Teacher Filmmakers
Teacher Filmmakers
This chapter examines the development of amateur filmmaking interests among women teachers as independent producers working on their own and as professional women who found a niche for themselves in amateur filmmaking circles. The rise of cine interests among single teachers reflects specific social, economic and educational circumstances in Britain between the wars and discussion of how they filmed their pupils, colleagues, classroom and playground links to wider consideration of women's opportunities for paid employment, societal expectations and attitudes towards teaching as a legitimate extension of childcare. Films provide opportunities to explore historical representations of childhood and its archival significance. Teachers filmed school journeys and residential visits in and beyond Britain. Such material offers informal imagery of adolescence and adult companions in and away from classroom setting during years when Britain's educational system being redefined in response to the post-war raising of the school leaving age, intense debate on girls' education and the rise of youth culture. Teachers' films represent an under-explored wealth of personal and professional subjectivities and are reminders that while professional constraints limited individual ambitions for decades, filmmaking brought autonomy, challenge and recognition. Like their teaching, filmmaking also reflected their sense of service to others and teachers' enjoyment of what they did.
Keywords: teacher-pupil relations, school journeys, classroom practice, professional women, cine film production, visual memories, childhood
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
