In Place of a Manual for Learning to Teach: Laurent Cantet’s Entre Les Murs (The Class)

• In Event: Aesthetic Objects, Art Practices, and Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is: 1) To consider the pedagogical uses of ‘teacher films’ in teaching certification programs. 2) To position teacher films as aesthetic objects, open to complex forms of deliberation about what might constitute exemplary teaching; and 3) To bring an aesthetic practice of reading film to debates in education on emergent forms of teacher performance assessment.
This paper provides a close reading of The Class, an independent film about schooling that complicates the traditional narrative “teacher films” in which an individual teacher plays hero to a group of underperforming students. The paper considers how the aesthetic qualities of film invite students to grapple with problems of implication in the work of becoming a teacher. How might our pedagogical practices of reading teacher films open insight into conflicts, idealizations and fantasies of learning to teach? How will attention to aesthetic conflict shape students’ conceptions of ‘best practices’ and accountability in teacher education? Maxine Greene’s (1973) method of reading film as a means “to take the stranger’s view” on questions of responsibility and accountability in teaching; and, Britzman’s psychoanalytic (2011) discussion of how professional standards defend against working through the teacher’s “learning conundrums” (p. 62) will provide the theoretical framework.

The Class ‘documents’ a year in the life of a French grammar class in a Parisian middle school located in one of the city’s multi-ethnic neighborhoods. The film is located at the intersection of fiction and reality: The teacher, Mr. Marin, is played by Francois Begadeau (author of the 2006 novel), and the students are played by non-actors. The paper will call attention to the film’s aesthetic qualities of irony, contradiction and the use of multiple cameras to shoot extended classroom scenes.

These interpretive practices are grounded in my experience of screening The Class in a graduate seminar on curriculum. Multiple screenings over five years have enabled me to notice a range of students’ responses, from moralizing judgments about the teacher’s incompetence and a desire to dismiss the film as having nothing to offer to their learning, to deeply engaged curiosities about the film’s power to provoke conflict within their views of what it means to teach.

Sources of data include cultural debates about the image of the teacher in The Class (Bradshaw, 2009; Gueye, 2009; Strand, 2009, Porton, 2008), and pedagogical reflection on the experience of discussing the film with teacher candidates.

The forthcoming Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) will require students in teaching certification programs in many US states to submit a 20 min video of their teaching practice for external review. The paper suggests ways of thinking about how the move toward video documentation as a form of evidence based assessment can open space for uncertainty about what ‘good teaching’ will come to mean; in particular, for those learning to become teachers. By entering contemporary policy debates from the unique vantage of aesthetic representations of teaching and classroom life, the paper addresses an audience of education students, practitioners, theorists and policy makers.

Author

• Karyn E. Sandlos, School of the Art Institute of Chicago