The Hollywood Curriculum

MARY M. DALTON is Professor of Communication and Film and Media Studies at Wake Forest University. She is the co-editor of Screen Lessons: What We Have Learned From Teachers on Television and in the Movies and of The Sitcom Reader: American Re-viewed, Still Skewed with Laura R. Linder. In addition to her scholarly work in the area of critical media studies, she is a documentary filmmaker and a media critic.

The third edition of this book analyzes over 165 films distributed throughout the United States over the last 80 years to construct a theory of curriculum in the movies that is grounded in cultural studies and critical pedagogy. The portrayal of teachers in popular motion pictures is based on individual efforts rather than collective action and relies on codes established by stock characters and predictable plots, which precludes meaningful struggle. These conventions ensure the ultimate outcome of the screen narratives and almost always leave the educational institutions - which represent the larger status quo - intact and dominant. To interrogate "the Hollywood curriculum" is to ask what it means as a culture to be responsive to films at both social and personal levels and to engage these films as both entertaining and potentially transforming.