Value education in schools: School cinema versus the moral science textbook

Pages: 339-342
Aswathi Mary Varghese (Amity School of Communication, Amity University)
Usha Raman (Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad)

In the decades since independence, Indian education has been the site of several attempts to make curricula more meaningful and relevant to the reality of Indian social and economic life. Education has been seen as an important tool of nation building, a space within which the citizen is moulded and shaped, with the values that are desirable in a modern, just and free society. Can Media Pedagogy be an element of the classroom practice, keeping in view the Indian education system? Media pedagogy is considered to be a cutting-edge form of pedagogy which is used by teachers to help students to deconstruct the messages they receive from mainstream media, and analyze them critically. So can we see media being used as a pedagogical tool to engage critical students? The research was centered around the examination of the ways in which media, particularly cinema (educational short films and documentaries), is used as a tool to impact learning outcomes. From the literature, it was gathered that the use of films as a medium to enhance moral learning among children is not something new or ground-breaking as it has been effectively and widely used all across the world. The study has been positioned on the use of film and video in classroom environments as tools to impart education at a time when the knowledge of video has been consistently demystified and where the best videos are available for teachers to use and for students to benefit from facilities which are free to use such as YouTube. As stated in the review of literature, the successful experiments have shown that the films can act as a strong force to bring about social change in the case of children. These experiments aimed at creating innovative and creative educational programmes to create a positive attitude towards formal education and also make education interesting, creative, reflective, purposive and stimulating. The present study aims to look at yet another controlled experiment, The School Cinema project, which aims at providing life skills based training for the children through short films and documentaries. The aim of the study is to find out “The effectiveness of School Cinema in imparting Value Education in comparison to a moral science textbook”. Another major aspect of the study is positioned to understand the relevance of films focused on children and on education in a country like India, which is considered as the world’s largest film-producing country and yet it produces very few films in this area. Explanatory research design form mixed methods of research for this study. The methodology is essentially divided into two stages and as the method suggests the quantitative stage is followed by the qualitative phase. Experimental research design is employed to get a clear understanding of the extent to which School Cinema has achieved the intended aims and objectives. The sample selection for the study is non-parametric which is representative/indicative of the population studied. Standard Deviation comparison is used to analyze quantitative data keeping in mind the small sample size.