![]() This study found also that black teachers are more frequently depicted in film from the mid-1980s onwards and popular images of black school teachers are predominantly male and middle class. A great number of them are based on real events and personal accounts of teachers, often crossing national boundaries and going to the past in order to narrate the experiences of black teachers and to talk about racial inequalities. In this interdisciplinary approach, these movies unveil racist stereotypes and ideological trends that are enforced and duplicated by popular media, very often at crucial historical and political times of racial relations and educational debates. The entire stories take place in secondary schools and are the classics The Blackboard Jungle (1955, USA) and To Sir with Love (1967, UK), Lean on me (1989, USA), Sarafina! (1992, USA & South Africa), Shoot the Messenger (2006, UK) and Freedom Writers (2007, USA). The teaching narratives of four black and two white teachers were addressed historically and intertextually by deriving evidence from diverse scholars, film critiques, box office covers and the comparative study of the popular texts themselves. As an outcome of content analysis and critical viewing of more than twenty movies, a sample of six features and TV movies were selected based on their racial significance inscribed on the central role of teacher. Within the framework of cultural studies and critical race theory, movies on black teachers are the focus of my consideration. ![]() The limited research with regard to „race‟, education and popular culture indicates that Hollywood cinema and TV portray the white as saviour hero and the African American or Black British characters as representative of the „other‟ teacher. This character has often been analysed in terms of gender, rarely class, race and ethnicity and there are even fewer accounts on sexuality. Teachers and students‟ representations in popular culture have long been the subject of different scholars and disciplines showing a distinctive interest in the central character of the school teacher in the world of film. In this study, I searched for representations of 'black teachers' through popular media stories. ![]() This analysis illustrates how film reviews operate as mediating voices between producer and consumer, and in so doing, the interpretations of the film serve as “common-sensed” mappings of the contested terrain of contemporary race relations. These interpretations equate non-whites with pathological and dysfunctional traits, frame hard work as a white normative characteristic, and construct deterministic views of both Hollywood’s ability to represent progressive racial representations and the educational system’s potential. Reviewers rely upon specific cultural frameworks to both contest and reproduce the notion of a “post-racial” society. Drawing on the reviews of a feature film with implicit racial content, produced in the context of a supposedly “color-blind” era, this article documents how reviewers constitute a racialized interpretive community. This article documents the collective interpretations of film reviewers a position typically associated with individual aesthetic judgment rather than socially shared scripts of explanation. The focus on marginalized populations strengthens the argument by virtue of addressing challenging cases where this second kind of reflection is even more critical to one's development. The analysis advances received scholarship by differentiating between introspection about oneself and reflection on the societal relations within which one is positioned. Echoing Foucault as well as Vygotsky, the article demonstrates how diaries and narrations by young women written in different educational contexts promoted different forms of communication between teachers and students as well as qualitatively distinct modes of reflection. These materials stem from my own ethnographic research that took place at an experimental vocational school in Germany in 20, and an a posteriori analysis of a school project that took place at the Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California from 1994 to 1998. ![]() It contrasts exemplary materials from two research projects at schools where students share experiences of social exclusion, poor performance in mainstream educational settings, economic challenges, and family-related problems. This article elaborates on different modes of reflecting and on the significance of these differences for educational and educational-psychological practice. ![]()
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