The Dialectic Between Waiting for “Superman” and The First Year

• In Event: Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Reel Education: Exploring Issues of Learning, Teaching, and Schooling in and Through Film

Abstract

I compare Davis Guggenheim’s recent and well-publicized documentary Waiting for Superman (2010) with the first full-feature documentary that Guggenheim made about education, titled The First Year (2001). To guide my comparison of the films, I employ Stuart Hall’s (1980/2001) theory of preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. According to Hall, a preferred reading is one that a text (print, film, visual image, etc.) continually works to achieve through its presences and absences (or silences). Viewers who share the main assumptions and understandings encoded in a text are likely to see and understand it as the text sees and understands itself. A negotiated reading is one that recognizes the contradictory elements of a text, does not accept all the elements, but does not read the text in a totally oppositional way. An oppositional reading wholly rejects much or all that a preferred reading accepts, resulting in a reading that can indeed “read the signs” but that refuses to follow their direction. Such readings are attuned to the presences and absences (silences) of a text and are “read” from an oppositional ideological ground. I present this theory of reading to make it clear that I am not framing my interpretations and analyses of the two documentaries as somehow getting at the “truth” about these documentaries. Rather, I am offering my own readings, and readers can decide if I have been persuasive or not.

Guggenheim’s two documentaries are very different from one another. The First Year focuses on the challenges, struggles, failures, and successes of five first-year teachers in different public schools in Los Angeles, and the documentary narrates each teacher’s experience by showing the teachers both in and outside of the classroom. One of the main purposes of the film is to reveal that teaching is a very complicated endeavor that inevitably involves tensions, conflicts, opportunities for creativity and experimentation, and a lot more. My own preferred reading of The First Year is that it is a very fair, insightful, touching portrait of the lives of five new teachers as they navigate and struggle through their first year of teaching. But what makes the documentary fascinating is how radically different it is from Waiting for Superman, which incites an oppositional reading in me. Absent from The First Year is any of the anti-public school, anti-teacher union propaganda that is at the center of Waiting for Superman. This is but one of several differences between the films, and two of the main questions I attempt to answer are: 1) What happened to Davis Guggenheim’s ideological compass between making The First Year and Waiting for Superman? 2) How can this self-professed ‘lefty’ make such a very good film about new teachers and follow it up a decade later with the anti-public school / pro-charter-school propaganda film that is Waiting for Superman?

Author

• James Trier, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill