His sixth graders at Taipei Municipal Zhongxiao Elementary School shoot their hands in the air for a chance to voice their opinions. Their answers broach the importance Rastogi places on family to his superstitious nature. They also paste all sorts of colored Post-it notes with their responses on the blackboard.
Before reaching a first-grade classroom, visitors may hear “My eyes will sparkle with tears when I think of the dull-ice flower,” as the sounds of young voices singing the theme song from “The Dull-Ice Flower” comes out of the room. The film is showing on a light-emitting diode, or LED, monitor in front of the blackboard. A scene featuring the main character, a young boy named Ku Ah-ming, painting dominates the screen. The teacher pauses the movie from time to time and throws out questions to the students.
In an arts class, meanwhile, sixth-grade students who have just finished watching “Yesterday” are divided into groups of five or six and given seven minutes to use fishbone and Venn diagrams to analyze the ideas set out in the film. After drawing their analytical diagrams, the students mingle and explain their logic and methods.
At present, lot of schools in Taiwan use movies as teaching tools. Zhongxiao Elementary School has without a doubt been doing it more systematically and more extensively than any other. Each grade from first to sixth has its own film lineup and goals for what they intend to achieve by teaching through film. Enthusiastic teachers, moreover, have developed their own analytical tools for film analysis—such as spider web, balance scale and concentric circle diagrams—to guide students through the process of organizing thoughts about the movies they watch.
Zhongxiao Elementary further boasts an unmatched film collection, including more than 50 theater-version releases. Principal Kang Yan-yu pointed out with pride: “Teaching through movies is something that sets us apart. We incorporate films into our course content. Our students see a combined total of more than 30 films per year, each of which touches on themes we deal with in class.”
Many students, after graduating, look back with great nostalgia on their time at Zhongxiao Elementary where they watched movies. One student stated that discussions sparked by films made the classes more creative, while another felt his ability to express himself was sharpened by discussions and presentations that took place following movie viewings.
Teacher remembers dream of filmmaking
The key mover and shaker behind Zhongxiao Elementary’s film education program is 39-year-old Chen Jian-rong. Slim and bespectacled, the scholarly-looking teacher is the very image of a young intellectual. Being president of his university film club, he worked for a year in a movie company after receiving his degree. Responding to the hopes of his family, however, he eventually switched to a career as an educator, but his passion for cinema has never flagged. Ever since taking part in a teacher internship 17 years ago, Chen has continually sought ways to work the silver screen into the process of education.
Movies have been an integral part of Chen’s life since high school, when he always celebrated the completion of a big test by heading to a theater. As a native of Tainan, the cinema he went to most often was the venerable Chin Men Theater. To this today he still remembers clearly the feel of the hard theater seats and the smell of the restrooms there.
In addition to Hollywood movies, the theater also shows European arthouse films. Chen recalls that information about movies was hard to come by when he was a boy, so he often did not know the titles until he got to the cinema. And even the film names sometimes left him in the dark as to what a movie might be about, which only made it more pleasurable when a film turned out to be a good one.
As a high school student, Chen always felt a tremendous sense of release and happiness after watching a movie, regardless of whether it was a commercial offering or a film festival entry. He said with a laugh: “I sometimes stayed in the theater so long my butt hurt, but I felt so happy on the way back home. I felt like my bag was filled with school books and food for thought that would keep my batteries charged until the next big test.”
After finishing his master’s degree and passing the test to become a teacher, Chen began devising ways to use his beloved cinema as a teaching tool, so that discussion of movies might make the learning experience more powerful.
Chen Jian-rong’s former student Chen Zheng-xuan is now a teacher at Zhongxiao Elementary. Even after the passage of more than 10 years, she still remembers the showing of “October Sky” in a science class. “Mr. Chen showed the film one segment at a time, stopping it now and then to ask us questions. The first time we did that in class, I was amazed at how much meaning was lurking beneath the surface of the movie.”
Different films for different grade levels
For the past decade and more, Chen Jian-rong has worked continually to improve his teaching techniques and course content. He has written up a lot of methodologies for teaching through film, and has even published on the subject. Because students love his classes so much, the principal decided to make teaching through film a key focus at the school and adopt the approach at all grade levels.
Through dedication and hard work, Chen and other teachers at the school have built up a fleshed-out system for teaching through film. The system focuses on five different themes: multiculturalism, love of family, gender equality, environmental sustainability and moral education. Different films are used at each grade level to address these themes.
The eclectic film lineup includes both major studio films and little-known European flicks. First graders, for example, learn about gender equality by watching “Shrek,” while “Annaluise and Anton” is shown in third grade to teach about moral education, and environmental sustainability is taught to sixth graders through the showing of “Hula Girls.”
The objective in first and second grades is simply to get students to like movies and to draw what they have seen. In the middle grades, the school hopes that students will come to understand films and be able to discuss them. In the upper grades, the goal is to cultivate the ability to critique movies and act in them. In addition to classroom instruction, there are also schoolwide activities such as making film posters and gatherings where students talk about their favorite movies.
In the classroom, besides having students use diagrams to analyze movies, teachers also make extensive use of small group discussions where virtually every child has a chance to get up and state his or her thoughts. Some teachers extend instruction beyond school walls by, for example, having pupils make handmade soap and selling it to raise money for charity. Chen chuckled: “Our classroom instruction develops children’s ability to communicate, to create and to cooperate, while participation outside of school in charity fundraisers develops their capacity for empathy and action. I think it’s fair to say our approach covers all the bases.”
In contrast to traditional subjects like Chinese and math, the most valuable thing about teaching through film is that there are no standardized answers. “When you just spoon-feed information to children, they are like little robots that won’t talk unless instructed by the teacher to do so,” Chen said, adding that by studying movies, students can actually develop the full range of their abilities and rethink life itself.
As there are no standardized answers, just about all pupils can get a feeling of accomplishment. Students who get good grades see cinema as an area where they can use their abilities, while others who get ordinary grades see it as a subject where they can find some relief from pressure. For this reason, children do not complain when the classes sometimes run overtime, and in fact they generally want the teacher to keep going.
From the discussion topics put forward by teachers, pupils learn to think and be creative. For instance, while teaching the film “Yesterday,” Chen handed out cosmetics to students and asked each group to come with a definition of beauty. He had been expecting the pupils’ thinking to run along well-worn pathways, but the responses were actually quite surprising.
One group used lipstick to draw an abstract image to express the idea that beauty has no borders. Another group drew a big smiley face to symbolize the idea that beauty radiates from an inner smile. Each group had its own unique emphasis, which showed the children already had lots of different ideas about beauty and were prepared to grasp the core values of the course.
Other teachers have also gotten hooked on teaching through film. “A child can learn about life from movies,” said Xiao Jing-li. One time, after taking a class to see a location where the environment had been cleaned up to promote a resurgence of the firefly population, she followed up by showing “Fireflies: River of Light.”
Following the movie, a girl student started up a schoolyard plant patrol so classmates could monitor and care for the greenery growing around the school grounds. Though only in the first grade, she organized the members and awarded participation points that served as the basis for weekly prizes.
After a decade of effort, Chen’s teaching through film has come to full fruition at Zhongxiao Elementary, where it now counts as one of the school’s most distinctive features. While acknowledging that the undertaking has required a whole lot of hard work, he nevertheless feels that much has been achieved: “There is no greater happiness than to make a living doing something you love.”
[by Wang Yi-fen / tr. by David Mayer]