Feature Editors’ Introduction

Schools, teachers, students, and administrators are common subjects in film and television, and viewers share many school experiences—from sitting at desks in rows, trudging through homework, squinting at multiple-choice exams, and lugging textbooks to resisting exhortations from teachers and swooning at their compliments. But the messages about the quality of schools, the challenges of teaching, and the purposes of education vary widely. For most adult viewers, in fact, school is a distant memory, easily upstaged by depictions of it on the screen—depictions that soon shape their perceptions, beliefs, biases, and values toward education in general and toward school life in particular.

The first of the five essays in this issue on film and schooling analyzes the historical significance of The Blackboard Jungle, the 1955 melodrama that established the norm for urban school films. In “They Turned a School Into a Jungle!: How The Blackboard Jungle Redefined the Education Crisis in Postwar America,” Adam Golub places the film in its social and historical context, discussing the film’s production and reception and the potential influence of the film on the public-education debate. Golub juxtaposes the belief that the film was a realistic portrayal of problems facing schools in the United States with the view that it was an “irresponsible exaggeration.” Was the film a work of fact or fiction?

Anne Helen Petersen, in “Their Words, Our Story: Freedom Writers as Scenario of Pedagogical Reform,” examines a modern-day version of the urban-school film Freedom Writers. The article focuses on the presentation and performance of race, difference, and education reform through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of the “abject” and through Dyer’s theory of whiteness. Petersen explains how the film, as part of a larger pattern of school-reform films, encourages viewers to conceptualize difference, poverty, and race as “problems solved only through strong white leadership.”

Our third piece, “Beyond Legend: Stand and Deliver as a Study in School Organizational Culture,” considers how this iconic “good teacher” film might be used as a resource for classes in educational leadership, foundations, and sociology. Roger Shouse presents the film as a “rugged, organic, and authentic model of school culture,” in contrast to what he sees as the failing model of educational leadership promoted by many schools of education: bureaucratic, formulaic, and devoid of warmth.

Heather Weaver, in “Beyond Apples and Ice Cream: The Teacher-Student Relationship as Cinematic Romance, 1909–1939,” takes us back to the early history of teacher-student relationships in film, when students and teachers were depicted as ineluctably drawn toward each other, with teachers often “saving” the students and students “wooing” the teachers, and when teacher-student relationships ranged from substitutes for family to vehicles for erotic encounters.

The final article, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Say, “I Don’t Care”?: Resistance and Reverence at Schindler’s List,” from Dennis Hanlon, explores the national controversy that erupted in response to student behavior during a viewing of Schindler’s List at an Oakland theater in 1994. The high school students, who were primarily African American and Latino, were evicted from the theater for their reactions to the film. Hanlon discusses the media’s portrayal of the Oakland students as “an example of outrageously inappropriate and insensitive behavior by possible anti-Semitic black youth,” while also exploring the culture of black youth in movie theaters and the ethics and educational purposes of showing the film to these students.

Alan Marcus and Ron Briley