The Close Up (Teaching Film through Mini-Lessons)

Recently at my school we began working with Professor Wayne Sawyer, the Director of Research in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. The goal of this collaboration has been to improve student writing by incorporating the 'mini-lesson' approach that was pioneered and refined by prize-winning American educator Nancie Atwell. 

Something Wayne Sawyer said to our faculty in our last meeting with him was that it's sometimes helpful to get students to think about creative writing in terms of how films are cut together, and it sparked an idea in me that was only, at best, tangentially related to our mini-lessons project. 

Teachers reading this might be familiar with that gap towards the end of Term 4 where all the junior assessments have been finished, and reports are written, and students are ready to move on to their next grade. At my school, we're often left with about 5 weeks. For some classes, we just continue with their current topic and explore a few areas that might be of interest to the students, or could help set them up for the following year. For Year 10 in particular, we have a space where it's teacher's choice to do a whole topic just for fun. 

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, I had a great Year 10 class last year who were fairly focused, so in their case I decided to do some stuff on the History of Cinema. This is a personal interest area for me as I used to write quite extensively about film before I was a teacher, so I took my students all the way back to the early days of silent cinema. This provided me with an opportunity to take a grass roots approach to teaching the actual mechanics of filmmaking. 

Here's where the mini-lesson stuff comes in. I've never used iPads in the classroom before and I discussed with the class how they felt about giving them a go (with the caveat that the technology might need to be troubleshooted a bit as we went [and it did]). I applied the mini-lesson approach to teach some film techniques, making use of the absolutely brilliant and excellent documentary series The Story of Film, by Irish film critic Mark Cousins. 

(SIDE BAR: I can't recommend Mark Cousins' The Story of Film enough. If you want to know anything about film, this should be your non-negotiable first stop.)

So the first thing thing I did was show the students a short clip from the documentary (included below, though I'm happy to take it down if anyone considers it a flagrant infringement of copyright). 

This clip concerns the point in film history where the concept of a 'Close Up' was first invented. We take the visual language of cinema for granted now, so it can be eye-opening and quite illustrative to get inside the process of how these techniques first came about, and what they really meant. The clip shows one of the very first known close-ups, a sequence where the camera cuts from a mid-shot of a little girl feeding a cat to a close-up of the cat itself and then back again to the little girl. This very short instructive lesson has one simple goal: teach the students about the function of the close-up and show them what a close-up looks like.

After showing this to the students, we then got the school's set of iPads and started filming. I gave them a sheet of instructions that outlined some options for creating some shots. The goal was to create a short mini-narrative with a sequence of shots that incorporated a close-up that would build story. The results were fantastic, and I hope to show some here on the blog after securing permission.

It was a very rewarding experience for both myself and the students. Here are the resources:

Clip: The Invention of Close Ups
Sheet: Close-Up Instructions

Teaching History Concepts: Cause and Effect

A cartoon depicting the European nations discussing the future of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884

I guess the first thing I should point out before I get stuck into this is that, at present, there is no History Continuum of Concepts and Skills for Stage 6.

That aside, the Continuum is still highly relevant when it comes to Year 11 and 12 students, so I tend to program for Preliminary and HSC Modern History with the top end of these concepts and skills in mind. In an ideal world, the more capable students in Year 11 Modern History would already have a solid grasp of the Stage 5 Concepts, but, as my fellow History teachers should know, this isn't always the case.

These are the concepts from the Continuum just in case you wanted to see them and didn't feel like googling it:

• Continuity and Change
• Cause and Effect
• Perspectives
• Empathetic Understanding
• Significance
• Contestability 

And the skills:

• Comprehension of chronology, terms and concepts
• Analysis and use of sources
• Perspectives and Interpretations
• Empathetic Understanding
• Research
• Explanation and Communication

As you can see, there's a bit of crossover because some of these are things that need to be understood and applied. I don't want to try and deconstruct or explain the whole continuum, instead, I thought I could use this as an opportunity to talk about just one concept and a way that I try to teach it to Preliminary students.

Cause and Effect in Modern Europe

A perfect example of where Cause and Effect can be taught is the mandatory Preliminary Modern History Core Study: The World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. During this topic students look at (among other things) the short and long term causes of World War I. Two such long term causes are Nationalism and Imperialism (I like to capitalise them in the hope that I impress upon my students how important these concepts are in understanding the subject).

These aren't exactly easy concepts to teach to 16 year-olds. One of the hoarier parts of understanding history is getting your head around the ideas that propel the big changes, and 19th Century Europe is absolutely gorged full of such 'big' ideas. Marxism, Nationalism, Imperialism, the Enlightenment, Egalitarianism, Industrialisation, Darwinism, Anarchism... these are the things that make Modern History so interesting and important. A student with a truly solid understanding of where these things come from will, mark my words, become a much more politically rounded and awakened adult. This is why History matters so much!

Ahem. Sorry, I'll get off that soapbox now.

The activity is relatively simple. Students are shown a timeline of European events between 1000 and 1914 (the resource can be found at the bottom of this page). This timeline is fairly broad and aims to draw multiple lines of cause and effect leading up to the outbreak of World War I. The thing with History is that 'cause and effect' is arguably quite subjective. This is why we continue to contest the major causes of World War I. So what I wanted to do with this activity is have students come up with their own causal relationships between events. Anyway, these are the events:

A. 1000-1790: Europe ruled over by monarchies.

B. 1600-1830: Europe uses slave labour to build colonies overseas.

C. 1790: The French Revolution

D. 1800s: French Republic

E. 1830-1850: Slavery outlawed.

F. 1850: Revolutions throughout Europe.

G. 1871: Various smaller European states form into the nation of Germany.

H. 1860-1900: Austro-Hungarian Empire struggles with smaller ethnic groups within Empire.

I. 1870-1914: The major European countries reach various levels of industrialisation.

J. 1884: The Berlin Conference

K 1885-1900: The Scramble for Africa.

L. 1900-1914: European Empires stretch out across the world.

By this point in the core topic, students will already have been taught most of these things. Their goal now is to join them up to each other.

The question that accompanies this timeline is: How do each of these events/eras connect to each other? Write an explanation of how each dot point connects or changes into another.

Theoretically, students could connect any of these dots to any of the others (within reason). One example given on the sheet is the 1790 entry.

EG. 1790: French Revolution - The French become the first European nation to reject their aristocracy, leading to the execution of the French royal family (this links to Event A)

Other examples, not included on the sheet, could be:

• Linking K to J. 
• Linking the revolutions of c. 1850 (oft-called the 'Springtime of the Peoples') to the success of C or D.
• Drawing parallels between the self-determination of ethnic groups in H with the birth of French nationalism in C.
• The rules of the Berlin Conference (J) and their relationship with the outlawing of slavery (E)
• The outlawing of slavery (E) resulting from the charter created by the French people in C.
• Linking L to I.

And so on. There are a lot of other opportunities for connections to be made, and I was surprised at some of the ideas that my students were able to identify in the timeline. The main point was that the students were able to come up with their own 'cause and effect' relationships, which demonstrates the subjective nature of History when it comes to this kind of stuff. It's very historiographical too, which should help set some students up nicely for Extension History in Year 12.

Click to Save/Download - Resource: Cause and Effect