Abstract:

Screening motion pictures is a common practice shared by history teachers. Yet, most of them use films as a break, a “time out”, in their teaching which is based on textbooks and written primary and secondary texts. In the following presentation we discuss a course designed for preservice history teachers and whose aim was to take motion pictures seriously (Mathias,2007). There are good reasons to introduce such an approach today. First of all , we live in an age in which the visual is prevailing in our culture. Secondly, motion pictures ,(also called ”historiophoty” ) ,consist today a legitimate field of inquiry within the historians’ community . Motion pictures are of course different than writing and doing inquiry of the past but both provide legitimate kinds of historical knowledge. (Rosenstone ,1988). And last but not least, educational research proves that a deep understanding of history requires an acquisition and use of certain cognitive dispositions and second order concepts which transcend factual content knowledge. (Donovan&Bronsfard,2006 ).

Discussion:
The preoccupation of the course with popular films (in Israel or internationally ) , introduced a whole range of questions on the epistemological foundations and cognitive disposition which underlie historical knowledge. Above all it attracted our attention to the constructive nature of historical knowledge. We realized also that the encounter with the past in films may serve the development of empathy, the conception of history as narrative and films as signifiers of collective memory.

These topics are at the focus of the course proposed:
1. Historical films help to develop empathy toward the human protagonists of the past and make sense of their world . It is a basic mental faculty due to which we get understanding of minds of people whose conditions, values and culture are different than ours.
2. Narratives: It is through narratives that our mind encounters the world and draws its meaning. Historical narratives are an interpretation of the past and the way we make sense of it. They are stories, on events and human agents which occurred in a certain place and time and unfolded gradually from a beginning to their end. To understand them requires to retrace their narrators, their point of view and the forms in which they choose to tell them ( narration).
3. Collective memory and films: films are quite often vehicles of collective memory . We paid attention to how films produce a “bank” of visual images which turn into cultural capital and are integrated into collective memory of past.

References:
[1] Donovan and Bransford J. D. (editors). 2005. "How Students Learn- History". National Research Council". Washington D.C.: The National Academy press.
[2] Marcus.A.& als 2010.teaching history with films, strategies for secondary social studies,N.Y: Routledge.
[3] Mathias, Y. 2007. Cultivating Historical literacy in a post literate age. Journal of research in teacher education 4, 37-54.
[4] Rosenstone,R.(ed).1995.Revisioning history –film and the construction of the past ,Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[5] Stearns, P. Seixas, P. S.. Wineburg. (editors).2000.”Knowing, teaching, and Learning History – national and international perspectives”. New York: New York University Press.

Keywords:

Historiography, visual history, cognitive dispositions and second order historical concepts, empathy, narratives, collective memory, films and their bank of visual images.