Educating images: Representations of cultural difference in popular education films.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This is an interpretive cultural study that examines how popular education films represent education in relation to and across cultural difference (i.e., race, class, and gender). This study also examines how audiences' lived experiences of education compare and contrast with film representations.
This study examined three levels of data including primary (selected education films), secondary (film publicity and criticism), and tertiary level texts (created by audience members and posted on Internet bulletin boards). I interpreted these films through the postcolonial mind-body dichotomy. The findings suggest a hierarchy of white and male bodies over non-white and female bodies that is mirrored in teaching that acknowledges the mind and logic and disavows the physical body and difference. Audiences read their own educational experiences through these films to construct a representation of education that exceeds the boundaries of the traditional classroom, accounts for the whole student, and encompasses respectful ways of being in the world. Films depicting women have attempted to recuperate the body as a source of knowledge and strength, yet these films yield to a class critique. Audiences' readings of race are also problematic for advancing a belief that Whites and Blacks equally suffer racism.
This study, while not definitive, suggests that education films speak to audiences' expectations of culture and education. Education films speak to viewers' wishes for representations of education that reflect their academic, cultural, and social selves. Films representing culturally different learning are evolving to account for and evade earlier critiques. A white, US-American perspective that is largely ignorant of White privilege seems to shape audiences' ideas about difference. This privilege along with a belief in effort-optimism seems to be fueling current commercial and filmic attempts to reclaim the body and identity in educational representations.