Teaching cultural literacies with films: Using the online platform Education on Screen in secondary school classrooms

Abstract

This case study presents the Estonian open access online platform Education on Screen. So far, the platform features two educational projects: Literature on Screen and History on Screen. Both projects are aimed at secondary school students and are balanced between a thorough treatment of a single film and a universal framework for discussing the topics of film adaptation of literary texts and the mediated construction of historical memory. The focus is thus both on film literacy and on film as a means for developing cultural literacies. The projects combine accessibly written theoretical discussions from the perspective of cultural semiotics, excerpts from films, materials relating to their production and reception, analytical tasks, and assignments for implementing individual creativity in multimodal forms. Finally, this paper includes some conclusions drawn from testing the platform with 230 students during 2017/18.