Like everyone else, I was very saddened by the death of Michel Côté. I didn’t know him personally, but I saw him play in many films and TV series and I appreciated his immense talent. He was like an old friend. It moved me, made me smile, made me think and brought many emotions to life. I salute him and offer my condolences to his family and loved ones.
I dedicate this reflection on what cinema can bring to education to him.
We can certainly learn from the cinema. No one will doubt that a historical film, well made and faithful, a biographical film with the same qualities, a documentary can teach us many things. But it’s fiction I want to talk about, precisely because with them, things are less clear.
Learn from film fiction
Let’s start with the most obvious: the films which, precisely, talk about school and education. Surely you have favorites. Me, it would be straight away Topazby Marcel Pagnol, The Society of Dead Poetswith the late Robin Williams, and The Vinland Club, by Benoit Pilon. What are teachers, what are schools, what does it mean to learn, to teach are, with many other subjects, and unsurprisingly, themes on which these films make you think.
But let’s go further. I will limit myself to two observations.
The cinema can be an important source of reflection, often very deep, even philosophical; he contributes to the ethics course.
wonder and feel
The cinema indeed often invites us to ask questions on many subjects and in particular on ourselves. Take all these sci-fi movies, with their aliens or their robots, which are not human. Impossible to look at them without wondering what we are, what sets us apart, what threatens our existence, without also thinking about what consciousness is.
The cinema is precisely a marvelous observatory to see at work this extraordinary human faculty which allows us to attribute to others, and even to a fictitious other or to a robot, mental states. What then opens is prodigious. It is inferred by it that such a character acts thus because he is jealous, or pretentious, or malevolent, etc. And we discover what it feels like to be inhabited by these emotions.
Cinema, through its game of camera and photo direction, transforms actors into characters, and if we add music, it can become a very powerful tool for bringing emotions to life. We can therefore, and this has been verified, use the cinema in the teaching of ethics. Through it, we can for example develop empathy, by learning, by reliving, what it feels like to be this or that.
But I would like to say that we can also learn something useful for teaching from cinema.
The merits of stories
One of the right ways to define the human being (he is a being of reason, who has the ability to speak, to attribute mental states, etc.) is to remember that he is also an animal that tells stories, who takes a liking to them, and who, through them, learns things.
As you have experienced countless times, a good story interests us; it is easy to understand and we remember it quite easily. How does it work to produce these effects? How are a good story, a good novel, a good film script structured?
Daniel T. Willingham, from whom I learned the following, suggests that a broad consensus has four characteristics.
A good story causally connects events and doesn’t just relate them chronologically. It concerns one or more characters wishing to accomplish something, obstacles then stand in front of him or them. The pursuit of this goal is made of many complications and adventures. Finally, it depicts characters who have a particular personality for one reason or another, which is revealed in actions, by gestures.
Think of your favorite Michel Côté film and you’ll find it all.
The relationship with education? Willingham suggested taking inspiration from how stories work, how effective they are at arousing interest, being understood and helping people remember things, to think about how to decline a lesson.
This does not mean telling a story in class, which of course can be done successfully. But it’s about structuring a lesson based on what makes stories successful.
Willingham gives this example. What we want students to learn is actually the answer to a question. In itself, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you understand the question well, it becomes. A good story begins precisely by posing a problem perceived as interesting before declining the answer.
Nice suggestion. Free as well. Take advantage of it, because as the character played by Michel Côté says in The little lifewe don’t usually pay for this kind of advice with ” peanutsmy Colonel.
Doctor of philosophy, doctor of education and columnist, Normand Baillargeon has written, directed or translated and edited more than seventy books.