Learning through film: Navigating truth, history, and Hollywood
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Summary
Using movies and popular media in the classroom is nothing new. But being purposeful and effective in using it as a teaching tool can have many challenges along the way.
Guest: Scott Roberts, professor of education at Central Michigan University and series co-editor of Hollywood or History?
Summary
In this episode of The Search Bar, Scott Roberts, professor of higher education at Central Michigan University sits down with Adam Sparkes to discuss purposeful use of movies as a teaching tool in the classroom. The two talk about how social studies has evolved, some of the biggest challenges to using films in the classroom, and some of the biggest benefits for students in learning through film.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction
- 01:50 Why is social studies important?
- 05:47 Why do people think social studies is boring?
- 09:18 How can we use movies to teach historical events?
- 14:02 Does using movies in classrooms encourage reading?
- 22:46 When incorporating film in the classroom, what are some of the best topics to cover?
- 24:15 What are movies that surprised you with their positive or negative impact on education?
- 28:46 How can you use historical facts to verify accuracy in films?
- 34:35 What is the 'Hollywood or History' book series?
Transcript
Introduction
Scott: Social studies is boring! I mean, to most people, when you think of your social studies classroom, you're thinking of Ferris Bueller. All the students are falling asleep at their desk because social studies isn't taught in an effective manner. There's that natural connection we have to history and like you said, and I think there's a natural connection to history when we watch it in film, for example, as opposed to maybe reading it from a textbook or doing a worksheet or being lectured at by a teacher. Well think Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer made how much money? A billion dollars worldwide? I think if a teacher can find a way to use that medium as a way to get student interest, then that's just going to open the flood floodgates for this appreciation and love of history and social studies that may not happen if you teach it in a traditional kind of way.
Adam: Watching movies in school isn't what it used to be. Welcome to The Search Bar. I'm your host, Adam Sparks, and on today's episode we're talking with Scott Roberts, professor of education at Central Michigan University about how movies in the classroom can build critical lifelong skills that you'll use every day. Well Scott, I'm excited to have you in today to talk a little bit about social studies to some extent. I loved social studies growing up. It was one of my favorite subjects, just kind of anything in that social studies bucket. I loved civics, I loved government, I loved American history, I loved Western Civ, all that stuff. And then as you grow up and you get older, you realize that it's not like the sexy school subject. A lot of the STEM fields are getting pushed or rather STEM fields are getting pushed, I think more directly towards kids as being immediately adjacent to these career paths and stuff like that. But to me, that was always the thing that I looked forward to when I was in secondary ed and when I was in university. Why is social studies important?
Why is social studies important?
Scott: Yeah, well, going back to what you said, unfortunately with No Child Left Behind, which was an act, that was enacted in 2001, they basically pushed social studies to the side. It was a major focus on reading and math and even it pushed science to the science. Well, science got pretty smart and they came up with STEM to get back into the classroom. Social studies, we've kind of done the same thing, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But really the purpose of social studies, to answer your original question, is to help develop active and engaged citizens. We really want students to be able to participate civically and no matter if you're teaching history or economics or geography, it's all leads to this idea of being our civic action and really helping students understand their place and their role in our society. In fact, the National Council for the Social Studies, they even say that the primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions, for the public good, as citizens of a diverse democratic society. And I'm a member of that camp. I really believe that social studies is the most important subject we teach and it should be the center of everything else because it is that citizenship that we want to promote. Other things that we get from social studies that we may not think about as much, is it promotes critical thinking. It instills knowledge about our society, instills knowledge about other cultures and the world. It helps you make decisions and problem solve. And finally, it helps you be more self-aware. And the hope is when we do teach social studies grade K-12 and at the university level, that we are keeping that idea of civic practices in mind.
Adam: And I think it's interesting that you listed all that and that's without even touching on current events or history or sort of the anthropological value of social studies. When I was a fixed term faculty, I remember, having students come into my class and-we are sitting here with me, a multimedia guy. I was teaching Photography 121 at the time, and it struck me how people who are second, third year of college, a lot of them, I'm explaining to them when and where they're allowed to take photos. And there's was this massive gap in the basic understanding of, I mean, just little simple things like “how does the government engage with these things? Are you allowed to record people? Are you being recorded? What is the first amendment?” And I found myself actually spending a fair amount of time in class discussing this because I felt that, for you to enact this thing that you want to do technically we have to understand why you're able to enact it principally, within the society that we live in. And I was surprised to get feedback from students on how much they valued that. I feel more confident going forward because I sort of understand the rules and it's not the rules as I'm giving them. It's kind of the social contract that, in this case, US citizens have when it comes to recording things or taking photos in public.
Scott: Yeah, definitely. And again, it's just so important and it's such a shame that has been reduced at the elementary level. To the extent where I work with pre-service teachers in that primarily that grade three-six band. And I just talked to them today. I talked today and they said they're not seeing social studies being taught at all. And this is October. One teacher that, one of my student teacher said, she's working with a teacher that said, they haven't even opened the social studies book. She has no idea what the curriculum is. And this is fourth grade. And it is a shame because that's the building block of kids, like you said, understanding First Amendment rights, when you can take pictures, copyright rules, when you just grab something from the internet and use it or when you actually have to cite your source. All these things we teach in social studies. And that's why, again, I'm a huge proponent of the subject and hope that these ideas in my book series, that we really help teachers teach the subject more effectively.
Why do people think social studies is boring?
Adam: What do you think holds people back from being interested? You talked about No Child Left Behind changing public school curriculums, but is there misconceptions? Are there things that have changed? What's more interesting now versus maybe when I was a kid, although I loved it, so I guess you don't have to sell it to me.
Scott: Yep. Well, social studies is boring. I mean to most people…
Adam: No, it's not!
Scott: To most people. When you think of your social studies classroom, you're thinking of Ferris Bueller. If you, you're thinking of the Taff Smoot Act of 1923, all the students are falling asleep at their desk because social studies isn't taught in an effective manner. It's taught through textbook readings, answering questions, knowing a bunch of dates and facts that are not relevant to the student. So, when you learn history and social studies in that way, you don't have that connection. I talk to a lot of adults who tell me, I hated social studies when I was a kid or history when I was a kid, but now I love it. You know why? They're watching John Adams. They're seeing it in a different way and they're becoming way more interested in it. But the way it's currently taught, traditionally, it's certainly not the most effective way. And it certainly leads to just people not thinking it's an important subject.
Adam: I think, and this will lead us a little bit into the meat of what we're going to talk about. I think one of the things about history that, I'll pitch a history book to people every now and then, mainstream ones. I'll be like, read Guns, Germs, and Steel, or read The People's History of the United States of America or something like that. And I am an annoying book gift giver. I'll write a note in it, make it personal and then give you, “Here's something I think you should read.” It's like a punishment depending on who you are. But the thing I've kind of pushed on people is, it's Game of Thrones, man. It's Lord of the Rings. There's a lot of intrigue in history. There's a lot of moments where you kind of go “What?” when you learn about certain stuff, when you learn about the death toll of King Philip’s war or something that was. It seems somewhat obscure, but when you learn about it, “you go, man, this is not some biennial, little thing in American history. It was massive. And it was probably a beige footnote in that history book that I had in eighth grade, but it was this big thing. And there's an interesting story sort of buried in there. And it's like a movie. Which is interesting because that's an area of interest for you.
Scott: Exactly. Well think Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer made how much money, a billion dollars worldwide? So, there's that natural connection we have to history. And like you said, I think there's a natural connection to history when we watch it in film, for example, as opposed to maybe reading it from a textbook or doing a worksheet or being lectured at by a teacher. And I think going back to film, I think if a teacher can find a way to use that medium as a way to get student interest, then that's just going to open the floodgates for this appreciation and love of history and social studies that may not happen if you teach it in a traditional kind of way.
Adam: And I think, again, I'll bring us into the films here a little bit. I think you brought up Oppenheimer recently. We've had a good sloth or this collection of these really big historical movies. You already mentioned John Adams. Lincoln was this massive movie, and there's been kind of this litany of these over the last 20 or 30 years.
Scott: Band of Brothers.
Adam: Band of Brothers, Falkirk, there's all stuff, these big movies, Enemy at the Gate, these kind of things that are steeped in history.
How can we use movies to teach historical events?
Adam: How important are those and how can they be teaching tools just initially, if you're thinking about it, either I want to edify myself or I want to edify my classroom, how do I find the right ones? How do I incorporate that in a way that isn't obtrusive?
Scott: Yeah. Well, I mean think when you think of, like I said, the traditional ways to teach social studies, and I tell this to my students, you have lecture, you have worksheets, you have using a textbook, and then you have film. But when teachers traditionally use film, it's usually popping in the movie. And here you go, no context, no rationale for showing it, other than maybe you're just randomly talking about World War II. So, you pop in, God forbid, Pearl Harbor, right? No offense to Pearl Harbor, right. So that's what they do. Or you give kids a huge worksheet like this full of questions that they have to try to watch the movie answer, watch the movie, then answer. There's no connection to the film. So, when you use film that way, it's not effective. It's not a good way to teach history and social studies. You have to make it more to where students use inquiry-based practices, where they look at multiple sources, secondary and primary sources, and they have to, in the case of my book series, determine the accuracy of the film. Like I said, you can show Pearl Harbor, but make sure they're reading a primary and secondary source about the actual battle. And they compare and contrast these sources to what they're seeing in the film. And that's where we're trying to push social studies teachers to go through this inquiry-based model. They come up with compelling and supporting questions about the film, and they go through the process of analysis to see, for example, how accurate the film is. That's the way we want to incorporate film and movies. We don't want to just say, “Hey, I'm going to push play as a teacher, set my computer grade papers or watch the World Cup” or whatever's going on or some sporting event while you watch this film with absolutely no context. So, if we want to show film effectively, there has to be a context and there has to be a connection to your students.
Adam: Yeah, I love the idea of there being kind of a forensic exercise with it because I mean, one of the things that is certainly a consideration when you're watching historical film is that there's almost always going to be creative or storytelling liberties. Even in some of the most famous like Schindler's List, I think it still plays on network television once a year for Holocaust Remembrance. So, it's one of those ones where it's lauded for being an authentic representation of that time period. But also there's a lot of things from Schindler's actually story that are missing or added to it. And there's probably value if you're a student and not just going, Spielberg got it right. I think largely he did. I do not want to discredit Schindler’s List, but there's stuff in there that's missing and you might find additional intrigue by going in there and figuring out that, “oh, Schindler kind of didn't make the list. He sort of just read it off and acted it. There was all these other players involved, and what were their interests? Why were they providing Schindler with these lists of workers to bring it to his factory?” Stuff along that line. I mean, that's kind of the idea of that analysis.
Scott: Exactly. And I'll give you another example. So not to talk about a Competiting podcast, but I'm a huge fan of The Ringer’s ‘Rewatchables’. And whenever on the ‘Rewatchables’ they do a historic movie, the host always say something like, “well, it's not accurate, but it doesn't matter. It's not accurate, but it doesn't matter.” It does matter because most people get their history, especially after they leave K-12 through film. And if they think, that you said, Schindler's List was this great hero, which he was, but without knowing the full story, they have a minimum understanding of the actual events. Another example, Lincoln we talked about, when Spielberg was making the film and they were having the vote to ratify the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery. For whatever reason, he picked on poor Connecticut. And in the film Connecticut voted against the 13th amendment and people from Connecticut took huge offense to that, even though it's just artistic license. If you're from Connecticut and you're a kid that's learning about Connecticut history and you think, “why did my state not want to end slavery in the United States?” That's a huge, huge inaccuracy. And the people of Connecticut really took it to the media to say, “Hey, this is not correct.”
Adam: Needed a little drama there.
Scott: They need a little drama, but I feel bad for Connecticut. So that's important and we need to understand, and we need to teach our students and adults to analyze these films critically, so they're able to pinpoint these inaccuracies that, to some people are a huge deal.
Does using movies in classrooms encourage reading?
Adam: Do you find that that type of an exercise kind of enables people to spend more time reading? I mean, in thinking about this conversation that we were going to have today, I had written down, “Do people still read?” Now, I'm an avid reader. I love reading. I always have four books on my nightstand that I'm inadequately trying to read at the same time, because I have such ADD I can't pick. So, to me, it's like this thing that everyone must be doing. And then when I went and looked it up, it turns out that reading is actually way down. The percentage of Americans that say they have read one book in the last year is like 42% or something, which I thought was wild. But also, it makes sense. I mean, I think social media is probably a little bit to blame there. Screen time certainly makes up for that. But do you find that type of an exercise going, “Hey, you're going to really enjoy this movie. Now go find what parts of it are real and what parts of aren’t.” Does that get students to engage better? Is it a good tactic?
Scott: It is, but as a teacher, you have to kind of select sources for them to read. Because you're right. I mean, reading is down. But the funny thing is with that push for English language arts, especially when it comes to reading “informational text” there's a huge push in the grade K-12 level where teachers are constantly talking about literacy and how to teach it. When we analyze film, it's up to the teacher, especially at first, to come up with, I wouldn't say simple to read, but easier to read primary and secondary sources. So basically, you show a film clip, you want them to analyze, you as the teacher have to find-or if you use my book series-you have to find the primary source, paragraph-two paragraphs, something like that, and then a secondary source. Often, I recommend using just the state-mandated textbook as your secondary source. And the good thing about textbooks is they're definitely short and they're concise when it comes to this topic. So, you have to kind of select the readings. But when you get your kids to read and when you get your kids to read in order to compare and contrast something, they do have that interest. For the younger kids, especially third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, you can say-or even the older kids-you can say you're being a detective or you're being a historian or a geographer or an economist, really trying to get them to think, “oh, I'm actually going to use this for a purpose.” But yeah, we have to be selective with the reading. And of course, as you well know with students with special needs, I mean there's different reading abilities, that kind of thing. For what we do with our book series when it comes to primary sources, Sam Weinberg, who's a famous social studies historian researcher, says “It's okay to change the language of the primary source to the student's reading level as long as you have an actual copy of the source on the back.” So there's the Declaration of Independence written in 1776 language, but if you want them to read a little section of it, they turn it over, it's written at a fourth-grade level or third-grade level, that kind of thing. So, you can definitely do that, but just to answer your question, it does encourage reading, but you have to be very selective with the type of materials you give to your students based on their ability level,
Adam: Trying to match that up and empower them to find those answers. I think that's interesting because you touched on it a little bit. It can seem like, I know for me when I was in grade school, a hundred years ago, before I collected social security, that when that cart came rolling and when the big CRT TV was on it, you're like, “yeah, baby, we're in for a do-nothing afternoon” and it really shouldn't be that, right? I mean, these things that you're talking about, like having this investigative approach to validating the movie, having a reason to look for maybe little topics or themes within the movie is something that should be enriching, not just a day off of education.
Scott: Right, and when you bring in that cart or whatever it's these days, that YouTube clip, students have to know, okay, we're going to work. We're going to watch a movie, we're going to watch a film. But they should know that they're just not going to take the class off that they are going to actually, we're going to watch the film first, you're going to analyze some sources, you're going to become a mini or little or junior historian, and you're going to figure out, for example, how accurate this clip from Pocahontas is. So, you're going to read a letter from John Smith, you're going to read the secondary source about the life of Pocahontas, and you are going to have to use these sources and use evidence from these sources to determine how accurate this movie is. Where I'm just not showing you Pocahontas with dancing raccoons and talking trees.
Adam: That one might be disappointing.
Scott: And you have to come up with it. And again, with my work and me working with kids, I did this in my classroom. I have former students using it all over Michigan. I have colleagues using it all over the United States. Kids actually like it. They love proving adults wrong, and if they can prove this cartoon to be “wrong” or in some cases right, it gives them that buy-in, that incentive to actually do this hard analytical work that they may not get if you just said, “Hey, read two different sources here and give me a comparison.” They like that additional video or visual media to kind of open up the floodgates for this type of thinking.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, I can appreciate that as somebody who, I feel like I'm kind of an audio-visual learner. If somebody's talking to me. I always did well, when I was in University or in high school with teachers and faculty members who kind of gave me an oration, “This is my thesis, I'm going to try to prove it to you. We kind of go, here's the 30-minute talk in class.” I think movies do a little bit of a similar thing. If you have a hard time getting started on something that's a little bit drier and just fact-based, it gives you something to start turning your head around and going, “okay, now I want to know more.” It kind of gets those gears turning. I know I'm probably not alone in that, where even now as a man in his forties, sometimes someone puts a document in front of me and I'm like, “man, I wish somebody would just tell me this and then I can go back and read it and fill in the gaps.” There's something about that that will stick, for me. So, I would imagine that this is also an accessibility tool at times for students that might have a harder time getting up and getting going some of these topics that they may perceive to be dry.
Scott: Definitely. And I always tell teachers, “start with a film first.” Don't give them a primary source first. Don't give them a secondary source. Start off with that cartoon. Start off with the dancing raccoons or the inaccurate battle of Pearl Harbor, or God forbid, we wouldn't show that with fifth graders, but The Patriot, get them involved with the film. And once they get that connection to the characters or that scene, then you can start taking out, “okay, now let's actually read something from the time period to see what it was like back then. Let's look at something that author wrote 20 years ago about Pocahontas to see what historians say about the topic.” But I think to get that buy-in from students, like I said before, you have to show that film clip first.
Adam: Yeah. And there's a lot of reward there. I mean, there's movies that we see where the movie is such a small slice of that story, and if you can get a student to go down there, then suddenly, they've got some knowledge that other people. I was thinking about some movies that I watched in school, and The Miracle Worker came to mind, and I remember reading about Helen Keller later. I was probably 17, 18, and my brother had watched, I had watched it a few years prior. I think he ended up watching Miracle Worker in sixth grade or something like that. And my brother was watching it, and then I went and looked it up and was like, “wow, Helen Keller had a wild life after the events of the movie play out.” And it's something that were it not for the Miracle Worker being this kind of constant conversation at that grade level, I would've never known. And I think it's a fascinating one. I tell people all the time now, I'm like, “you should watch it and then look up what she did afterwards.” I don't even want to ruin it for you.
Scott: And you're coming up with a lesson plan. If I was going to do that, I would show the film and then my secondary source, obviously the primary source would be her own writings talking about these things, being a socialist, that kind of thing. Her fights for civil rights. But then there's a great book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen.
Adam: I'm familiar.
Scott: And he does a whole chapter about how Helen Keller is portrayed in textbooks compared to her actual life. So, then you have even more analysis on top of the analysis, looking at your secondary textbook to say what they say about her and then what Loewen says. And that's another kind of analysis piece, sprinkle piece that you could actually use. I don't know about sixth graders at that level, but definitely high school. You show that movie in high school, and they could actually do that analysis on Helen Keller through these variety of sources, including the film.
When incorporating film in the classroom, what are some of the best topics to cover?
Adam: When it comes to introducing film into these classrooms, what are some of the best topics that you've found work? I mean, I'm sure there's a variety of them, but it's not kind of just straight American history. There's a whole lot of other stuff that you could be learning about through film.
Scott: Oh yeah, definitely. So again, in the book series, it is a 10-volume book series, looking at a variety of topics that we can talk about later, that are the theme of the book. But certainly, in these lesson plans that have been developed by classroom teachers, student teachers and teacher educators like myself, I mean, we talk about through film history, race, class, gender, immigration, disability activism, world religions, climate change, animal rights. We have really used all important social studies topics as the foundation for these lessons using a variety of different films. And again, just having that student buy-in through discussing these topics using film as the example. Because again, there's no other source that I can think of in social studies that brings that human connection other than film and documentaries, you become attached to those characters. That's why film has been so popular for over a hundred years. This connection we have to Hollywood film especially, I think just makes it, again, a great way to introduce some of these more difficult, controversial issues to your students. And the lesson plans in this book series have really tackled those things from the grade K all the way up to the 12th grade level.
What are movies that surprised you with their positive or negative impact on education?
Adam: What are some movies that have surprised you in terms of, well, I guess both directions really. They were accurate. They kind of passed the sniff test more than maybe you thought, and maybe give me one or two that you're like, well, that was fun, but it didn't work at all.
Scott: Yeah, yeah. I think honestly, the most accurate Hollywood film I can think of, believe it or not, is the movie Johnny Tremaine. Do you remember Johnny Tremaine?
Adam: I don't.
Scott: It's a 1950s Disney film based on a book, a literature book, where the main character's, historical fiction, he's not real, but there's all these major people from the New England area, the Boston Tea Party members, the Patriots, all that kind of stuff. So, you have Sam Adams in there, you have John Adams in there, you have the Boston Massacre in there, Boston.
Adam: Oh, wow. So this guy's kind of ‘Forrest Gump-ing’ through this.
Scott: He's kind ‘Forest Gump-ing’ through it. Yeah, it was like Forrest Gump before Forrest Gump, right? He's a 14-year-old kid, so students can have a connection to him, that gets his hand melded together because he’s a silversmith apprentice. So he has an accident, can't move his hand, but somehow he finds himself in all these major events of the early revolutionary period. And they have a reenactment or a battle of Lexington Concord that kind of closes out the movie. And if you actually compare what happens in the film to the actual accounts of the battle, very, very close. And I was shocked that a Disney movie from the 1950s was that accurate.
Adam: Yeah, I would've almost guessed that era would've been a little bit more embellished.
Scott: Well, if we want to go the other way, another Disney film from nearly the same time period, The Alamo. The 1960s The Alamo with John Wayne. So, John Wayne's playing Davy Crockett, he's about to get himself killed. He's fighting off dozens of Mexican soldiers, and then he gets stabbed, by a bayonet and shot, I think, or something like that, and is dying act of heroism, he throws a lit lantern into the powder keg or the magazine, and boom, that is who blows up the Alamo and takes out countless numbers of poor soldiers under Santa Ana. And that is the most inaccurate depiction of Davy Crockett that you can think of based on the sources. But when you watch the 2004, I believe, version of it with Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Bob Thornton's playing a Davy Crockett who knows his myth and his legend. And at the end of the film, he's actually executed by Santa Ana and his men, and that is based on a primary source letter from one of Santa Ana's officers who talked about several of those men were captured and they were executed by Santa Ana. And it's a different hero. He's still heroic. Again, it just gives you a different depiction of how two films about the same topic can give you wildly different accounts of the same event.
Adam: Yeah, I actually love that as an example, because I think it's easy. You're talking about earlier about Helen Keller, and there's kind of this probably a lot of suppression of some of Helen Keller's later life, because at the time, I mean even now, I suppose, but the open talk of socialism or communism would've just been an absolute no-go. She probably lucky she didn't find herself in prison. But with the Alamo, it's one of those things where it is kind of American mythology and largely what we understand about it is probably really inaccurate to begin with. It's not something where at least I don't recall in grade school or secondary school, a whole lot of depth about it. You kind of got it. And then I saw the John Wayne movie and I was like, oh, there you go, that's the Alamo. I have not seen the Billy Bob Thornton one, but I will watch it now because that's one of those ones where what you know, what you get told and what's in the movie are just so wildly out there. And it is a deeply complicated historical tale with a lot of gray area, especially in terms of the morality of all the players that were involved there from the settlers to Santa Ana. And probably having those movies out there, in contrast, hopefully would give people the curiosity to go, well, “where's the truth?” Right? I mean, you tell me how you feel about it.
Scott: Well, truth with a lowercase ‘t’.
Adam: Well, yeah, but that's the fun part about history, right? History is taking a lot of accountings and trying to have the best possible through-line for it. And what we know kind of has a little bit of a frequency to it, I feel like, right?
How can you use historical facts to verify accuracy in films?
Scott: And that's a continuum. So, with this strategy, Hollywood or History, we let students come up with their own percentage about how accurate they think the film is. So, it can be a hundred percent history. Everything about this movie is correct. It's like you went back in time and you're watching John Wayne save the Alamo, or it's a hundred percent Hollywood. Everything about this movie is inaccurate, fake, it's all made up, or is it somewhere in between? And what we get our students to do is they have to come up with a number. It can be 75% Hollywood, 25% history, but what they have to do is they have to support their ideas using evidence. There's no right or wrong answer, but they just have to basically, if they say 75%, okay, using evidence from your sources, why is it 75%? And that's the critical thinking piece that we're trying to instill in our history/social studies students with bringing film into the classroom, really think about critical thinking, really using evidence to support your ideas and coming up with your own conclusion. And knowing that history, there's the capital T truth and there's the lowercase T truth. And honestly, most history is that lowercase T truth. Because you have to, if you're a historian, you're trying to use multiple sources, you're trying to determine what's accurate, what's not accurate, who wrote it, what's the bias, the authors. One thing I asked my students, I'm like, “which of you think is more accurate? A primary source or a secondary source?” What do my students normally say? “Primary source.” I'm like, “are you sure?” Primary source comes from one person. They have one perspective, one idea.
Adam: What's that motivation?
Scott: What’s the motivation? When you look at a secondary source, when I write a historical article, for example, I have to use multiple sources. I have to come up with conclusions based on evidence, not how I believe about one thing with my own ideas. So yeah, primary sources are useful, secondary sources are useful. One's not better than the other, but you use them together to come up with your ideas. And again, that's what we do in history. That's what these directors do when they make films. We all do it. We just have to sort through all of this information to come up with a reasonable conclusion based on evidence.
Adam: Yeah, I think in hearing you say that too, just goes back to the very beginning of our conversation, which is why there's so much importance to social studies. It's that idea that I'm walking into a conversation about what I think I know, and I'm ready to maybe be wrong. History is so peripheral, and it feels like stone pillars to so many people. World War II is this thing. I mean, is there a piece of American history that's more documented, that's more research. I remember having a conversation with somebody once about Stalin and how really, to some extent, Stalin, there's some nuts things about Stalin, but our grandparents who got back might've all got back because of Stalin too. And the person I mentioned this to, and I think it would've been brought up because the Stalin portraits were at the DIA or something, and he was like, oh, I would never go look at that. And I'm like, well, I mean, no defense of Stalin, by the way. But there's a lot of interesting things there that are gray that I think as Americans, we sort of just go, “I don't want to, he's a bad guy, we're just going to let him be a bad guy.” Well, sure, but what do we owe him from a historical standpoint? And that's a tough conversation for most people to have. They don't want to have it. But history kind of begs us to look at even a character like that who we think we have just a kind of monolithic idea of and from a lot of different directions.
Scott: And that's going back to film Saving Private Ryan. When you watch Saving Private Ryan, you would think that the only reason why Germany was defeated was because of the US and their allies. They say nothing about Russia, they say nothing about the 20 million Russians that died in the war and the impact they had on the Eastern front to really in the Nazi regime. And again, not giving Stalin too much credit, but they were one of the reasons why Germany was defeated, because the US had their hands full with Japan at the same time.
Adam: And they arguably might be why Japan finally surrendered because they didn't want Russians in China or in Japan.
Scott: Exactly. So, these things are not told in these films, and that's why we do this idea of going through the process to determine the accuracy. You could make a compelling question, “Did the US win World War II or did the US defeat Germany alone?” That would be a great starting question where you show the film, you do these different sources, and a teacher's able to get their kids to think critically about that particular question. And they do have to understand the impact that Russia had in World War II.
Adam: And there's a couple of good movies about Russians in World War II out there. They're not as popular. They're not the Inglorious Bastards. Which is super accurate. Did Hitler die in a movie theater?
Scott: My favorite story, when I was an eighth grade teacher, I had one kid come in, swear this is true, came in and we were talking about World War II at the time. He saw Inglorious Bastards, I guess his parents let him see it. And he was like, he's like, “Mr. Roberts, I think you were wrong the other day.” I'm like, “what?” And he was like, “I think you were wrong. Hitler died in a movie theater.” I'm like, “what are you talking about?” I had seen the movie, but I didn't put two and two together. He's like, “the Americans came in there and killed them in the movie theater.” I was like, “are you talking about Inglorious Bastards?” He's like, “yeah.” I'm like, “you think that's accurate?” He's like, “yeah, I watched it.” And that was really one of the reasons why I started doing this. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, great movie. That's called Alternative History, counterfactual History, which I've actually written about as well, how that can be useful. But I'm like, but we need to have a talk. We need to make sure we can correctly analyze films and make sure we do our own research to determine what we think happened. And in this case, I tell you, there's no right or wrong answer, but I think in this case, there's a wrong answer.
Adam: Probably. Yeah. That kid probably watched The Last Temptation of Christ and then went to church and got yelled at by the pastor.
Scott: Yeah. I couldn't believe the kid said that, but I was like, okay. And that's what really, like I said, led to this moment where I really need to make sure I use film effectively as a classroom teacher.
What is the ‘Hollywood or History’ book series?
Adam: And that kind of leads into your book series. If you could give us a little more information about that, I think that'd be an interesting way to wrap up.
Scott: Yeah. So, I am the developer of a strategy called Hollywood or History, and it's simply as we've been talking about a way for a teacher to bring in film to the classroom where they show a movie clip. We recommend not showing the whole movie, but clips from a movie, and students use primary and secondary sources to determine the accuracy of the film. Now, I'll give credit where credit is due. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia back in the 1990s, I think ‘95, ‘96, ‘97, there was a television show on the History Channel before they started showing Ancient Aliens and stuff. They actually showed history stuff.
Adam: Those are the days.
Scott: And it was called History versus Hollywood. And what they do is they would show a movie like Tombstone, one of my favorite movies, and they would show 15 minutes of it, and then they would take a break and they'd bring in a panel of historians, and the historians would talk about the accuracy and inaccuracy of that 15-minute clip of Tombstone. Then they show another 15-minute clip, bring back in the historians. As I was getting my teaching degree and I thought to myself at the time, “well, this is great. I'm glad the historians are telling us about what's accurate and what's not accurate, but how can we get students to do the same thing?” How can students actually become the historian and do the same analysis that I'm seeing on TV, letting them do the critical thinking? So, I started playing with this idea for many, many years, and like I said, between that poor student thinking that Inglorious Bastards was true, and I started thinking about, okay, what would be a film to do this strategy with? And it happened to be Gone with the Wind. Now Gone with the Wind is super problematic, which we could have another podcast about, but there's a scene called The Fling of Atlanta where it looks like Scarlett and Rhett are, basically didn't realize that the north was, and Sherman was attacking Atlanta, they had to leave overnight, threw all their stuff in a buggy, started trying to run out of town, yada, yada, yada. And I was like, “you know what? This doesn't seem to be very accurate.” I knew that Sherman had basically been in Atlanta for almost a month before the city was set on fire, if you will. So I found a letter, Sherman wrote to the mayor of Atlanta basically saying, you need to evacuate. We're going to destroy the city. We don't want to harm the civilians. Get out, because Sherman is really a cuss word in the American South, right? So, I wanted to show that portrayal of Sherman to my students who may have been told that Sherman was the bad guy because he destroyed Atlanta in the South. But I also used a secondary source that described the fleeing of Atlanta, and then used it with that clip. So, I taught that to my students for several years, and then I was like, okay, I was working my doctorate degree, decided to become a professor. I'm like, I think I can write an article, a practitioner-focused article that talks about this strategy and how to use it. So that was my first publication on that. And when I came here, it had gained so much traction. The idea, I thought, well, why not make a book? I'm not going to write all the lessons, but I'm going to get my colleagues to write lessons based on this idea. I taught them the strategy, how to use it. They came up, I think we have 18 lesson plans. In the first book, it was Hollywood History, American History. So we looked at the American history first. That's more of my specialty. And we got a publisher and we released the book. And I thought, cool, I'm done. Publisher was like, “we really like this book. We really like this idea. Can you do one about world history?” Okay, sure, I want to get tenured, promoted. Why not? I'll do another one. So, I added a book about world history. Then I started having the authors in that book series. They're like, they had their own ideas. They had ideas that they were really wanted to do, they were passionate about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that didn't necessarily meet my expertise or necessarily, my interest. So, the first one was called Hollywood History: An Inquiry Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach about Inequality and Equity Through History. Now, I certainly think that's an important topic, but I was thinking more accuracy of film historically, not this particular topic.
So, I told the editor, Sarah J. Kaka, who's over at Ohio Wesleyan University. Yeah, let's put in the book series. And so, she did an amazing book about inequality and inequity through film and history. And then another person said, well, I like this idea. I want to do one about trauma and history. I'm like, okay, Paul Yoder, you can do trauma in history. So that led to, we have books now about television shows. We have books about world religion. We have books about The Simpsons. Annie Whitlock, who's over at Grand Valley State, just released a book in the series about using the Simpsons to teach social studies. And we have a book about war films. We talked a lot about war films. Mark Percy at Writer University wrote about that. And then we actually just released the 10th volume, which I was the primary editor of, along with my colleague Charles Elfer about using cartoons. So I wanted to use cartoons and look at old Tom and Jerry films, Disney Films, Liberty Kids, all these other films, or cartoons that we could use. So we just released that. So that's coming out this year towards the end of the year. And we have literally, I think five or six more at various stages of development.
Adam: And if you're an educator, if you're just interested in this, we're going to put a link down so you can find all of the books in the series and that you're working on publishing, down in the YouTube description here or in the description on Spotify so we can make sure that we're not leaving any teachers out who are interested in this or anybody else.
Scott: And before I leave, I do want to say that I am certainly not the only social studies researcher that talks about effectively using film in the classroom. Definitely a lot of people I've read, people that I've worked with. So if you are interested in the topic and you want to read something other than my work, check out Alan Marcus, Scott Metzger, Jeremy Stoddard, Richard Paxon, Will Russell, and Stuart Water just named a few. They're all teacher educators and they all have written some great work about how to effectively use film in the classroom. That is certainly different than my work, but we are probably in the same camp of thinking that you can certainly use film effectively, and it's a great way for students to have a connection to those social studies topics.
Adam: That's awesome. But check Scott's workout first.
Scott: Yeah, do that first.
Adam: Do it first. Scott, thanks so much. It was great to meet you, man. Thanks.
Scott: Great meet you. I appreciate it. Thanks for the conversation.
Adam: Thanks for stopping by The Search Bar. Make sure to like and subscribe so that you don't have to search for the next episode.