ERIC Number: EJ1089369
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: 15
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1550-5170
EISSN: N/A
Cinema and Pedagogy: An Urban Education Seminar
Meyer, Karen Ann; Vellani, Al-Munir
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, v11 n2 p107-121 2014
In "Cinema Paradiso" (Tomatore, 1988), Salvatore's love of movies came from spending his earlier, young life inside a cinema with the fatherly projectionist Alfredo, now blind and bitter. Alfredo is right. Life is much harder, yes, yet still very much "like in the movies" filled with frustrated actions, performed inside blind and repetitive constellations of every-day-ness and non-stop antinomies. "Cinema Paradiso," among other cinematic gems, is curriculum to a seminar in Urban Education that probes, tussles, even attempts to seduce the grand problem of education, as posed by Hannah Arendt: "[F]or the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must … preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world" (1968, p. 193). In this essay the authors, characters themselves and co-instructors, tell the story of this seminar and its pedagogy. In the telling, each plays a different role--Meyer recounts the narrative in seven scenes, Vellani weaves in five "Counterpoint Moments" of its hermeneutics, set up as notes between the scenes. The narrative feature, "Matinee Dreams," unfolds an argument in prose, of lived curricular and cinematic moments with teachers from urban contexts--graduate students, at times a weeping audience, and co-authors in children's lives. In front of the screen in a makeshift cinema, all are beholden to the Arendtian question of pedagogy: What does it mean to be a teacher amid the onslaught of newcomers and the unpredictable plurality, in a world, old and weary?
Descriptors: Films, Film Study, Urban Education, Seminars, Role of Education, Graduate Study, Teaching Methods, Story Telling, Audience Awareness, Hermeneutics, Personal Narratives, Persuasive Discourse, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Creative Works; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A