Seeing Through Television and Film: The Teacher’s Gaze in Professional Learning

“Seeing Through Television and Film: The Teacher’s Gaze in Professional Learning” by Claudia Mitchell, Bridget Campbell, Stephanie Pizzuto, and Brian Andrew Benoit draws together three exemplars for using film and television in teachers’ professional learning. Bridget Campbell, working at a South African university, embarked on the use of two teacher films, Freedom Writers and Dead Poets Society, to enrich her understanding of her work with the preservice teachers in her class. Then Stephanie Pizzuto, as a master’s student at a Canadian university, used a popular television series from her childhood, Boy Meets World, to deepen an understanding of the teacher she now wants to become. Brian Benoit, also at a Canadian university, explored the way he used repeated viewings of a local television series he remembered from an earlier time, Les Bougon, to engage in memory-work and critical autoethnography in relation to class structures.