infobong.com

My mom, who teaches 8th grade U.S. History, just pointed me to this gem of a Web site, "Teach With Movies."

Mom described it as a site for teachers that indicates how accurate movies are to history and how appropriate a movie is for students. Looking at their sample for Gettysburg, it seems that their level of analysis isn't tremendously deep. While I hardly expect a site like this to perform a full-on historiographic analysis of a period film - overworked teachers would hardly have the patience to plow through it - they could be a little more critical of issues of representation and accuracy than "some of the beards look fake."

It's a subscription service, and at $11.99 for a year subscription, I suspect it's geared for the homeschool market. I used to copyedit math books for a publisher that did a brisk business with the homeschool market, and it seemed pretty clear that conservative ideology meshes with the desires of homeschool parents. Saxon Publishers, whom I worked for, made their name publishing straightforward algebra books that eschewed graphics and conceptual "new math" for repetition and memorization. Teachwithmovies.org seems to share a conservative approach to pedagogy. For example, here are some discussion questions from the lesson plan for Gettysburg:

While I don't doubt that movies can be a valuable instructional tool, I sort of cringe at this lightweight approach to analyzing film historiography. I'm certain that historians, history buffs, and media studies folks could find more problems with Gettysburg than just the beards. It would be kind of cool to build a free Wiki for teachers to serve a similar purpose. Informed folks could submit descriptions of representational problems of a text such as inaccurate costumes or anachronistic representations of race like Morgan Freeman's character in Amistad. It would provide teachers with a resource for teaching history and media literacy, while giving frustrated viewers an outlet for voicing their objections to media representations of history.