1. RESEARCHING FILM EDUCATION:
What do we know? What don’t
we know? (a partial account)
Andrew Burn
Institute of Education, University of London
www.andrewburn.org
www.darecollaborative.net

2. WHAT DO WE KNOW?
2001 systematic review of
(Anglophone) moving image literacy
research
- Very little research (leapfrog victim?)
- Mostly snapshot case studies:
- of critical ‘reading’ of film, mostly in
secondary classrooms: analyses of:
-children’s reading and increasingly
making, in formal and informal
contexts
-pedagogies
-digital affordances
-Relation to media eduction, literacy,
arts in education

3. WHAT DO WE KNOW?
-Some larger studies:
-Children using the moving image to negotiate
cultural identity in migration (CHICAM, 2003)
-The making of film across the curriculum – eg
BECTA/bfi , 2002)
-Special Effects (2007)
-Gilje et al, followup study of young film-makers.

4. SOME RECENT UK WORK
-film-making can enable primary
children to build audiovisual
memories (Potter);
- Multimodal connections with
literature (Parker), drama (Durran),
games (Marsh; Parry, Burn,
Mackey)
Changing digital media practices,
cultures, genres, technologies:
Machinima (Burn)
Tablets – (Cannon, Potter)

5. So: WE KNOW
SOMETHING about the
MICRO picture: how
young people understand
and make film;
how this connects with
other communicative
practices and domains of
knowledge
Contexts of film
education
Pedagogies
technologies

6. WE DON’T KNOW:
mostly the MACRO picture
-The benefits of this across the
wider population – eg
comparing those who do have
opportunities for film
education with those who
don’t
-Learning progression over
time: what counts as progress;
assessment; pathways into HE,
the industry, etc.

7. WHAT DO WE KNOW IN EUROPE?
-A lot about the enormous diversity of
projects: film festivals, workshops, film
clubs, archive access programmes
-Curriculum structures: film in mother
tongue teaching, the arts, optional
courses, exam courses, etc
- National policies, strategies, guidance
-The involvement of the audiovisual
sector
-The training of teachers (or lack of it)
-The role of the national film agencies,
institutes, archives
-Preferred film cultures (national;
world; Hollywood)

8. WHAT DON’T WE KNOW IN EUROPE?
-Participation (unreliable data; guesstimates –
Hero to zero!)
-Attainment across large cohorts (almost no
data)
-Learning progression over time
-Long-term outcomes
-What counts as ‘good’ (cf Being Seen, Being
Heard study 2001)
-Coding and film-making
-‘Signature’ pedagogies
-Education and the archive: unlocking the
archive; archiving young people’s films

9. THE “3-CS”: have your
cake and eat it
CULTURAL
CRITICAL
CREATIVE
Popular culture
AND
Elite culture
Rhetorics
AND poetics
Imaginative poaching
AND original
production

10. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
-Longitudinal studies and large cohort
studies
-A new synthesis of the research across
Europe (translation; network)
-Multi-method study, combining close
textual analysis of young people’s work
with attitudinal surveys, interviews, and
data on take-up and progression – all
over time.

11. WHAT COUNTS AS ‘FILM’ ANYWAY?
- Moving image media (inc television, still in top 5 of
chosen media by EU teens)
- Games: moving image medium – animation, imaginary
worlds, powerful narratives, traffic between game and
film, machinima
- Mashups: the (not so) new aesthetic of Youtube:
parodic practice
- Cinematic ‘special effect’ – the work of the motion
capture, CGI and 3-D animation industries:
programming and coding and the arts in education.
- Mobile practices: filming, editing, uploading from
tablets and phones.