Sub-cultural groups that depend on a historical account to validate their thoughts and practices may need to revise and repair those accounts as changing circumstances present new issues affecting them. The year 2013 gave us three movies that dealt with racism, mobility, and political action: Lee Daniels' "The Butler," "12…

The movie "Lee Daniels' The Butler" is an example of a work that is meant not only to entertain but to convey an important attitude and offer important viewpoints. The movie deals with a deep issue in the history of movies and the history of the country: racial inequality. Three issues are discussed in this article: (a) African…

The emerging methodology of ethnocinema fuses techniques from its ethnographic origins with its co-constitutive methods, and invites collaborators to creatively come together for mutual education and cultural transformation. Education as a site of the enactment and "politics of identity construction" continues to confront notions of…

Political science faculty have access to a wealth of innovative pedagogies thanks to a comprehensive literature on teaching and learning in the discipline and related fields. Yet, from among the hundreds of documented possibilities, how does one go about deciding which to incorporate into a given course? Few articles have much to say in response…

When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror…

This document presents the proceedings of the 18th Annual Research Forum held June 26, 2013, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 13 action research papers: (1) Developing Oral Language Ability in the Secondary Spanish Classroom Using the Interpersonal and Presentational Modes of Communication…

This reflective essay tells the story of the transition of a Hollywood director to the professoriate. Jack Sholder's name may be familiar to those who are film buffs. As a filmmaker in Hollywood, he directed such films as "Alone in the Dark," "Nightmare on Elm Street 2," and "The Hidden." In addition, he won an…

With more than a quarter of a century of filmmaking under his belt, Spike Lee has begun working with students to provide opportunities for them to reach their dreams. The tough-minded director on set has proven to have a soft spot when it comes to youth and the next generation of filmmakers. Lee is a welcomed guest lecturer offering candid…

"Dreaming in the Classroom" provides teachers from virtually all fields with a uniquely informative guidebook for introducing their students to the universal human phenomenon of dreaming. Although dreaming may not be held in high esteem in mainstream Western society, students at all education levels consistently enjoy learning about dreams and…

This article synthesises an investigation of the making of a didactic programme as a consequence of the excess of consumption of audiovisual messages and the non critical and non-thoughtful attitude the youngsters have towards it. As an answer to this problem, the authors have produced a didactical programme about cinema and its language, the main…

Canadian Film will be a new course in the Communications Studies department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City particularly designed for non-Canadian Midwestern US students. It will not only introduce students to the richness and significance of Canadian film as both art and entertainment (which is virtually unrecognized around here),…

Task-supported language teaching can help provide L2 learners communicative practice in EFL contexts. Additionally, it has been suggested that repetition of tasks can help learners develop their accuracy and fluency (Bygate, 2001; Gass, Mackey, Fernandez, & Alvarez-Torres, 1999; Lynch & Maclean, 2000). The purposes of the study were to investigate…

According to Glanz's early research, school principals have been depicted as autocrats, bureaucrats, buffoons, and/or villains in movies from 1950 to 1996. The purpose of this study was to determine if these stereotypical characterizations of school principals have continued in films from 1997-2009, or if more favorable images have emerged that…

The purpose of this study was to explore with 25 filmmakers their perceptions of how they learned to develop the competencies needed to become proficient filmmakers-as-educators. Hence, this study describes (I) the filmmakers-as-educators' competency development as they integrated filmmaking into teaching film, and (2) key experiences that…

When Morris Dees was a young man in Alabama, the law said that black people couldn't drink from the same water fountain as white people, or sit at the same lunch counter. Back then, the government created and sanctioned divisions between human beings. The Civil Rights Movement changed all of that, of course, and ended state-mandated apartheid in…