Reading and rereading ‘Shrek’

Abstract

This article presents the findings of a small-scale research project which aimed to enable young people to reflect on their childhood responses to the popular films, ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shrek 2’. During the project the participants develop new readings of the films in the light of their own recent experiences both of life and of other texts. The research draws on reader response theories to describe the complex readings of the films made by two young women from Rotherham. These readings include an engagement with an element of the films’ narrative structure, the relationship dilemma between the main characters. There was also clearly recollection of enjoyment of the animation style, the humour and the fairytale intertextuality of the film. However, the strongest response was based on more recent experiences and involved considerable empathy with the characters. This has important implications for both educational research and classroom practice. This paper argues for an increased recognition of the significance of children and young people’s engagements with popular children’s films as integral to their development as readers and creators of narrative texts.

Full text

Reading and rereading
‘Shrek’
Becky Parry
Department of Education, University of Sheffield
Abstract
This article presents the findings of a small-scale research project which
aimed to enable young people to reflect on their childhood responses to
the popular films, ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shrek 2’. During the project the participants
develop new readings of the films in the light of their own recent
experiences both of life and of other texts. The research draws on reader
response theories to describe the complex readings of the films made by
two young women from Rotherham. These readings include an
engagement with an element of the films’ narrative structure, the
relationship dilemma between the main characters. There was also clearly
recollection of enjoyment of the animation style, the humour and the
fairytale intertextuality of the film. However, the strongest response was
based on more recent experiences and involved considerable empathy
with the characters. This has important implications for both educational
research and classroom practice. This paper argues for an increased
recognition of the significance of children and young people’s
engagements with popular children’s films as integral to their
development as readers and creators of narrative texts.
Keywords
Film education, film and literacy, film and reader response theory,
children, young people and film, popular children’s films, reading and
rereading Shrek
148 ª2009 The Author.
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Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-8845.2009.01037.x English in Education Vol.43 No.2 2009

Introduction
Children and young people regularly watch, enjoy and make meaning from
moving image texts and their participation in these texts is an asset to their
developing literate lives (Robinson and Mackey, 2003). Moving image texts
influence children’s developing pleasure, understanding and engagement
with the narrative form (Robinson 1997) and contribute to their ‘funds of
knowledge’ (Moll et al., 1992) about stories and the way they are told and
retold. An increase in television channels for children, DVD distribution and
downloading mean that children can and do access a wide range of films,
both contemporary and from other eras and cultures. Furthermore, with the
growth of production companies such as Pixar, Dream Works, Walden and
Aardman, and the continued success of Disney, there is considerable
confidence within the film industry that films for children are economically
viable. As a result there are many new films made for children and family
audiences. In my professional practice in the field of film education, I have
encountered many children who displayed sophisticated knowledge of
popular texts and reported extensive emotional engagements with them
that were clearly influencing their responses to other texts; and it was this
relationship that became the focus of further study.
My interest in the role of children’s films also emerges from a concern
that the films we draw on in education are not necessarily the ones which
form part of children’s popular culture. In the context of this paper, I
broadly define children’s films as those produced and marketed
specifically for young audiences with a U, PG and occasionally a 12
certificate, and particularly focus here on those made for families. A
distinction can be made between children’s films which are made from
the child’s point of view and have the child audience firmly in mind and
those that are made for wider family audiences with content that is for
children but also content that addresses adults. Within UK education these
films such as ‘Toy Story’ (Lasseter, 1995), ‘Lion King’ (Allers, 1994), ‘E.T’
(Spielberg, 1982) or ‘Star Wars’ (Lucas, 1977) are often shown as an end-
of-term treat but are still rarely linked to children’s developing capacities
to comprehend story. Films of literary classics are also shown as
adaptations of texts studied in English (Goodwyn, 2004). Only rarely are
either adaptations or popular films shown as an aesthetic experience in
their own right. Film Education and the British Film Institute provide
materials about the film, which aim to enable educators to use a wide
range of film to teach aspects of the curriculum or film form. Film is also
recognised in the literacy curriculum in the UK, under reading, but the
emphasis is on teaching about film form rather than on engagement or
personal response. In his studies of young people reading print fiction
Warlow (1977) suggests that involved or engaged reading, an immersion
in the text rather than critical appraisal of the text, is key to developing as
a reader. The relationship between personal engagement and critical
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response is equally important to developing an understanding of children
and young people’s reading of film.
During my experience as a teacher of English and Media Studies, I
observed that children’s emotional responses to texts, valued within the
personal growth model of English teaching, were less valued than their
ability to reproduce more teacherly responses accurately. By this I mean
that, rather than inferring meaning in texts by drawing on previous
experiences, students were assessed by their ability to reproduce the
inferences pointed out to them by their teachers or text books. Martin
Barker (2000) identifies a similar issue in relation to film analysis. Barker
is concerned by the way traditional approaches to the study of film have
‘interpellated’ the audience (Althusser, 1984), creating readings that affirm
favoured theories and rely on a conception of the audience as
fundamentally passive recipients. Barker further critiques psychoanalytical
study of film for its close proximity to the effects paradigm, which
assumes that the audience is subject to oppressive meanings, hidden in
the text and only revealed through a psychoanalytical approach. This
leads Barker to his particular interest in the role of the audience or the
‘involved, motivated spectator’. In her work on children’s reading of print
and television, Muriel Robinson (1997) identifies a need to devise a
‘theory of narrative as a social act’ drawing on a range of diverse
disciplines to explore the strategies children adopt in their encounters
with narrative texts (Robinson, 1997: 51).
The work of Barker and Robinson demonstrates the continued relevance of
reader response theory which looks back to the work of Louise Rosenblatt
(1970 – first published in 1938), who scrutinises the way in which a reader
emotionally engages with a literary text. She attempts to establish how best
to teach literature to ensure that individuals are not simply expected to offer
reactions that imitate ‘given’ critical or teacherly opinion about a piece of art
but whose reactions are expressions of a personal response:
Yet ultimately, any literary work gains its significance from
the way in which the minds and emotions of particular
readers respond to the verbal stimuli offered by the text.
(Rosenblatt, 1970: 28)
Rosenblatt argued that readers bring ‘common’ experiences to a text
based on their social and cultural lives but that the nature of these
‘experiences’, ‘images’, ‘memories’ and ‘associations’ will be particular to
each individual and will influence their response to a text. She divides the
reading process into two distinct experiences shaped by the planned
outcome for the reading. Rosenblatt distinguishes between ‘efferent’
reading, to ‘take away’ meaning from reports or instructions, and
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‘aesthetic’ reading, to ‘sense, perceive’ or to ‘experience’ a text. Rosenblatt
criticises efferent teaching of literature, that is to say, teaching a poem
because it illustrates a particular feature of language use or a poetic
device. She argues for an environment where aesthetic reading can be
nurtured. In doing so she makes important claims for literature as having
a central role in the emotional development of young people:
We participate in imaginary situations, we look on
characters living through crises, we explore ourselves and
the world about us, through the medium of literature.
(Rosenblatt, 1970: 37)
This claim has particular pertinence in today’s educational context
because the medium of film and other cultural forms also offer
opportunities for participation and exploration. Experiencing film enables
us to enter the lives of others, identify with their situation and follow their
story with interest and anticipation. How we teach film is an important
question which requires further reflection. Films, like other narrative
forms, might be studied in a way that recognises and values the process
of experiencing the text as well as focusing on analysis or an ‘efferent’
reading. Rosenblatt suggests that readers develop a repertoire of
experiences which enrich their future engagements with texts. Hodge and
Tripp (1986), in their work on children and television, argue that moving
image texts for children are complex and polysemic and that this is in
response to children’s need to be active meaning makers. It is important,
then, to question children’s responses to texts that, created for them by
Hollywood producers, are made to address universal themes or global
audiences. The ‘Shrek’ films offer an interesting example of a highly
popular family film with complexity and many possible readings.
In the case of the ‘Shrek’ films, the process of bringing to the text our own
cultural and textual experiences is not just essential to the process of ‘getting
it’ but is also made explicit and is clearly intended to be part of a conscious
process of enjoyment. This is also true of popular television series such as
‘The Simpsons’ (Groening, 1989) and of earlier children’s films such ‘Toy
Story 2’ (Lasseter, 1999). The Shrek films, however, are of particular interest
because they draw on many common ideas, memories and associations
from children’s popular culture. Drawing from fairy stories, advertisements
and popular music, the Shrek films reference verbal, visual and audio
material and, through narrative and editing conventions, many other texts
that children and young people recognise. Hugely popular, they can be
seen as having become part of children’s ‘collective memory’ of films,
(Bromley, 1996). Their inventive and complex uses of irony, ambiguity and
intertextuality explicitly invite children to draw on their repertoires of other
texts in order to participate in the subversion of convention and
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expectation. Given their overwhelming popularity it is important to
consider how children responded to them and whether their responses
have implications for educators.
The Shrek films are based on a William Steig picture book (Steig, 1993)
depicting an ugly, green ogre who eventually marries an equally ugly,
green ogress. The creators of ‘Shrek’ added to the original idea, drawing
on fairy tales and popular culture to create a contemporary fairy tale
kingdom that resembles the sort of gathering together of characters and
scenes you might find in a contemporary theme park. Both ‘Shrek’
(Adamson and Jenson, 2001) and ‘Shrek 2’ (Adamson and Asbury, 2004)
irreverently reference scenes from Disney films; for example, Shrek and
Fiona blow up the bluebirds from the 1937 ‘Snow White’ Disney film.
However, the film also draws on the conventional Disney structure
(Zipes, 1997). So, alongside the traditional fairy tale love story, in which a
Princess (Fiona) needs rescuing (by Shrek, the protagonist) from both a
dragon and an ambitious rival suitor, the film contains features such as
the comedy side-kick (Donkey). As well as using a contemporary sound
track, where the chosen songs reflect the internal dialogue of the main
characters, the film also demonstrates technological innovation in the
form of ever more effectively produced CGI animation. However, ‘Shrek’
is distinctively modern, with a belching Fiona who uses martial arts to
defeat Robin Hood and is, we later find, also secretly a green and ugly
ogre. The narrative is resolved when Shrek and Fiona take the decision to
unite not as transformed and attractive Prince and Princess but as ugly
ogres. The narrative arc is similar in ‘Shrek 2’ where Shrek and Fiona are
nearly separated by the self-obsessed Prince Charming and his conniving
mother, the fairy godmother. They are united with the help of their
friends and by reconciling Fiona’s parents to their relationship. Taking as
my starting point ‘Shrek’ as a cultural phenomenon, a highly popular
series of films produced alongside many and varied artefacts such as
games, books, toys and costumes, I invited young people who were
interested in the films to take part in a small scale research project.
The research project
This research was part of a pilot study I made in preparation for
fieldwork. I anticipated that young people aged 14–16 would have
important recollections of films that had previously been significant to
them. The pilot study aimed to explore both whether young people
would have distinct memories of films from childhood and which
research methods would be most appropriate for enquiring into their past
engagements with children’s films. However, the data which resulted from
interactions between two young women and myself raised some issues,
specifically in relation to young people’s accounts of their childhood
experiences of film, which are pertinent to recent debate about the
relationship between film and literacy (Marsh and Millard, 2000). The
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activity took place in holiday time and the young women, Helena and
Faizah, aged 15, were participants in another media project I had been
involved in, at a City Learning Centre. Before the project, both Helena
and Faizah had expressed their love of the ‘Shrek’ films; and this love
appeared to combine both a nostalgia for the pleasure of their own
childhood encounters with the films and pleasure in re-watching and to
some extent rereading the films in the light of their own more recent
experiences. Both girls are able and articulate and have a particular
enthusiasm for English. It is important to note that, although working with
young women aged 15 I was asking them to reflect on their early
childhood experiences up to the age of 11. Research activities included a
written questionnaire about their memories of children’s films, a
discussion of children’s film as a genre, screenings of Shrek clips followed
by audio-recorded group discussion and then finally filmed interviews. I
also briefly filmed them enjoying the films after they had begged me to
let them carry on watching one particular scene. In analysing my research
data, I attempted further to understand their responses to the films and to
scrutinise what experiences they were bringing to them.
Screening Shrek
B: Shall we start with the references then?
H: I’ve got loads.
B: What did you get? Go on you’ve got loads more than me.
H: Erm. I’ve got the whole Disney film read from a book
thing like in Sleeping Beauty.
B: Yep.
H: And when he sees the wolf, he’s reading erm he’s reading
Pork Illustrated – it’s kind of like a whole kind of porno
thing [laughter from all three] I’m not sure anyone else
noticed that!
B: I didn’t twig that one [laughter] but yeah.
H: And it had the memory style film reel, and it had the
doves, and kind of Lord of the Rings where they forged a
ring in Lord of Rings and the mermaids you know where in
those sort of tales where the mermaids seduce men and the
romance genre you know with the big moon in the back
and also Prince Charming is like one of those showy actors
with the hair net and things [does movement – laughter.]
This is the first exchange between Faizah and Helena, and myself as we
begin to watch and respond to scenes from ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shrek 2’. I had
asked them to look out for and make notes about any references to other
stories, films, adverts or music they spotted in the opening sequence of
the films. What is missing in the transcription of this discussion are the
giggles that accompany spotting the references and the rapid pace at
which they rattled out the things they had recognised. Their responses
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incorporated both recollections of things they had found funny at the
time and references they now saw as funny in the light of more recent
experiences. This was an engaging process and what emerged was
evidence of deep immersion in the process of seeking out references to
other texts to make sense of the film - to ‘get it.’ I compare this to the
sometimes laborious task I undertook as an English teacher, of explaining
references within poetry and I am reminded why I have become so
convinced that children’s films and children’s culture should be the object
of study. It is also possible to imagine demonstrating to young people
how references in films and television programmes work in a similar way
to those in poetry so that they are able to engage with the pleasures of
these references and the relationship between texts and social contexts.
Observations about references led us to explore the way in which some
identifiable characters are subjected to satire for comic effect:
H: Oh and Robin Hood is a complete jerk [laughter].
B: Are all the like traditional, romantic male characters
complete jerks? Can you think of any exceptions?
H: Prince Charming is a complete moron.
F: Lord Farquard. The King, Fiona’s Dad, is kind of weak
although he does make up for it in the end.
Both girls quickly latched on to this discussion thread about the male
characters. They recognised the humour in the way in which traditional
male story-book characters, who should display bravery and heroism,
were here presented as too concerned about their appearance to be
effective. The Shrek films regularly offer female audiences opportunities
to question gender stereotyping to comic effect. During this discussion of
the film references. Helena and Faizah decided they had other stronger
experiences they wanted to talk about.
Shrek and realism
When Faizah began to use the word realistic in relation to ‘Shrek’ I was
surprised. However, in discussion, both girls began to formulate their
ideas further:
F. The fact that it’s about love is realism. And it’s about
choosing someone not because of what they look like but
because of their personality – which is real.
H. They don’t just fall in love and then that’s the end – they
have an argument and they have problems – relationship
stuff which is quite real.
F. It’s not the living happily ever after.
Here I think Faizah is identifying an important response to the ‘Shrek’
characters by homing in on the difficulties of their relationship. This was
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something Faizah in particular could clearly compare to her own life and
text experiences and, despite the animated style, took very seriously.
F: Shrek 2 sort of links into real life, because like Fiona she’s
trying to get her parents to agree with her marrying the ogre
and that’s sort of realistic because that doesn’t usually
happen in fairy tales. She’s trying to get her parents to agree
with her marriage.
Faizah recognises here that the Shrek films are contemporary not just
because of the use of language and style but also because they move
beyond the accepted narrative dilemmas presented in fairy story films,
that is to say after marriage. Her discussions led her on to talk about other
films, she has seen more recently, with a similar theme of forbidden love
like ‘Titanic’ (Cameron, 1997) and ‘Moulin Rouge’ (Luhrmann, 2001).
Faizah emphasised that it is not just the humorous things the fairy story
characters do which defy our expectations – it is also the more ‘real’
things they do like opting to be ogres rather than royalty. For Faizah this
was an important aspect and indeed the scene in ‘Shrek 2’ where Shrek
and Fiona first argue because of Fiona’s parents’ reactions to their
marriage was the one both girls begged me to let them watch fully. They
watched it animatedly looking really upset at the facial expressions as the
argument progressed. Their empathy was for both Shrek and Fiona and
this strong emotional reaction is one, which might be forgotten in the
furore about the cleverness of the animation or the intertextuality.
Faizah and Helena talked animatedly about the way in which the humour
in the films worked, because of the elements of fairytale being uprooted
from traditional storybooks and placed in a ‘real’ world full of coffee
shops and theme parks, answer machines and limousines. But real for
them was the way the film explored a relationship in difficulty. That
readers can be differently affected by the perceived reality of a particular
text, ‘is ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform
reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what
is written’ (Iser, 1980: 54). I would argue that these responses
demonstrate that popular children’s films have the potential to affect
audiences far beyond a simple comprehension of the sequence of events
or indeed spotting the references. These responses, elicited from
pleasurable regression to an earlier experience and then built on from a
new perspective, might not be appropriately addressed by the teaching of
film form in a written critical response.
Reading Fiona
During the research process, I admitted that when I had watched ‘Shrek’ I
had a deep down niggling, guilty feeling that really – wouldn’t it be great
if Shrek and Fiona did opt for beautiful. I explained that for me a
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satisfying story, one that I was more used to, might have included this as
the ‘happy ending’ but that I was also glad when it did not take this turn.
They were both definite about their childhood reactions that they were
delighted when Fiona decided to stay an ogre and thought it was funny.
However, this led on to a discussion about Fiona, of wanting to be like
her, her role as Princess and both girls declared they would not have
wanted to be Fiona in a game or when dressing up when they were
younger. Clearly, they could sympathise with Fiona about her relationship
difficulties now but, when younger, were less enthusiastic about her
unconventional Princess character – as well as all the more heroic things
she does such as rescuing Shrek from Robin Hood. This version of
femininity, therefore, is not one they responded to straightforwardly.
Helena mentioned hating Fiona at first because she seemed like a ‘snob’
or a ‘diva’ and because she expected a fairy tale prince to turn up to
rescue her. On liking Fiona, she commented – ‘it took me a while.’ There
was some evidence here that both girls were viewing the development of
Fiona iteratively, gathering information and moving backwards and
forwards from one scene to another to build on their reading of her
character, clearly also contrasting her with other versions of princesses
they had encountered This negotiation of identities in fictional characters
is discussed in greater detail by Bronwyn Davies who describes young
women engaging with ideas which attempt to ‘disrupt old cultural
patterns’ (Davies, 1993: 198). The process of anticipation and
retrospection, which Iser (1980) claims comprises an important aspect of
reading pleasure, is clearly available in film as well as literature. Both girls
appeared to map their reading of Fiona against previous fictional heroines
and life and did so throughout the film and after watching, not just on the
first introduction.
Suspending disbelief
The discussion of realism led Helena and Faizah to share their thoughts
about suspending disbelief in relation to children’s texts. They describe
a time when you are younger when you might really believe in such
things as fairies. However, they also described a more conscious process
of entering that third space and taking a leap into the imaginative and
emotional world of the film. Robinson (1997) refers to the act of
‘suspending disbelief’ as a crucial aspect of a reader’s engagement with
a text. She argues that we learn to immerse ourselves in text or
surrender to a third space (Winncott, 1971: Meek, 1977) in a similar way
to the way we might also play, knowing at once that something is
‘make believe’ but maintaining our involvement all the same. This is
especially important for children’s texts, which often expect large
imaginative leaps away from the real life of the reader into magical
kingdoms or encounters with toys which come to life. This notion of
space is an idea echoed by Barker:
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Films are imaginative universes with organising rules and
principles; they generate a role into which the audience (may
or may not) enter, which I call the implied audience; and
through the intersection of these, they generate proposals for
how films might intersect with the rest of their audiences’ lives,
which I call modalities of their use. And in exploring these, I
aim to show that motives and emotions are natural and
inevitable parts of the invited processes of engagement.
(Barker, 2000: 37)
F. You usually think there’s a world, somewhere else – that
there could be a world a magical world. When you’re
younger you think ...
H. You think that it might be real. When you’re an adult
you’re more like scathing and you don’t believe that it
could possibly happen – when you are younger you think
it might do. That some of the stuff is real. Like I used to
think fairies are real.
F. At the time when you are watching the film you don’t
think oh that can’t be true – it’s just made up. You
always have a thought ‘oh it could be true – it’s
happening – it might be like a magical world’ so that’s
why you enjoy the film. If you think ‘it’s not real it’s all
made up’ then you wouldn’t actually enjoy the film.
You’d just think ‘it’s not real’ so what’s the point of even
watching the film.
Discussion of earlier enjoyments of the Shrek films led spontaneously
to this theme. The films juxtapose a distinct visually imaginative style
of the fairy tale world with a critical representation of a brash and
commercial modern world. The films also bring into contrast what
happens in traditional fairy story film texts, that is to say marriage with
a more contemporary ending which, as Faizah said, ‘isn’t the happily
ever after ending’. Both girls were able to engage with these
contrasting elements in the text. Both also recognised a particular need
to suspend disbelief in order to become involved in the fairytale world
and care about the characters. Although they enjoyed the irreverent
humour, intertextuality and parody, the Shrek films had also offered
them alternative meanings connected to the main narrative lived by the
characters. These readings had not been arrived at immediately but
involved a process of reflection on previous viewings – their previous
younger responses, which had been followed by discussion in relation
to other experiences of fairy story texts and popular culture. This has
implications for teachers and researchers.
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Conclusions
The idea that texts teach readers about other texts and develop them as
readers permeates much of the literature on children’s reading and in
particular can be found in the work of Margaret Meek (1974, 1988). I would
argue similarly that children’s experiences of films influence their future
engagements with films and that experiences of story in all forms contribute
to children’s overall repertoire of experiences of narrative texts. Meek draws
on examples of children’s picture books and descriptions of children’s
encounters with these books to demonstrate the need for imaginative texts
which are created specifically for children. Meek acknowledges children’s
need for texts which draw on their emerging repertoires of experience but
that are also innovative and playful. She also identifies a reading milestone
which takes the reader into risk-taking, unknown territory.
For me, the move from ‘more of the same’ to ‘I might try
something different’ is a clear step. So is the growing
tolerance of ambiguity. The notion that things are not quite
what they seem …
(Meek, 1988: 30)
Arguably, the Hollywood film industry has begun increasingly to re-examine
what constitutes an imaginative, playful and innovative film for children,
breaking the Disney mould. It is therefore timely to attempt to understand
how children participate in these playful films. In my research, I was
attempting to create opportunities to observe Helena and Faizah being active
and creative readers of the films drawing upon their own repertoires and
experiences to infer meaning. It was clear that they were also involved and
engaged readers of the text and as Warlow (1977) describes in relation to
print fiction, this increases their ability to infer meaning. What emerged was
that the most dominant response to the films was an empathy with the
difficulty of gaining parental approval to relationships. This might well be as
a result of the age of both young women and their current interests and life
experiences. Clearly, here is a suggestion that we bring to film our
experiences, associations and memories just as we do to literature. However,
both young women also drew extensively on their knowledge of
conventional fairy stories, in film and book form, to help them develop their
understanding.. They entered into the imaginative world the filmmakers had
created by contrasting Cinderella and Prince Charming with Fiona and Shrek
and they enjoyed the ‘more real’ extended narratives. They also enjoyed the
subversive humour of the irreverence to other traditional texts, which is a
feature of a number of other important texts for children and young people.
The Shrek films clearly prompt audiences to analyse the fairy tale form
critically, through parody. Indeed, the films are one of many contemporary
texts which encourage the retelling of fairy tales and which function as a
stimulus to invite young people to re-read and re-tell other traditional stories.
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They are complex texts, which offer opportunities for engagement, creativity
and emotional response, and as such they might usefully be afforded
pedagogical space alongside more traditionally valued books and films.
Within Media Studies there are useful models available for the further
study of film (Burn and Durren, 2007). Film, however, is clearly an aspect
of literacy that should be integral to the English curriculum. Enabling
children and young people to draw on their ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll
et al., 1992) about story from films and other popular culture texts, in
English and Literacy classrooms, enhances motivation and engagement
(Haas Dyson, 1997; Marsh, 2000) and enables them to develop as readers
of all manner of texts. As teachers and researchers, it is critical that we
offer opportunities for children and young people to share their repertoire
of experiences of narrative text, including film, and it is worthwhile
considering some of the ways we might do this.
lWhen selecting films for a classroom focus, the same attention should
be given to what is appropriate to a particular group of students as
would be asked of a print text. This may have implications for
building teacher knowledge and experience of children’s film culture.
lSelections should include popular culture texts that can provide shared
cultural experiences; but classroom activity should also acknowledge
that children and young people have different readings, memories and
associations connected with such films.
lIt is important to enable learners to draw on personal experience of
film and moving image texts in classroom discussions of other
narrative texts by explicitly inviting them to do so and valuing the
comparisons they might be able to draw.
lTeachers might offer opportunities for ‘experiencing’ texts,
acknowledging the wide range of emotional responses that result, as
opposed to teaching compartmentalised aspects of film form, which
potentially subjugate the learner’s particular reading of the text.
lTeaching film form through creative production, to enhance emotional
responses or individual readings, will allow learners to be able to
engage further with a particular text.
lIntroducing new texts which enable learners to make comparisons
based on their own knowledge, whilst encountering new ideas in
terms of form, style or content, will allow learners to continue to build
a personal repertoire of texts.
Whilst these ideas are not new in relation to teaching literature they are
worth consideration in relation to teaching about film. At the time of
writing, a new strategy for film education in the UK has been launched
entitled ‘Film: 21
st
Century Literacy’ (UKFC, 2009). It is timely then to
scrutinise existing pedagogy in relation to film and to contribute to debate
about how to approach film education, described in this strategy as,
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‘a systematic process in which confidence and articulacy
grow by having opportunity to see a wide range of films, to
gain a critical understanding of film and to enjoy the
creative activity of filmmaking’.
(UKFC, 2009)
Writing in 1946 and debating the use of audio-visual material in the
classroom, Edgar Dale (1946) describes the need to enable students to
read literal meaning, read between the lines and ‘read beyond the
lines’. In responding to this aspiration in existing frameworks for
literacy teaching, there remain some challenging questions and issues
for teachers and researchers about how this can be achieved. Children
and young people can usefully be encouraged to reflect on their own
encounters with films that become significant to them and their
participation in children’s film culture. These reflections clearly enable
them to explore their literate identities in relation to ideas such as
suspending disbelief, or the perceived reality of a text or the meanings
intended by uses of intertextuality. Offering opportunities to reflect on
previously enjoyed films in the Literacy or English classroom potentially
provides a bridge between experiences of popular culture texts and
school-based texts (Millard, 2005) enabling children and young people
to draw on their own knowledge to access the curriculum. Research
into reading of print based texts also offers useful pathways to a
further understanding of how children and young people read and
respond to film, an important consideration at a time of development
for film education.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Faizah and Helena and to Rawmarsh City Learning Centre in
Rotherham. City Learning Centres are nationally funded initiatives which
aim to support schools in the use of new technologies to enhance
teaching and learning.
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