Teaching Psychology through film

This summer, Aesthetica – a BAFTA-qualifying international Film Festival based in York – teamed up with York St John University to hold a unique screening event. Scott Cole had the role of coming up with an appealing and stimulating programme for A-level and undergraduate psychology students.

Could we involve students in a curation and discussion panel, drawing on models of effective academic-students partnerships, as demonstrated by Living Labs (where partnering with students enables real-world research insights)? Could curation provide a unique opportunity for students to acquire new skills and experiences. Thankfully – despite some understandable trepidation – the students we invited agreed to work together to select some though-provoking films for their fellow students. The final panel consisted of an undergraduate, Masters and PhD student, with me co-ordinating the meetings and decision-making.

We decided to select six short films around the theme of 'Looking at times past to imagine the future'. Aesthetica founder-curator Cherie Federico gave an insightful seminar on curation, including a summary of how the hundreds of films were categorised from the 2021 Festival database (based on genre and theme), the importance of selecting a range of genres, and warning of 'The danger of a single story' (she recommended a fascinating TEDtalk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). We then selected the films, keeping a couple of questions in mind: 'does it provide a new or different perspective the audience might not be aware of?' and 'how many psychological theories, findings or methods could be highlighted by the film?". 

We agreed on showing the following films, covering documentary, music, animation, and drama genres:

• The Impatient Man who Made His Life Considerably Shorter (Normal Selzer, 2021, 10:27): A comedy highlighting the dangers of implusivity.
• 2020 Vision (Polonsky, 2020, 04:00): An emotive dance and spoken word piece about the UK lockdown.
• Mother Tongue (Qian, E, 2019, 09:52): A dark, emotive drama about a Chinese-speaking mother who can no longer communicate with her daughter due to dementia.
• Nostos Erda (Aguilera, 2020, 03:24): A futuristic vision when humans have depleted energy supplies and harness the energy in human sweat.
• Top Down Memory (Theiler, 2020, 12:20): A film involving dance, narration and music about the power imbalances in public spaces.
• The Promise (Thai, 2020, 06:44): Animation about the need for foresight to build hope in society.

The screening event

With excitement and nervousness building on a sunny June day, we greeted around 50 students from local Colleges as well as some of our current undergraduates, before they sat in a 'cinema-like' auditorium. Following brief introductions by our Head of Psychology, Dr Lorna Hamilton, and a representative from Aesthetica, the lights were dimmed, and the film-reel started. I sat and wondered: Did we find films that would say something meaningful about Psychology?

As lights went up, the panel assembled. What then happened was a person-by-person outline of our film selections, before making wider points. Lorna Hamilton started the discussions by asking 'How do memories relate to our identity?'. It was nice to be on safe ground with planned questions, but the varied audience questions sparked surprising, thought-provoking discussions (for example about how dreams affect memory and vice versa). Indeed, such discussions could be used to spark new research studies (Charles, 2017).

Post-event feedback showed that the event was enjoyed, with the audience highlighting the 'best bits' as being an accessible way to learn, and the fact that it incorporated different mediums (e.g. spoken word, visual animations). This made me wonder whether film could be a novel way to spark discussion in class.

Teaching through film?

Films are rarely used in educating students at university level, perhaps due to common critiques and misconceptions such as 'that's not proper teaching' or 'it takes too much time' (see Phillips, 2017). However, in a world full of attention-capturing social media distractions, isn't it time to engage students more in class?

Also, links between Art and Science disciplines are rare (expect for public exhibitions, such as the Wellcome Collection). The multidisciplinary nature of merging art and science is the reason students can find this engaging. Cherie's reflection on the project highlighted this: 'this is not normally a way to get students to have experiential learning around these themes, but it worked and in fact, it has a bigger impact due to its immediacy'.

How might these films inspire learning? From academic studies (e.g. Hemenover, et al., 1999), and my experience of this event, films lend themselves to 'case studies', for example, in 'Mother Tongue' where one person living with dementia lost her ability to speak a second language (preventing her to communicate with her daughter), sparking questions such as: How might it feel to have dementia? However, some films were able to demonstrate more theoretical concepts such as 'societal duty to others' (The Promise), 'impulsiveness' (Impatient Man who made his life considerably shorter) and even more 'inaccessible' topics such as 'hierarchical models of memory' (Top Down Memory).

After a successful pilot, our School has now decided to adopt regular Psychology Through Film events, including re-screening our June event. We are hoping this event will increase the sense of an academic community (something we strive for but rarely achieve!), and that readers will see the benefits of challenging themselves and the students by seeing how what we know can inform what we see, and vice versa.

As a primer, we invite psychology teachers to access a brief selection of Films from the film library kindly provided by Aesthetica. However, a serious realisation of this idea across the UK and abroad will require a genuine effort (and funding) to construct an accessible database, as vast and diverse as the one we were lucky to access this year.

About the author

Scott Cole, Associate Professor, York St John University
[email protected]

References

Charles, M. (2018). Teaching, in Spite of Excellence: Recovering a Practice of Teaching-Led Research. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 37, 15–29.

Phillips, R. (2017). Russell Crowe is a better teacher than you: Movies outperform paper assignments or teaching-as-usual. In W. S. Altman, L. Stein, & J. E. Westfall (Eds.), Essays from excellence in teaching., Vol. XVI. (pp. 1–4). Society for the Teaching of Psychology.

Hemenover SH, Caster JB, Mizumoto A. (1999). Combining the Use of Progressive Writing Techniques and Popular Movies in Introductory Psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 26(3),196-198.