Adventures in flawed time machines: feature films, teacher pedagogy and deep historical understanding

Historical feature films transport their audiences to experience another world and time, albeit temporarily. They are time machines that have become major artefacts of popular and youth culture and for a brief interlude they bestow global-scale historical significance on their filmic narratives of the past. This fleeting significance is intensified by media hype, social networking clamour, gaming versions and product merchandising. However, historical filmic narratives are often a single representation of the past with no obligation to adhere to evidentiary records. Added to this, feature films serve a commercial imperative, and coupled with the limitations of the art form, this often leads to manipulation of the narrative and the inclusion of fictionalized elements. Despite these flaws, international scholarship suggests that these frequently historically inaccurate and distorted filmic resources are being widely and regularly used as teaching resources in history classrooms. These history teachers have experienced the power of film to motivate today’s visually-orientated students, to engage them both emotionally and intellectually and to provide narrative frameworks which offer single representations of the past that may vary from more conventional sources. As well as considerations of significance and engagement, feature films can be effective primary and secondary sources for historical inquiry and providing the history teacher with unique and rich opportunities to explore issues of historical representation and understanding. These apparent tensions between student engagement and issue of historical authenticity prompted this research project. Designed in three phases, the research project explores the relationship between the use of feature films in the history classroom and its link to the creation and development of historical understanding. The first phase establishes the usage, rationales and filmic pedagogies in Australia with a focus on New South Wales. The project then adds the student voice to the discourse and an Australian perspective to international research in the field. The second and third phases of the research take a grounded theory approach to explore the mechanisms by which historical feature film captivates the viewer and the utilization of this in the quest for historical understandings in the classroom. The project reports on filmic pedagogical methodologies and the link between these and teacher disciplinary conceptual frameworks and develops guiding principles for optimizing historical understanding when using feature films in the history classroom. Graphic representations and models have been developed to conceptualize the research findings and reflections. The scholarship from this research will contribute to the fields of education, history and media studies