Learning from Escuela: Documentary Film as a Context for Teacher Learning

Abstract

This article reports on the design of a teacher education activity that involves the documentary film, Escuela, which was produced by Hannah Weyer. We describe this instructional design, highlighting how documentary film can be used strategically to create opportunities for teacher candidates to approximate the work of culturally relevant teaching.

Notes

¹ We are attentive to the multiple and varied terms used here, including “culturally relevant,” “culturally responsive,” and “culturally sustaining” teaching and pedagogy. As we draw heavily upon Ladson-Billings' conceptual and analytic frameworks we consistently use “culturally relevant” to frame this inquiry and analysis. Further, we have come back, again and again, to Ladson-Billings' argument that “culturally relevant pedagogy rests on three criteria or propositions: (a) Students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 160).