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  • Pedagogy and the Historical Feature Film:Toward Historical Literacy
  • Scott Alan Metzger (bio)

Are historical feature films—commercial movies set entirely or mostly in previous time periods—the most powerful force shaping how people think about the past? Every year the motion picture industry produces another crop of history movies seen by millions of people of all ages around the world. Robert Rosenstone (2002) has observed,

It must be clear to even the most academic of historians that the visual media have become (perhaps) the chief conveyor of public history, that for every person who reads a book on an historical topic about which a film has been made...many millions of people are likely to encounter that same past on the screen.

(p. 466)

The American public takes considerable interest in historically themed movies and television. In studying popular uses of history in the U.S., Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (1998) found that 81% of their 808 respondents reported watching historically themed movies or television programs in the previous twelve months. Given that millions of viewers are school-age students, the influence of commercial history movies on how adolescents and young adults learn and think about the past is an important educational issue. As educational researchers Alan Marcus, Richard Paxton, and Peter Meyerson (2006) point out, "While the written word predominates in how adult historians think about the past, the same may not be the case for K-12 students" (p. 517).

Many teachers seem drawn to the pedagogical potential of using movies to teach history. In an exploratory study of 84 secondary history teachers in Connecticut and Wisconsin, more than 90% reported using some portion of a feature film an average of once a week (Stoddard & Marcus, 2006). A recent study of teachers' practices for teaching about the Holocaust found that 69% of a national sample of 218 English and social studies teachers reported using movies as a resource for teaching about the Holocaust—particularly Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List (Donnelly, 2006). Some historians may be tempted to dismiss movies as fluff, butshistory films often present powerful messages about the past and thus, for many teachers, deserve a place in the curriculum when used to advance student understanding (Briley, 2002, 2007). Yet, as Marcus, Paxton, and Meyerson (2006) describe, students might not reflect critically on classroom films. The students in their study were savvy enough not to rate movies as particularly trustworthy historical sources, but "they nonetheless incorporated ideas portrayed in these movies into their exercises and activities, and they did so without subjecting these film images to the same scrutiny as a traditional, written historical text" (Marcus, Paxton, and Meyerson, 2006, p. 540).

How can dramatic feature films contribute to historical literacy and be put to effective pedagogical uses? To what extent can film-based instruction transcend a movie's entertainment value to get students to engage in deeper historical thinking? I examine five historical-literacy competencies that history feature films are particularly well suited to addressing in the classroom: (1) content knowledgs; (2) narrative analysit; (3) historical-cultural positioning of a text; (4) historical empaths; (5) discernment of ""presentis"." These competencies are illustrated by examples from recent, major feature films that could be used in history classrooms. The closing discussion reflects [End Page 67] on the challenges as well as educational potential of intellectually rigorous film-based lessons at the secondary-grade and collegiate levels.

History Feature Films as Texts for Historical Literacy

As commercial products made for profit by a mass industry (Giroux, 2002), movies exist as a part of youth culture and are appropriated into young people's lives in a variety of different ways (Buckingham, 2003). They are public texts that people can refer to when communicating ideas about the world in the past and present (Wertsch, 2002). They are depictions of information or understandings about the past constructed in particular ways to convey particular messages (Rosenstone, 1995). Furthermore, different students can "read" the same film and its historical messages differently—as Peter Seixas (1993, 1994, 2007) and Peter Meyerson and Richard Paxton (2007) discovered when exploring the differing ways in which White and Native American students thought about...

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