The tyrany of the visible and its geographical imaginations: about a cinematographic archive in school

Abstract

The requirement to display at least two hours a month of Brazilian films at school has brought up the discussion about how (and if) cinema has been used in schools. In 2016, research professors from the International Image, Geography and Education Research Network proposed a survey common to all the Network's centers (Brazil, Argentina and Colombia), through a basic questionnaire, in order to find out how Geography teachers were appropriating this new possibility in education. Which motivations lead teachers to show films in class? Which films are these and which geographical content are being raised? To understand the possible answers to these questions, we investigated the responses of 136 Brazilian teachers. Firstly, we consider the power of images and the reflections about them in geographic education, as well as working with a theoretical framework that is capable of thinking about the visibility regime that involves the presentation of films as a didactic resource or as an object of cultural expansion of students. Second, when dealing with the results of the research, we problematize the motivations for cinema at school, showing recurrences of themes, contents and films cited by the teachers, questioning the role of some spaces. In this sense, we observe how the films have the power to mark the geographic and cultural imagery of the students and, from there, we pay attention to the need to discuss the films presented, showing them as one of the points of view of reality, but not the only.