Sociology: Coming to Life on Videocassettes

My wife, two adolescent sons, and I love to go to the
movies together. Viewing and discussing movies are
two of our most treasured activities as a family. Many
of the students in my classes are also avid movie fans;
teenagers and young adults comprise a majority of
today’s movie audiences.

Two of our greatest ongoing challenges as college
instructors are making our classes as fascinating and as
relevant to students’ personal and academic lives as
possible. In order to meet these challenges, I decided
to show my students three- to eight-minute segments
of recent full-length feature films on videocassette.
Obviously, time limitations prevent me from showing
entire one- to two-hour movies to the classes. The
students seem delighted to occasionally watch a brief
vignette frorn a favorite box-office attraction. When the
students view a short passage from a film such as
Dances With Wolves, they react positively. It is as if they
were encountering old friends again and were remi-
niscing about cherished memories of the past. I show
these short segments of recent movies in order to
capture my students’ attention, to generate enthusiasm,
to illustrate sociological concepts, to provide visual
reinforcement for cognitive and affective learning, and
to encourage students to appreciate the cinema as an
art form. It is my hope that sociology will come to life
before their eyes. :

In my Introduction to Sociology class, students
observe a domineering father planning and controlling
his adolescent son’s life in the film Dead Poets Society.
Can you imagine how an overwhelmingly adolescent
audience of college students identifies with the young
man, Neil, in this story and emotionally responds to his
feelings of powerlessness? In the movie Emerald Forest,
students meet a teenage boy who has been adopted by
the inhabitants of a lost Amazon tribe and who experi-
ences a rite of passage as he makes the painful transi-
tion from boyhood to manhood. As the students
empathize with Tommy’s ordeal, we as a class explore
the purposes of these rituals for young people past and
present. The sociological concept of Gemeinschaft—a
small, closely-knit, well-integrated community—is
beautifully illustrated in the movie Witness, as students
watch Old Order Amish neighbors raise a barn in a day
ona young couple’s farm. The fantasy Cocoon demon-
strates that older Americans can and do experience full,
rich, and exciting lives. Viewing scenes from this film
leacis to a lively discussion of our society’s collective
negative images of the elderly. Stereotypes of the past

are challenged, while empathy for the aged is fostered.
In the first minutes of the movie The Gods Must Be
Crazy, students encounter a young Bushman from the
Kalahari Desert of southern Africa who is totally
perplexed by a Coke bottle which he discovers on the
desert floor. Removed from the context of modern
civilization, this strange “artifact” loses its original
purpose and meaning and becomes a puzzling “gift
from the gods.” Who can forget the character of
McMurphy, played so convincingly by Jack Nicholson,
in the Academy Award-winning film One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest? Scenes from this movie powerfully
illustrate the “resocialization” of a patient in the “total
institution” of a mental hospital. McMurphy’s struggle
against the hospital staff leads us to debate the moral
and ethicai dilemmas of reconstructing an individual’s
personality against his will.

Vee

Used skillfully, appropriately, and selectively, this
technique provides the instructor with unlimited
Opportunities to bring the social sciences to life in the
minds of students. The ultimate reward comes when
students begin to share fresh new examples of socio-
logical concepts from the world of the cinema. It is
then that the instructor knows that students are begin-
ning to see their old familiar world through the lens of
the sociological perspective.

Jonathan C. Brown, Instructor, Sociology
For further information, contact the author at

Greenville Technical College, P.O. Box 5616,
Greenville, SC 29606-5616.

 

Suanne D, Rousche, Editor

October 11, 1991, Vol. XI, No. 23

©The University of Texas at Austin, 1991
Further duplication is permitted by MEMBER
institutions for their own personnel,

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS is a publication of the Natonal Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD),
Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, EDB 348, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
78712, (512) 471-7545. Funding in part by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation. Issued weekly
when classes are in session during fall and spring terms. ISSN 0199-106X.

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