1. Sylvia M. Spruill, Ed.D English Teacher, Hillgrove High School
Film in the Classroom: Using Visual Texts to Develop Critical Literacy Skills
Sylvia M. Spruill, Ed.D
English Teacher, Hillgrove High School

2. My Story…

3. Focus Statement
Today the topic of discussion is film in the classroom and the goal is to learn how to engage students in critical analysis.

4. Rationale for Using Film and Visual Texts
Serves as a useful lead-in to teaching analysis of written text (literature and informational)
Provides a more accessible medium for students to sharpen their analysis skills
Uses a common and/or shared experience as the vehicle for teaching complex analytical skills
Engages students in the task of analysis
Affects students ability to analyze and criticize literature (Golden, 2001)

5. Opening Consider the following: How have you used film in the past?
What standards have you focused on when using film in the classroom?
What films or film clips you have used in the past or are currently using?
Ink think pair share

6. Spruill’s Rules for Film
Film Clip vs. Full Film
Purposeful Use
Why are you showing this film clip?
Teaching an analysis skill or literary element
Developing a thematic connection
What standards are you working on with your students?
How will you assess what you intend students to learn?
How will it move from identification to analysis to evaluation to synthesis and creation?

7. Introducing the Language of Film Analysis
Film Terminology
Paper camera
Student application assignment (flip cameras or smart phones)

8. Approaches to Film Analysis
ELACC10RL5: Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.
Film Clip #1: Schindler’s List (1993)
Include Accountable Talk protocol
Analyzing Author’s Choices - “Reading” Purpose:
What do you notice?
Strategy: See/Hear/Feel/Believe
Why did the director use primarily a long shot?
How do the events seem to affect Schindler and Ingrid?
Describe the sounds heard in the scene. What is the effect of these sounds?
Symbolism:
The use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities by giving them symbolic meanings that are different from their literal sense.
Symbolism can take different forms. Generally, it is an object representing another to give it an entirely different meaning that is much deeper and more significant.
Symbols do shift their meanings depending on the context they are used in. “A fetter”, for example, may stand for “union” as well as “imprisonment”.
Thus, symbolic meaning of an object or an action is understood by when, where and how it is used. It also depends on who reads them. *
Juxtaposition
a literary technique in which two or more ideas, places, characters and their actions are placed side by side for the purpose of developing comparisons and contrasts.
In literature, juxtaposition is a useful device for writers to portray their characters in great detail to create suspense and achieve a rhetorical effect.
It is a human quality to comprehend one thing easily by comparing it to another. Therefore, a writer can make readers sense “goodness” in a particular character by placing him or her side by side to a character that is predominantly “evil”. Consequently, goodness in one character is highlighted by evil in the other character.
Juxtaposition in this case is useful in the development of characters.

9. Literary Elements Approach (symbolism and juxtaposition):
the girl in the red coat – Why do you think her coat is red and everything else black and white?
The sounds you hear – both diegetic and non-diegetic – Describe them. Why are these the sounds you hear?
symbolism and juxtaposition.

10. Analyzing Author’s Choices: character
ELACC10RL5: Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text…create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.
ELACC10RL3: Analyze how complex characters…advance the plot or develop the theme.
Film Clip #2: He Got Game (1998)
Reading Strategy: One Question, One Comment
How does the director establish the relationship between the two main characters shown, Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington) and Jesus Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen)?

11. Analyzing Author’s Choices
ELACC10RL5: Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text…create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.
Film Clip #3: Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
*activity from John Golden’s Reading in the Dark: Using Film As a Tool in the English Classroom (2001)
Reading Strategy: What does it say? What does it mean? What does it matter?

12. Literary Elements Approach (irony):
Describe the visual pictures that might correspond to the song.
Describe the emotions evoked while watching this scene.
Define irony and its effect while watching the clip with sound.

13. Analyzing Author’s Choices
ELACC10RL5: Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.
Film Clip #4: Fast and the Furious (2001)
“Reading” Purpose:
What do you notice?
Strategy: See/hear/feel/believe
How does the director manipulate time and why?
See, hear, feel, believe

14. Assessment
Analysis mini-paragraphs (using C-E-I – claim, evidence, interpretation format)
Sample: The Fast and the Furious scene
How does the director manipulate time?
The director uses editing techniques to manipulate time. As the two cars race toward the train tracks, the director uses cross cutting between the cars and the oncoming train which prolongs the time that it takes for them to reach the tracks and also builds suspense.
Framed Paragraphs (differentiated/scaffolds)
The director uses_______________ to ________. - claim
[Describe the moment in the film clip in which the technique is being utilized] - evidence
[Explain the effect of the technique] - interpretation

15. Other Ways to use Film Anatomy of a Scene (NY Times Learning Network)
Analyze opening credits or scenes
He Got Game (Spike Lee)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
Analyze film trailers (as rhetoric – RI5 and RI6)
Action
Comedy
Drama
Analyze documentaries and/or clips (as rhetoric – RI5 and RI6)
Waiting for Superman (Davis Guggenheim)
Analyze a concept in different contexts (RI7)
Heroism in The Dark Knight
Heroism in the Real World
Heroism in the Greek World (Troy and written classical texts)

16. Student Voices
“Using film has helped me think harder and analyze better as a student”
“Because we studied film…I started analyzing all visuals…”
“The one thing I will always remember about this class is how we used film to help us learn better.”
Advice to future students who take this class: “That you will probably die in this class, but at the same time, find yourself more alive.”

17. Your Turn!
Consider what you currently use in your classroom. How could you incorporate film in your current units of study? What films?

18. drsylviaspruill@gmail. com www. drspruillpl. weebly
@elizabethcobia