Lesson 12: The Power of Film Video and TV in the classroom

 

On average, children watch over twenty-five hours of television per week. This alarming statistic is not surprising, especially to educators who often compete with television for the students' time and attention. Granted, Christian educators must battle the negative effects of this medium. However, they should also recognize its positive effects and enlist videos as an imposing ally in the cause of Christian education.

Films are powerful communicators because a person remembers five times more of what he hears and sees (as opposed to what he only hears). The visual element gives the motion picture its special impact; and the bigger the image, the greater the impact. Yet the visual element is often neglected when people show videos. The VHS video format provides a convenient and economical means for distribution, but the effectiveness of video depends greatly on how it is used. Each viewer must be able to hear and see the video in order for it to communicate.

But as with any tools, they must be used skillfully. Too often, instructors fail to explore the full potential of video and film. They show movies to avoid an onerous lecture or to fill up time when a faculty member must miss class. The tendency is to turn off the lights and turn on a video—so-called teaching, but without a challenging lesson plan to engage students in active analysis and interpretation. Such "video babysitting" is the reason why the use of film and video in the classroom is often rightfully criticized.

Students' reaction to the use of film and video can also be an obstacle. Today's students have been trained since infancy to sit passively in front of the television set, causing them to tend to take in entertainment movies, instructional videos, and documentaries alike without contemplation or questioning of the images and ideas being presented. Such conditioning, combined with the reputation of video babysitting, can cause students to assume that courses that extensively use visual media are intended to be easy. This reaction can make for a self-fulfilling prophesy, with students collectively inferring that because little effort is expected, then little effort is what they put out.