Using films for teaching methodology

New generations of students grew up with the TV, from the beginning of their life. One of the many gaps between students and teachers is that the latter met TV in the teenager age. There are several studies which show the role of TV (as well as computer and play station) in the development of cognitive processes. So there are some grounded reasons to believe that students and teachers (especially the old ones as… us) perform different cognitive processes. Students in class are quite similar to a TV audience, even because the design of the classroom recalls the theatre (TV or movie) metaphor where the teacher is the performer and the students the passive audience. Because of the differences (between students and teachers) in reasoning, understanding and attention levels due to a different exposure to TV, teachers have to re-new their teaching methods to capture students’ interest, attention and passion. Some new technologies (as PowerPoint software) help in succeeding this task. However we need to enlarge and enrich our tool-box in a direction that meets the TV audience format. One way is to teach methodological issues through movies. I will show some examples how to treat and discuss ethic dilemmas, the limit of observation, the myth of objectivity, the problem of intrusiveness and so on, through some films as Kitchen Stories (made by the Norwegian director Bent Hamer in 2003) and Kinsey (made by the American director Bill Condon in 2004 chronicling the life of the controversial American sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey).