Probing Democracy: Preservice Teachers Apply Critical Media Literacy to Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Pop Pedagogies: Rethinking Education Through Film, Music, and Math

Abstract

In this critical qualitative case study, we investigated how preservice teachers probed concepts of democracy and citizenship by applying critical media literacy (CML) skills to Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight. By employing formal CML (Kellner et al., 2007) and film studies analysis to Batman: The Dark Knight, participants explored the ways in which feature films could be used as primary source documents for the purpose of 1) enriching historical inquiry (Rosenstone, 1995; 2017), 2) surfacing dominant assumptions and ideologies (Kellner et al., 2007), and 3) ferreting out hidden curricula in popular culture (Apple, 1976; Giroux et al., 1979).

Authors

• Robert L Sobel, The University of Texas at Austin

• Mathew Baker, Georgia Southern University