Winter 2018 – New Challenges in (Film)Education

Edited by Izabella Füzi

Conceptual problems

Education, pedagogy and academia – goals, principles, studies. Iterview with Benő Csapó

Psychological aspects of educational challenges. Interview with Éva Szabó

Szilvia Tóth-Mózer: Digital Learner Characteristics and Productive Learning Habits

The emergence of the digital generation (which is growing up surrounded by technology) in the school system has important implications for our ideas about pedagogy and everyday education. The term “digital natives” by Marc Prensky is widespread as it encompasses all the experience in which the youth surrounded by technology is different from the elderly. Although the theory of the “digital generation” is widely popular among laypeople, academics miss the empirical foundation of the theory, and even ordinary observations are considered to be valid (Seufert 2007, Schulmeister 2009, Bennett-Maton 2011). The digital native vs. digital immigrant confrontation is proved to be particularly useful in the world of school because of the significant differences between teachers and students that explain a number of difficulties that the millennial educators face with. The article focuses on the specificities of learning and teaching that are becoming more and more characteristic due to the expansion of digital technologies, provides learning preference patterns through an empirical study among Hungarian high school students, and concludes with pedagogical-methodological considerations.

László Hartai: Film Education for Generations Z and Alpha

The essay aims at formulating the topical problems of film education and thinks about the most useful ways to approach, in a new media context, the question of educating film to the generation born after 2005. A recent Hungarian study on the topic is analyzed with the conclusion that the goals of film education should be reformulated, and that the joint education of film and media in Hungarian secondary schools should be reconsidered.

Methodological challenges

Lívia Barts –Beja Margitházi: Pictured texts. A method for text visualization in (film) theory and (higher) education

The present article describes a new, experimental method designed to help the individual or collective interpretation processes of different theoretical texts. The ’text visualization method’ elaborated and applied by the authors is based on the hypothesis that theoretical argumentation can be mapped visually, and the visual transformation of the underlying structural pattern of a linear text helps to understand the key conceptual patterns of the respective discourse. After reviewing some of the general and current problems of film theory education at university level, the authors investigate the role of visualization in learning, reading and understanding processes, as well as the possibilities of its integration into individual and group work. The last chapter presents the characteristics of the text visualization method through the case study of reading Laura Mulvey’s famous Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) with three different undergraduate groups of film and media students.

Michael Aronson: Teaching Film and the Internet

The essay discusses the possibilities of teaching film in the age of the Internet. It introduces a number of alternatives to pedagogical methods, which change in the variety of the online resources, methods that can help students to find the right resources and to develop a good working method. It describes the advantages and disadvantages of the various online databases, softwares that are useful for education, and the interfaces to create different social networks that can be used by students for out-of-class activities.

Andrea Pócsik: E-utopias. Critical pedagogy, critical culture research and netgeneration

My ideas in this essay are based on three crucial factors. One, our social and political circumstances increased the responsibility of teachers, especially those who do critical pedagogy. Two, film (especially after the World War II) became a medium of complex influence on the social environment. Film studies have got multidisciplinary research agendas that are embedded in the knowledge and methodology of critical culture research. Three, the so-called netgeneration is used to new forms and styles of learning.

These changes motivated me to write about my conceptions about the challenges of film theory and film history teaching under transformation and argue for its new practice-based methodologies. Using my own researcher and teacher experiences I will point out one possibility, the useful approach of media archaeology. The closing part consists of a case study analysing two international projects of networking, KineDok and European University Film Award, and highlight the crucial importance of methodological innovations.

Imre Szíjártó: University Student’s Comprehension of Film

The article proposes to map up specific activities and strategies which university students employ in their comprehension of films. The analysed corpus includes the recordings of model seminars taught at the four faculties of the university chosen for the study, with the aim to develop students’ cinema comprehension skills, the transcripts of in-class discussions, and short analytical take-home essays submitted by students for seminars in film history and film analysis.