Encounters with Insignificance in Teaching and Learning: Gus Van Sant's "Elephant"

Autor/in	Sandlos, Karyn
Titel	Encounters with Insignificance in Teaching and Learning: Gus Van Sant's "Elephant"
Quelle	In: Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 31 (2009) 1, S.55-73 (19 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1071-4413
Schlagwörter	Adolescent Development; Violence; Anxiety; Films; Preservice Teacher Education; Adolescents; Experience; Homicide; School Safety; Educational Environment; High Schools; High School Students; Social Environment; Social Problems; Curriculum; Aesthetics; Homosexuality + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Gewalt; Angst; Film; Lehramtsstudiengang; Lehrerausbildung; Adolescent; Adolescence; Adoleszenz; Jugend; Jugendalter; Jugendlicher; Erfahrung; Mord; Lernumgebung; Pädagogische Umwelt; Schulumwelt; High school; Oberschule; High schools; Student; Students; Schüler; Schülerin; Studentin; Soziales Umfeld; Social problem; Soziales Problem; Curricula; Lehrplan; Rahmenplan; Ästhetik; Homosexualität
Abstract	This article explores how a curriculum of film becomes organized by the teacher's worries about what film may open up in class. The author focuses on her own worries about showing Gus Van Sant's (2003) film, "Elephant," an elliptical and dreamlike study of the murders in 1999 of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, to a class of teacher candidates. The course, entitled "The Adolescent and the Teacher," was designed to explore theories of adolescent development and representations of adolescent experience. By refusing to explain the Columbine murders or suggest how the lessons of the past may become a prophylactic against future repetitions, the author hoped that the film would help students to think about school violence outside of the usual discourses of safety and prevention. The author's reading of "Elephant" focuses on three dimensions of time: the ethnographic present of representation (the details and rhythms of an ordinary day at high school), the uncanny (the role of repetition and anxiety in the narrative), and the possibility of reparative reading (a belated study of the nature of perception). Close attention is paid to how the troubling history recounted in the film and the problem of engaging in a reading of the film come into conflict. This article raises some dilemmas of staging encounters with representations of social violence in teacher education: the teacher's anxiety, the pedagogical problem of insignificance, and the aesthetic possibilities of repairing meaning. As teachers begin to understand how their anxiety is telegraphed through curriculum, they may then learn to read students' responses to curricular texts, and their own responses, as aesthetic representations of the self. (Contains 6 notes.) (ERIC).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10