Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets, and Democratic Education: Examining Representations of Students, Teachers, and Education in Hollywood Feature Film

What does it mean to teach and be taught? How have we come to know what schooling is? And, how/should we challenge pervasive, and oftentimes troubling representations of schooling, teaching, and students? Taking Hollywood feature film as our inquiry into education and schooling, this proposal presents a course that has been offered since 2011 at both the graduate and undergraduate level. As co-developers of this course as graduate students, we have both since adapted the course and implemented it in a variety of ways and formats. While the course content has been relatively constant (using Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets Society, and Blackboard Jungle), additions of Clueless, School of Rock, Mean Girls, and Fist Fight have augmented discussions of race and class, to include issues of gender and sexual identity. Finally, we will conclude our presentations by discussing and reflecting upon the documentary filmmaking assignment students engaged in for their final project in the course