Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
Against the Global Right Vol 5 (1)
Nisha Thapliyal, University of Newcastle, Australia
I teach at a four-year undergraduate teacher education program in a regional Australian university, close to Sydney. The mission of our teacher education program is to prepare university-based teachers with the skills to provide full educational access and opportunities to all learners. The themes of educational equity and excellence are embedded across the program. Our student teachers also reflect the socioeconomic diversity of our geographic region. These students are part of demographic groups rarely represented with any complexity on the media including youth, indigenous, and regional and rural Australia.
Public education remains a key battleground in the fight against the combined right-wing forces of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Processes of neoliberalisation are not just economic but also cultural and political (Apple, 2009) as demonstrated by the rapidly growing corpus of films (big screen and television) funded by a transnational network of market reformers.
Documentary films critical of public education, such as Waiting for Superman (2010) directed by Davis Guggenheim (of An Inconvenient Truth fame) and Hollywood films like Won’t Back Down (2012) directed by Daniel Barnz have been hits at the box office. They represent the potency of what Henry Giroux (2011) calls corporate public pedagogy culture for producing market identities and imaginations that negate structural gender, racial and class-based injustices in education and society.
Defining characteristics of this film corpus include portrayals of public schools in chronic crisis, and schools that fail to meet the needs of historically underserved groups. In particular, the documentary genre privileges pro-market ‘expert’ voices in presenting public education debates while silencing or distorting the voices of teachers and their unions. Success and failure are measured exclusively in quantitative terms, based on performance on standardized national (NAPLAN in Australia) and international (PISA) literacy and numeracy tests. These test results have become central to the annual flagellation of public schools and their teachers. This ‘blame and shame’ discourse has not closed the achievement gap but instead facilitated the casualisation and contractualisation of teaching.
Similar to much of the Western world, the quality of teachers and University-Based Teacher Education (UBTE) in Australia has been identified as a key policy ‘problem’ by politicians and corporate media. UBTE takes the form of four-year undergraduate (single or double/concurrent degree) and 1.5 to 2 years postgraduate degrees in teaching. The programs are usually comprised of professional studies, curriculum studies and professional experience or practicum. While UBTE remains the largest source of new teachers, other recent initiatives demonstrate a clear intent to dismantle public teacher education (Fitzgerald & Knipe, 2016). One example is the quasi-private Teach for Australia initiative, introduced in 2014 as a federally funded initiative to provide an accredited, clinical, employment-based pathway into teaching. It is this context that shapes the pedagogical strategies I use to encourage aspiring student teachers to dismantle the language and assumptions that pervade neoliberal reform on and off screen.
Teaching resistance
Given the unrelenting attack on public schools and teachers, I now incorporate modules on media literacy into all my teacher education classrooms. Through these modules, student teachers are supported in reimagining themselves as critical media educators and consumers (Kellner & Share, 2005). We also talk about the impact of the consolidation of ownership of the mass media on democratic discourse and participation and how teachers can use media to resist and interrupt hegemonic discourse. In this paper, I discuss two education documentary films that I use toward creating this resistance pedagogy via ideas of “power structure literacy” and “teaching hope.”
Power structure literacy and teaching hope
Inspired by critical, feminist and postcolonial scholarship on mediatization and media literacies (see e.g. the journals Feminist Media Studies, Signs, Discourse), a foundational component of my resistance pedagogies is power structure literacy. This begins with questions about how films create messages about social groups historically disadvantaged by the apparent failures of public education systems. I ask students to reflect on the implications of the meanings in these messages – not only for themselves as media consumers but also for the groups represented in the films. How is the education problem framed? By whom? How are solutions framed? By whom? And who benefits?
These questions legitimize multiple ways of knowing our world and the social problems within it. Hierarchies of knowledge and power that sustain social inequality and oppressive social relationships quickly become visible, beginning with assumptions about the objectivity and neutrality of documentary films. As we investigate the ways in which messages and meanings about public education are produced in film, we unearth underlying cultural logics or assumptions about what contributes to educational failure or success. I refer here to capitalist discourses where success or failure in education and life are explained entirely in terms of individual merit (e.g. talent/ability, hard work) or deficit (e.g. no talent/motivation, poor work ethic) obviating the need to address structural inequality and exclusion.
Testing Teachers (SBS, 2016)
Testing Teachers (2016, 150 minutes) highlights the first year of teaching for Teach for Australia recruits. Teach for Australia is part of a global, corporate-funded organization (Teach for All) that works to deprofessionalize teachers and undermine university-based teacher education. Although very new in Australia, the model was introduced three decades ago in the United States (as Teach for America) and the U.K. (as TeachFirst). In this approach to teacher education, high performing university graduates receive six weeks of preparation and then teach fulltime in so-called disadvantaged schools for two years.
The film was produced by commercial television production company Screentime Australia (known for reality dramas such as Outback Truckers) in close consultation with TFA. It presents an ahistorical framing of the problem of chronic teacher shortage in schools that serve disadvantaged students in urban and rural Australia including those from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, working-class, migrant and poor communities. The plot of the film consists of ‘problem students’ from socially disadvantaged backgrounds who are eventually saved by the passion and determination of TFA recruits. Using this narrative device and selective uncited statistics, the film positions TFA recruits as ‘superheroes’ and the only viable solution to the challenges of teacher shortage and quality (Thapliyal & Fischetti, 2017).
To deconstruct dominant framings of problems and solutions in the film, we situate the Australian teacher shortage problem in the historical context of an education system characterized by institutionalized funding inequality. We also look at the working conditions of teachers and the status of the teaching profession around the world through websites such as Teacher Solidarity. We examine other TFA-promoted documentaries from the UK and USA and read emerging scholarship on the role of corporate news media in promoting the TFA brand of the ‘best and brightest’ teachers around the world. These resources lead students to identify silences and erasures such as the omission of voices of experienced public school teachers.
After we have deconstructed dominant framings of ‘the teacher problem’, students are more likely to construct complex answers to overarching questions about the benefits and disadvantages of a given education reform. They are able to engage critically with research that supports and contradicts TFA claims about improvements in student learning achievement in underserved communities (see e.g. recent Special Issues of Education Policy Analysis Archives and Critical Education). While these results are mixed at best, TFA indisputably enhances the resumés and future educational and career opportunities for their recruits. The fact that a minority of recruits stay on beyond their contractual period only perpetuates the revolving door problem in these same communities which further undermines teaching as relational and highly skilled work. In brief, power structure literacy enables students to read Testing Teachers as a film that promotes market-based silver bullet and one-size-fits-all solutions.
We Shall Fight, We Shall Win (AIFRTE, 2016)
Social justice teacher educator William Ayers writes about teachers as “midwives of hope” who make quotidian choices about “how to see the world” (Ayers, 2004, p.4). A documentary that helps in opening up this possibility is We Shall Fight, We Shall Win. This is a 56-minute documentary produced by a coalition of grassroots education activists known as the All India Forum for the Right to Education (AIFRTE). The coalition was formed to resist the commercialization and commodification of public education. The goals of this coalition are captured in one of their favored slogans – “Education is not for sale. It is a people’s right”. The film was made on a shoestring budget by activists with no prior experience in filmmaking.
The film critiques the current trajectory of education policies that violate the right to education through neglect of public education and instead, promotion of for-profit private schools for the poor. It reclaims marginalized histories of a two-hundred-year-old popular struggle for universal education that began in colonial India and continues till today. It also links the current struggle to protect secular and democratic public education to other collective struggles against against the rising tide of Hindu nationalism.
Through the voices of diverse activists from historically excluded groups (including Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, women, peasants, and students), the film encourages viewers to see the world through the lenses of multiple historical knowledges and realities. In narrating their struggle, activists help to expand individualized conceptions of participation beyond self-interest, consumption, and charity to collective wellbeing and structural transformation. Drawing on the film, AIFRTE publications, and the vast scholarship on Indian social movements, my student teachers in Australia grapple with alternative ways of knowing and doing politics and the situated realities of mass struggle. In doing so, a space opens up for student teachers to talk about the relationship between educational, economic, cultural and political struggles for equity, social justice and democracy.
Conclusion
In my experience, teaching about progressive social movements for public education is one of the most effective components in pedagogies of hope (Giroux, 1997). Activist education media effectively communicate the message that “Another World is Possible” contrary to neoliberal claims that only the market can solve all our problems.
References
Apple, M. (2009). Can critical education interrupt the right? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30(3): 239 – 251
Ayers, W. (2004). Introduction: Teaching as an ethical exercise. In Ayers, W. (Ed.) Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice. New York: Teachers College Press.
Fitzgerald, T., Knipe, S. (2016) Policy reform: testing times for teacher education in Australia, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 48:4, 358-369, DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2016.1210588
Giroux, H. (2011). Neoliberalism as a form of public pedagogy: Making the political more pedagogical. Retrieved www.academia.edu
Kellner, D., Share, J. (2005). Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations, and policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26, 3, 369-386.
Thapliyal, N., Fischetti, J. (2017). The myth of teacher as superhero (and other bad messages) peddled by hit TV series. EduResearchMatters. Retrieved www.aare.edu.au
Nisha Thapliyal is a teacher educator at the University of Newcastle, Nisha Thapliyal has incorporated modules on media in all the undergraduate and postgraduate courses she teaches including: “Global perspectives on education – Issues for Teachers”; “Schooling and Society”; “International Education Policy”; and “Social movements for Public Education”. These modules incorporate the critical analysis of news as well popular culture media (print, audio, video, digital and so on) in relation to teachers, public education, gender and sexuality, race/ethnicity, and international development. She also incorporates into these courses alternative protest or resistance media produced in and by social movements and other sites of collective struggle.
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