Preface

This book is the end product of six years of reflection about the relationship between popular film and pedagogy. Exploring and researching film theory and cultural studies at the Film and Education Research Academy (FERA), Teachers College, Columbia University; I was very aware of just how fundamental cinematic questions were to a pedagogical understanding of educators’ reflective practices.

Traditional and current reflective models are important to analyze to be able to understand Habermas’s crucial theoretical framework of rational reconstructions. This is a theoretical approach that moves away from a solitary cognitive objective attitude to a more explicit subjective condition for the possibility of a valid reflection on certain types of phenomena. Furthermore, each chapter of this book will show that the knowing subject is also cultural; and that all knowledge is mediated by cultural experiences.

The overall commitment of the book is to no specific orientation, to no particular group, but to the pedagogical challenge to explore the questions provided by cinematic experiences and to what it may constitutes reflective practices in various professions. Nevertheless, it would be great if this book particularly speaks to the school teaching community, to those individuals who use cinema to enhance our learning experiences. The hope sustain throughout the book is that the work presented here will help to make the project accessible to an ever- increasing and worldwide group of students, teachers, scholars, and practitioners.