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Part I
Introduction to Teaching Difficult History and Film as Difficult History
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1
Using Film to Teach Difficult Histories
Jeremy Stoddard, Alan S. Marcus, and David Hicks
Introduction
History is full of difficult topics: topics that are difficult to portray, to discuss, to teach, to experience, and to understand. This volume builds from scholarship in history, film, and education with the goal of exploring the relationship between difficult history, film, and pedagogy and considering how best to teach difficult history. The idea for this volume emerged from our previous research on film in history education.
Our research identified the role that film plays in high school teachersâ pedagogy with difficult histories, such as the history of enslaved peoples and American Indians in the US and victims and perpetrators of genocidal events such as the Holocaust (Marcus and Stoddard, 2007). We found that commonly used films focused on these often-marginalized topics in the history curriculum, including the films Dances with Wolves (1990), Glory (1987), and Amistad (1997). We also identified a pattern in teacher use of films focused on these histories: suburban and rural teachers showed African American history films more often while urban teachers used films on American Indian history. This suggests that teachers may be using film as a medium for engaging students in histories they are not as familiar with or not as comfortable teaching. This initial study then led to our attempts to theorize this phenomenon, resulting in our conceptualization of the burden of historical representation as a model for analyzing film, and pedagogy with film, that represent marginalized and difficult histories (Stoddard and Marcus, 2006; Stoddard, Marcus, and Hicks, 2014).
Building on recent research that uses theories of difficult knowledge in education research (e.g., Britzman, 1998) and in engaging in difficult knowledge with film (Garrett, 2011; Gaudelli, Crocco, and Hawkins, 2012), we identified a group of scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds and challenged them to explore the relationship between difficult history and pedagogy, using film as the medium of study and engagement. The authors in this volume explore how films may be used to engage in the difficult past within pedagogies informed by theories from sociocultural, post-colonial, disability studies, critical theory and critical race theory, and film and cultural studies using examples from their own research and the fields of education, history, and film and cultural studies.
Our goal with this volume is to expand the theoretical and pedagogical approaches for examining how film may and may not be useful for addressing difficult history through its role as a medium of instruction, as a historical source, or as an art form to communicate and interrogate history, collective memory, and student identity. In this introductory chapter we explore what makes history difficult, including traumatic aspects of the past as well as contextual and curricular difficulties in teaching about marginalized or challenging histories. We also examine the affordances and limits of history as portrayed on film and the pedagogical potential and constraints of using film to explore difficult histories. Finally, we provide an introduction to the overview of the structure of the volume and the challenge we posed to its authors.
What Is Difficult History: Why Is History Difficult?
We first examine what makes some history difficult, and in particular difficult to engage young people in through commonly used pedagogies and existing history curriculum frameworks. Some history can be difficult because it is traumatic; because it is difficult for most people in the present to fathom; or because it raises issues of identity, marginalization, and oppression that are more easily ignored than addressed for many students and teachers (Epstein, 2009). We explore these aspects of difficult history below and contextualize them with research and our own experiences of how film is used as a medium to sometimes avoid, but more often to engage with, difficult histories. We also asked each of the authors in the volume to similarly conceptualize difficult history from their own disciplinary or theoretical perspectives and wrestle with what makes history difficult.
Traumatic and Affectively Difficult History
Film and history both often rely on narrative, characters (whether fiction or based on a real person), and conflict to engage the reader or audience in examining some aspect of the past. Too often, this past and the history that attempts to represent it include violence, injustice, or other powerful instances largely viewed as taboo or ones that could inflict trauma. While these types of difficult aspects of the past can be vividly conveyed through many mediums (e.g., photographs), film in particular brings together the visual, audio, and character and narrative elements to promote an affective and emotional response in an audience. This is powerful in that it engages audiences vividly and deeply â but also can create difficult and traumatic engagements with representations of the past. In fact, decisions made by filmmakers to adhere more or less closely to the historical record is often driven by whether or not the director believes it will engage audiences â as entertainment or to challenge their understandings of the past.
This is what Walsh, Hicks, and van Hover refer to as affectively difficult history in Chapter 2 of this volume, as the medium itself is designed to engage affectively with the viewer and intended to elicit particular emotive effects, at least in its intended audience. The study of history can be emotive and controversial where there is actual or perceived unfairness to people by another individual or group in the past. This may also be the case where there are disparities between what is taught in school history, family/community histories, and other histories (see also, Epstein, 2009). Such issues and disparities create a strong resonance with students in particular educational settings (Historical Association, 2007, p. 3).
This trauma can sometimes emerge as a form of difficult history that groups do not want to face or acknowledge â or that they do not want to engage with because they are cognizant of the trauma these representations could induce. We have had many conversations with teachers, students, and colleagues about 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueenâs film adaptation of the story of a free African-American man who was kidnapped and enslaved for 12 years before being freed through the courts. Many potential white viewers see this film as difficult because of not just the violence and difficult imagery they imagine will be in the film but also the acknowledgment that this history existed and that complicity in, and benefits from, slavery went well beyond the borders of the southern states in the US. Potential African-American audience members, and especially males, have been hesitant to view the film for a different aspect of difficulty.
African Americans we spoke to in particular often worry about their own reaction to the trauma portrayed on screen and their own emotional response to the filmâs representations. This emotional response is grounded in the individual and collective experiences of African Americans who have descended from enslaved peoples and who still experience racial violence and discrimination today. This may be a way of âacting outâ historical trauma, or reliving the past in some way, even if they do not have direct memory (LaCapra, 2001). However, the intended audience of McQueen was likely those âworking throughâ and not acting out the trauma. These are people who need to create a distance to the history but also seek to understand the actions from the past and develop empathy with the potential of acquiring the âpossibility of being an ethical agentâ (LaCapra, 1998, p. 3).
Similarly, teachers may not be comfortable engaging students in difficult histories within divided societies, and therefore may resist incorporating multiple perspectives or interpretations in their teaching (Zembylas, 2016). In Chapter 4, for example, Britt explores the difficulty of representing the ongoing and challenging history of the IsraeliâPalestinian conflict â and the ramifications of this history for those involved as well as the broader global community invested in this conflict and its outcome.
Similarly, while recognizing the importance of teaching affectively difficult histories such as race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, predominantly middle class white teachers in the US may be uncomfortable connecting the Black Lives Matter movement and debates around the flying of the Confederate flag with the concept of the Civil Rights Movement in their future history classrooms. Similarly, teachers in Northern Ireland or Israel may hesitate to want to engage students in their countriesâ difficult pasts (Barton and McCully, 2005; Zembylas and Beckerman, 2008). These issues may be viewed as both affectively difficult as well as professionally difficult to teach in a way that engages students thoughtfully in these difficult pasts within communities that may not want all perspectives to be included in schools.
The example above of the type of trauma experienced by teachers has also been theorized through a framework of difficult knowledge (e.g., Garrett, 2011; Gaudelli, Crocco, and Hawkins, 2012), using this psychoanalytic framework to help analyze how teachers may experience these representations and how they make sense of the history being represented â and think about teaching it. However, the latter experience of imagery with ties to collective or cultural memory needs additional theorizing and pedagogical consideration. Though many teachers see the value for students, and especially white students, to acknowledge the challenging nature of slavery in the United States and how the benefits of slavery are endemic to the development of the country, what does this mean when students could feel a potential historical trauma from this difficult history, such as the examples of those African-American men that we have talked with?
History that Is Marginalized or Challenges the Official History Curriculum
There are numerous difficulties when it comes to the history curriculum in the US and in other parts of the world. These difficulties stretch from the ideological and nationalistic goals of history education to other objectives of history education, such as creating more humanistic citizens who can think critically. Of course, it has always been difficult even finding a place to start when deciding what to include or not include in any history course, or at what age students should engage in different historical content or concepts.
The history curriculum has traditionally been used to reinforce a national narrative and maintain the status quo (Barton and Levstik, 2004; Foner, 1998). Though creating citizens has always been the goal of history education, the difficult decision or debate has always been over what kind of citizen we would like that to be and about who gets to be a citizen. For the curriculum, any time teachers, states, or curriculum writers want to reframe or include history that has been left out or is on the margins, it is seen as a threat to the status quo.
For most teachers, the difficulty comes in their role as gatekeeper, with one foot in the âofficialâ curriculum and the other in making decisions about what else to bring in or in how to engage students in the history (e.g., transmission approach, inquiry) (Thornton, 1991). Other contextual factors such as high stakes testing or district level benchmark testing may also influence these decisions. Further, there is difficulty that emerges when teachers are not comfortable in teaching about certain issues they perceive to be difficult or controversial and therefore present an official account with little student engagement in the aspects of the history deemed as difficult. For example, the teachers using Amistad or Glory in the study we refer to in the introduction may be doing little to help students debrief or critique what they viewed in these films (Stoddard and Marcus, 2006).
While this research suggests that some teachers may use films to avoid their own role in teaching difficult history, other pedagogues have found film to be an effective curricular tool to engage students directly in difficult aspects of the past. This latter group of teachers uses film as a vehicle to engage students in controversial aspects of events such as the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, or the complexities of race, enslavement, and the Civil War (Marcus, Metzger, Paxton, and Stoddard, 2010). The primary goal of these teachers is not to transmit content but to engage students in historical empathy or to develop inquiry skills using different forms of historical evidence â including film. These topics are largely included in the official curriculum but are not often engaged in through marginalized perspectives.
Further, controversial or contested histories are difficult to navigate, especially when marginalized perspectives or views are rarely included in meaningful ways in the discussion. The knowledge and experiences of teachers or the contexts in which they teach may make some of these histories even more difficult. Similarly, issues related to gender, sexuality, and disability throughout history are difficult to incorporate thoughtfully into a curriculum and history that has long marginalized them (see Chapter 12 on portrayals of disability in film and Chapter 14 on films that represent LGBTQ history).
However, regardless of curriculum or the teacher as curriculum gatekeeper, there are also issue...
