at the required juncture and discuss the physics behind the pranks played by Kevin in Home Alone or focal length of the telephoto lens used by Jeff in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. For lack of adequate infrastructure, such classes were occasional. But students used to look forward to these classes. For subjects other than physics or pure science, the possibilities of using popular films were even more immense. Management schools have been practising this pedagogy for years. An entire course on “Leadership Management” has been designed using Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film Twelve Angry Men. In the year 2012, Dr. Mohan Aghashe, a thespian and psychiatrist, gave a lecture demonstration on how he uses clippings of popular films like Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue to teach psychiatric disorders like chronic depression and schizophrenia.

By 2012, the world had changed radically. Digital technology had elbowed out old fashioned, bulky analog equipment. Media was run by a market driven consumerist agenda. Prime time slots on Doordarshan had been taken away from Countrywide Classroom. The private channels were not interested in airing educational programmes. Content developers had sporadically gifted the country with highly original, well-researched, well-produced programmes Mathemagic Show, Bharat Ki Chhaap, Bharat Ek Khoj, etc., but these gems got lost in the crowd of light-hearted entertainment shows. Some of them found their place on the Internet. With the coming of YouTube in 2005, the Internet was now flooded with content of all kind. In schools and colleges, it became not only so much easier to take classes using audio-visual aids, many schools made it mandatory. Teachers looking for the right kind of audio-visual material on the Internet were spoiled by the choice they had. A search for “Videos on photosynthesis for Grade IV” yields 900,000 results in 0.45 seconds. A search for “Harnessing energy from the sun” yields 89,20,000 results in 0.40 seconds. But the big question remained, what would teachers do with these videos. How would they use them in class?

The time was just ripe for developing the pedagogy of “Cinema in the Classroom” – a pedagogical outline that would guide the teacher to use a film clipping most effectively in the classroom. A film clipping was by no means a substitute for the teacher. It was a teaching learning material (TLM) that the teacher could integrate into her teaching-learning design. The first step towards developing a teaching-learning design is to look for an appropriate film clipping. If the teacher is willing to step outside the realm of conventional audio-visual material made explicitly for the purpose of education, then the world of popular films is not likely to disappoint her. Let us take a look at some of the blockbusters from Bollywood.

Using the film Lagaan, one can develop an entire leadership training programme. Recruitment of every team member in the cricket team of Charanpur is an application of a leadership skill. Ashutosh Gowarikar’s other film Swades is equally useful for teaching different subjects from science to community engagement**. In a civics class, the teacher can show the democratic process in action at the grassroot level in the gram sabha sequence of the film and collective action taken to solve a problem in the generation of hydro electricity sequence. This sequence can be equally useful in a physics class for teaching transformation of energy from one form to another and practical aspects of hydro electricity generation.

In films like these, the situations presented are realistic and the next best thing to experiencing a live situation. A popular film has the power to hook every child present in the class, be the child a fast learner or slow; an auditory learner or visual learner. Thus, participation of the class in the collective learning experience is as good as 100 per cent. Witnessing the drama unfolding in front of their eyes, the young viewers develop their own understanding of the situation or issue. Pedagogists call this the “constructivist” mode of learning. The learners construct their own knowledge instead of being spoon-fed by the teacher. Viewing a film clipping, each learner is likely to generate his/her own knowledge. After the screening, the teacher has to consolidate these personal knowledges constructed into the collective knowledge of the class.

Repurposing a carefully selected portion of a popular film for classroom transaction has its own rewards. However, everything shown in popular films may not be the “truth”. The filmmaker sometimes takes liberties to dramatize a situation. For example, in the film Swades, the sequence of hydro electricity generation culminates with an electric spark flowing between two poles. This is an untruth because sparks are generated when electricity passes through air. When the poles are connected by a thick wire, the electricity will pass through the wire and not through the surrounding air. These deviations from the “truth” can also become points of discussion in the class.

Besides popular films, the teacher can also mine her TLM from the repository of documentaries, television commercials and news clippings. Repurposing and repackaging them with annotations, explanatory texts and embedded questions is also content creation of a very special kind. However, this content has to be confined to classroom use only. It cannot be put up on public platforms because of the copyright issues involved.

But if the teacher has the time and inclination, she can be an original content creator using her smartphone. The teacher can always capture her own videos when she goes on sightseeing tours or encounters interesting flora and fauna. A teacher can also do an experiment in the lab, record it using her smart phone and show the video instead of showing the experiment live. Demonstrating a live experiment may become clumsy. But in a video recorded experiment, important developments may be highlighted with close ups, slow motion, proper lighting and much more. Such original content, made with a lot of love and care and a little bit of expert technical guidance, has the potential to go viral. Its use can spread way beyond the teacher’s own class. Digital technology is fast closing the gap between amateur and professional efforts. Amateur efforts by teachers can now confidently compete with Cosmos and Living Planet.

With teachers becoming content creators, Prof. Yashpal’s original vision of reaching out to the remote corners of the country with quality audio-visual content is likely to come true. “Countrywide Classroom” will take on new connotations in the digital era.

*Read the article, Movies, men and machines, on using movies to teach science by the same author in the May-June 2017 issue of Teacher Plus.

**Read King Khan in a physics classroom by Subha Das Mollick in the May-June 2015 issue of Teacher Plus.

The author is a filmmaker and a teacher of media and film studies. She had been a physics teacher for many years before switching her career from physics to media. She is the prime ideator of “Cinema in the Classroom”. She may be reached at subha.dasmollick@gmail.com.