By David DeBaker
I have been teaching English 210 Introduction to Film for three years now. The class is great fun to teach, but I have been struggling with how to best help my students learn the terms and ideas they need to know. My main issue has been with how much information I give them. Most of the students in this class are not looking for a career in the movies so I know that I don’t need to turn them into moviemakers, I need to meet the ADOs of the class and help them look at movies in a new way. This leads me to a constant struggle of how much do I teach them. How much about movies do they need to know?
One of the sections that have always been a struggle for me is a chapter that contains 15 different elements of something called Mise en Scene. Mise en Scene is a collection of ways to analyze the visuals in a particular scene. My goal with each lesson, and in particular Mise en Scene, is to give them the terms and tools they need to speak and write about what they are seeing on screen.
In the past two years I have gone over all fifteen elements and spent a short amount of time on each one. The students always felt frustrated and rushed and they felt like they weren’t getting it. And their papers reflected that.
So, this year I decided to spend more time on just a few of the elements instead of covering all 15 and it went much better. I picked what I thought were the five most important elements and went over them more in depth. They seemed to understand it more and to make connections to the other elements quicker. There was a stronger feeling of confidence from them.
The realization I had from doing all this is that before I gave them less, I was certain that I had to give them all fifteen elements, but after my experiment I realized that maybe less is more.
What I am trying to figure out is what are the steps they need to reach their goal of being able to analyze a movie. This issue is no different than me trying to figure out the steps I need to have them take to write a paper and I would imagine that some of you have similar issues with how much information to give your students.
I’d be curious to know how some of you deal with this idea of how much to teach your students about a typical concept? Have any of you been experimenting with how much to give them and what steps to take along the way? Any success or horror stories?
