Toward Structural Attribution: Using Détournement With Preservice Teachers to Challenge the Teacher Savior Myth
Ashley Boyd and Amy Senta
Abstract This paper explores how détournement, a short film consisting of juxtapositions of existing media, can be used in teacher education to challenge dominant myths in popular educational discourse. The authors describe how the pairing of clips from contrasting documentaries affected students’ perspectives. Students’ forum comments pre and post viewing were analyzed through layers of initial, deductive, and focused coding. Findings include students’ shifts from stances of teacher savior to perspectives on structural responsibility, from reliance on meritocratic ideals to awareness of broader inequity, and from uncritical acceptance of appeal to emotion in media to the articulation of cinematographic choices. Authors believe that this self-study informs efforts in teacher education for drawing upon media studies to facilitate critique.
Author Bios Ashley Boyd is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Culture, Curriculum and Change area. After obtaining her BA in English and her MAT in English Education both at UNC-Chapel Hill, she taught high school English in eastern North Carolina for five years. She then returned to graduate school to explore her interests in critical media literacy and to further investigate systemic inequities in schools. She currently works as the organizing research assistant for a professional development program for in-service teachers at UNC. Her dissertation research focuses on teachers’ social justice literacies in three middle and secondary English classrooms.
Amy Senta is a doctoral candidate in the Culture, Curriculum and Change area at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of concentration include social foundations of education, qualitative research methods, and teacher education. After obtaining her A.B. in Sociology at Dartmouth College, she taught for six years at a public elementary school in Durham, North Carolina. Schooling inequities compelled her to begin graduate work in social foundations in 2008. Amy’s dissertation emerged from a four-year ethnography of a writing and film-making group that she facilitated with 24 youth as they moved through elementary and middle school. In the dissertation she articulates students’ film scenes in order to explore their critiques of schooling’s silencing.