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Education in motion: Uses of documentary film in educational research

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Education in motion: uses of

documentary film in educational
research
a b a
Paul Warmington , Angelo Van Gorp & Ian Grosvenor
a
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
b
Centre for the History of Education, University of Leuven,
Leuven, Belgium

Available online: 02 Aug 2011

To cite this article: Paul Warmington, Angelo Van Gorp & Ian Grosvenor (2011): Education in
motion: uses of documentary film in educational research, Paedagogica Historica, 47:4, 457-472

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 Paedagogica HistoricaAquatic Insects
Vol. 47, No. 4, August 2011, 457–472

Education in motion: uses of documentary film in educational

research
Paul Warmingtona*, Angelo Van Gorpb and Ian Grosvenora
a
School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK; bCentre for the History
of Education, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
(Received 22 October 2010; final version received 11 May 2011)
Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 05:07 08 August 2011

This paper explores the challenges for social and cultural historians of education
of using documentary films on schools and schooling as a research resource. It
draws upon the outcomes of the British Academy-funded Documentary Film in
Educational Research project, an international study that focused on developing
methodological frameworks for researching school documentaries. The paper
offers definitions of the notion of documentary and considers the range of styles
and forms that constitute “school documentaries”. Among the salient methodo-
logical issues examined is the potential for documentary film to be used both as
a source and an object of study. These multi-dimensional possibilities raise a
series of questions about different status and usages of documentary footage
according to research context and about the myriad social, production, genre
and technological contexts in which readings of school documentaries are
embedded. The paper argues the need for historians of education to develop
networks that can contribute not only to academic study of school documenta-
ries but also to the urgent work of archiving and circulating films.
Keywords: documentary; film; television; visual archives; research methods

It is not the literal past, the “facts” of history that shape us, but images of the past
embodied in language . . . we must never cease renewing those images.1

I don’t believe that a period of history – a given space of time – my life – your life
. . . contains within it one “true” interpretation just waiting to be mined. But I do
believe that it may contain within it several possible narratives . . . and those ways are
determined by the needs and demands and the expectations of different people and
different eras.2

*Corresponding author. Email: [Link]@[Link]

1
Brian Friel, Translations (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 66.
2
In Brian Friel, Making History (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 15–16, Irish rebel leader
Hugh O’Neill finds himself caught between reality and representation in his encounters with
his biographer, Peter Lombard, who utters these words in an attempt to explain the complex
relationship between writer, subject and audience that pervades the documenting of history.
Friel’s earlier play, Translations, also explores these historical dynamics and what John Gri-
erson once termed, “the creative treatment of actuality”. We take for granted that “images of
the past” are not only embodied in language but in the visual also.

ISSN 0030-9230 print/ISSN 1477-674X online

Ó 2011 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2011.588239
[Link]
 458 P. Warmington et al.

Introduction
These epigraphs may be better received by some historians than others. Either way,
they perhaps offer some clues as to why documentary films, despite the salient role
they have played in depicting schools and schooling since the 1930s, remain an
under-used resource among historians of education.3 For, in accepting documentary
films as a valid historical source, we pitch ourselves into the cracks between “real-
ity” and “representation”, into what Stella Bruzzi has termed the “negotiation
between reality, on the one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other”.4
This paper is not the first to advocate the use of audio-visual sources by social and
cultural historians. However, despite some innovative historical research,5 we would
argue that school documentaries are still lodged in the space described by the medi-
cal historian Kelly Loughlin, having “yet to pass from the limbo of being simply
dated into the academically accredited realm of historically significant and routinely
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consulted sources”.6 The growth, since the 1990s, of visual research within the his-
tory of education has tended to favour still images over documentary film. Con-
versely, the body of film studies literature on documentary film has paid little
attention thus far to representations of education.7 This paper offers an extended
tracking shot (think of the long take that opens Touch of Evil) of an inchoate
research field. Our setting is partially familiar: debates about how, as historians of
education, to approach and assess “the potential of an avalanche of sources”.8 The
back story is gradually outlined (in our British Academy-funded project, Documen-
tary Film in Educational Research) and narrative conflict emerges. The narrative
unfolds via a series of takes on the challenges of approaching school documentaries
as a historical source. That is, how might we develop historical readings of the net-
works of context, production and reception; the relations between the visual and
aural; and the dialectic between reality and image that constitute documentary films
on schools and schooling?

3
The research project from which this special issue emerged aimed to contribute to redress-
ing this deficit. We wish to acknowledge the valued support of the British Academy in fund-
ing the study, Documentary Film in Educational Research: Producing Methodologies.
4
Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 4.
For a wider ranging consideration of textuality in the writing and interpretation of histories
of education, see Sol Cohen, Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of
Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
5
See, for instance, Peter Cunningham, “Moving Images: Propaganda Film and British Educa-
tion 1940–45”, Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000): 389–406; Karl Catteeuw, K. Dams,
Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon, “Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Bel-
gium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources”, in Ulrike Mietzner, Kevin
Myers, and Nick Peim, eds., Visual History: Images of Education (Bern, Switzerland: Peter
Lang, 2005), 303–32.
6
Kelly Loughlin, “The History of Health and Medicine in Contemporary Britain: Reflections
on the Role of Audio-visual Sources”, Social History of Medicine 13, no. 1 (2000): 131.
7
Ian Grosvenor, “From the ‘Eye of History’ to ‘a Second Gaze’: The Visual Archive and the
Marginalized in the History of Education”, History of Education 36, nos. 4–5 (2007): 607–
22, is among recent explorations of visual sources in educational research. Jon Prosser, ed.,
Image-based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers (London: Falmer, 1998),
draws together a useful selection of research from across disciplines, including some writing
on film.
8
Loughlin, “The History of Health and Medicine in Contemporary Britain”.
 Paedagogica Historica 459

Documentary Film in Educational Research: aims and methodology

The articles contained in this special issue grew out of a British Academy-funded
research study conducted in 2009–2010. The aim of the Documentary Film in Edu-
cational Research project (DFER) was to build upon emergent approaches to utilis-
ing school documentaries in historical research on education. DFER was organised
around a series of three workshops (in Belgium, England and Scotland),9 led by a
core research team of nine academics drawn from the Universities of Birmingham,
Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leuven, Ghent and Lisbon. In the workshops, colleagues
from each university presented and offered historical analysis of documentary films.
The project also drew upon the critical contributions of an art historian, a historian
of film and a film archivist; their responses to the six main articles in this collection
are included in this issue as a series of “Afterwords”. The analyses and debates that
emerged from the workshops encompassed both “intrinsic” analyses of the form
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and content of each film and “extrinsic” analyses, in which the films, separately and
comparatively, were used to explore methodological questions. The first methodo-
logical challenge concerned the two-fold nature of film as a resource in historical
research. In some cases, school documentaries might be utilised as a source (of
information) in studying particular periods, policies, practices and ideologies in edu-
cation. In other instances, films might become objects of research, to be studied for
their representational and technical features. For instance, how might school docu-
mentaries aim to direct society’s and individuals’ self-observation? What kinds of
definitional or representational power have school documentaries exerted? What
kinds of intersection between educational, political and media logics can be identi-
fied? Second, DFER aimed to develop understandings of the status of documentary
film artefacts as data sources. This involved questions about, for example, the extent
to which film footage might act as a sufficient “stand-alone” source or else might
rely upon “triangulation” with other sources, via accumulation of extensive contex-
tual detail. The notion of “context” was itself multi-dimensional; we might refer to
particular social contexts but also to cinematic and televisual contexts. For example,
what film genres, visual grammar and technological devices might a school docu-
mentary made in the 1930s draw upon, in comparison with a film made in the
1990s?
The overarching aim of the DFER workshops was to consider which analytical
frameworks might best further understandings of relationships between documentary-
makers’ intentions, their historical contexts, the forms and technologies of their work,
contemporaneous audience receptions and trans-historical readings. These workshops,
to which a small number of research students, film archivists and interested academics
were invited, produced collective (though not consensual) analyses. Our objective
was to produce a special edition journal and website materials that offered methodo-
logical frameworks useful both to experienced academics and novice researchers.
Prior to the workshop series, the DFER team had agreed, for the purposes of the pro-
ject, provisional definitions and boundaries, in order to ensure an operable, rather than
exhaustive, range of possible film sources. Thus our definition of “school documenta-
ries” incorporated three salient genres: commercially produced cinema documenta-
ries; locally produced documentary film not intended for commercial use; and

9
We wish to thank the academics and doctoral students who attended the DFER workshops
and seminars in Ghent, Birmingham and Edinburgh for their support and critical engage-
ment.
 460 P. Warmington et al.

television documentaries. The earliest material we examined was produced in the

1930s; the most recent documentary was from 2008. The workshops began, in Ghent,
with examples from all three genre categories, drawn from English archive collec-
tions. Thereafter, members of the international project team selected films from all
four national sites (Belgium, Portugal, Scotland and England). In total, eight films
were collectively viewed and analysed. The films included both those in which
schooling was the producers’ intrinsic focus (films that focused on aspects of educa-
tional policy, theory, practice or experience) and also documentaries that had a school
setting but approached the school as a microcosm of wider social issues and debates.
Outside of the workshops, the research team also began the work of creating “filmog-
raphies”: identifying existing films on education and collating and cataloguing pro-
duction details. Clearly, this was only a tentative step towards the national indexes of
school documentaries that we would like to help work toward.
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We do not claim that either our selection of genres or our combination of

national sites exhausts the definition of “school documentaries”. We did not, for
example, include examples of reality television or historical reconstructions
(although these would be valid objects of future research). All of our films were
European in origin. During the course of the project, we considered extending our
viewing to include colonial period documentaries that offered “official” depictions of
education in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean but felt that the proliferation of issues that
would be raised could not be dealt with adequately within the practical limitations of
the DFER project. We also considered, for this special issue, including additional
contributions by researchers from other countries. However, we agreed that a valu-
able coherence was provided by organising the issue around the work of those who
had collaborated over an extended period on the DFER project and that this should
take precedence over bolting-on additional contributions. The diversity of the team,
given its modest size, should also be noted. The team was drawn from four national
sites and was also diverse in terms of its disciplinary range (including academics
from sociological and cultural studies backgrounds, as well as historians – and
including professional archivists, as well as academics among its invitees). Within
our national and disciplinary boundaries there were also other different positions that
should be acknowledged. There are marked historical, political and systemic differ-
ences between schooling in England, Scotland, Belgium and Portugal; indeed, even
the English and Scottish sectors are distinct education systems. At particular points
in the research tensions in ethnic and gender positionality also became apparent,
sometimes in ways that were not easily resolved in the workshops. Understandings
of what might constitute an “emotional response” to a film or understandings of edu-
cational and social “context” are sinewed by experiences of gender, class and raciali-
sation, as well as disciplinary perspectives. However, the purpose of the project was
not to make claims for definitive or consensual understandings but to begin to depict,
to imagine, a field of research, with myriad possibilities for future studies.
It is also worthwhile offering a brief note on the origins of the DFER team’s
interest in the potential of documentary film as research data. As historians of edu-
cation, several members of the team have a longstanding interest in visual research
and related archival sources. This interest in image-based research has been
explored in recent years through Network 17 of the European Conference on Edu-
cational Research (ECER). In addition, around the time that the DFER study was
proposed and initiated, there were other events that exerted an influence on the pro-
ject’s focus. Principal among them was an exhibition of an art installation in late
 Paedagogica Historica 461

2008 at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, which featured work by the pio-
neering New Zealand video artist, Darcy Lange (1946–2005).10 In 1976–1977
Lange conducted video research in schools in Birmingham and Oxfordshire, filming
classroom activities. Lange then used his initial video footage as a stimulus tool,
playing the videos back to pupils and teachers, discussing them and video-recording
the participants’ responses. In the Ikon exhibition, classroom footage and partici-
pants’ video-recorded reflections were intercut and presented in an installation, com-
prising facsimiles of school spaces (screens set on “classroom” rows of school
desks, a mock-up of a school assembly hall used as a projection screen). Mercedes
Vicente comments that Lange’s video practice “could arguably belong to the tradi-
tion of social documentary, given his aspirations of raising awareness and potential
agency for his subjects . . . however . . . as a pioneer of video, the origins and devel-
opment of Lange’s practice parallel that of the medium itself ”.11 The Ikon exhibi-
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tion had a marked influence on our interest in the diverse potential of school
documentaries as research data. Here was a video display that, in both design and
content, pushed boundaries between ethnography, intervention and the creative arts
(exemplifying in certain respects the notion of “cultural learning” that is currently
emergent in education in the UK). Lange recorded aspects of school life in the
1970s but also offered reflexive, agentive spaces for participants. His documentation
of school life used technology in ways that drew attention to genre, to emergent
video techniques and to struggles over the ownership of representation. These
dimensions, and the problems and issues embedded in them, all became recurrent
themes within the DFER project.

Documentary: forms, functions and contestation

As Dirk Eitzen has remarked, it is now 80 years since the Scottish film director John
Grierson first used the term “documentary” to describe his work yet “the definition of
the term remains a vexed and controversial issue, not just among film theorists but
also among people who make and watch documentaries”.12 In the Anglophone world,
Grierson retains a spectral presence in the field of documentary film. However, even
an “incontrovertible” statement such as this draws our attention to some of the same
contentious practices that pervade documentary-making itself, wherein “fact”, “argu-
ment” and “persuasion” are bound together and the positions of film-makers and audi-
ences alike determine the ways in which issues and events are framed, populated and
made significant. After all, we could just as easily begin our brief survey of documen-
tary’s forms and functions a decade earlier, with reference to Robert Flaherty’s
Nanook of the North or the work of Dziga Vertov in the early Soviet period. Indeed,
Jeremy Hicks describes Vertov’s “kino-pravda” movement (translated by Hicks as
“cine-eye” – or “kino-eye”13) in terms strikingly similar to those often used in relation
to Grierson. For Hicks, the example of early Soviet journalism:
10
Details on the Ikon Gallery’s exhibition of Darcy Lange’s video art can be accessed at
[Link]/programme/current/event/263/work_studies_in_schools/
11
Mercedes Vicente, ed., Darcy Lange: Study of an Artist at Work (Birmingham: Ikon/Govett-
Brewster, 2008), 15.
12
Dirk Eitzen, “When is a Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception”, Cinema
Journal 35, no. 1 (1995): 81.
13
See Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (Boston, MA:
McGraw-Hill International, 2010), 169.
 462 P. Warmington et al.

inspired [Vertov’s] creative transformation of newsreel into the new form of documen-
tary film . . . turn(ing) newsreel from the illustration or recording of events into an
overt attempt to persuade through images . . . intervening minimally in what he filmed,
striving for a balance between recording and reworking.14

In his influential overview of the history of documentary film, the American aca-
demic Bill Nichols depicts Grierson as the inheritor of Vertov and Flaherty’s innova-
tions. In creating, between 1930 and 1933, the film unit of the Empire Marketing
Board, Grierson “persuaded the British government to do with film . . . what the
Soviet government had done since 1918: make use of an art form to foster a sense
of national identity and shared community commensurate with its own political
agenda”.15 Nichols emphasises that Grierson was both film-maker and theorist,16
whose theoretical concerns were with “the creative treatment of actuality” (a term
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that has subsequently been widely problematised, since it is dependent on a particu-

lar confidence in knowing what constitutes actuality)17 and the possible relationships
between documentary film and the production of (democratic) discourses and action.
In his 1943 work, Propaganda and Education, Grierson was explicit about the social
function of documentary. He argued that, within social democratic systems, predi-
cated upon persuasion and inclusion rather than compulsion, documentary film:

translated the material of citizenship into terms which [were] capable of being grasped
and which . . . [were] inductive of action.18

In short, even a brief examination of the roots of documentary forms and functions
serves to dispel any notion that there was a prelapsarian moment in which its origi-
nators believed in documentary film as an unaffected capture of reality, as opposed
to the recording and reworking of events. Indeed, Nichols emphasises that, above
all, documentary is a form of argument about the historical world (as opposed to
the imaginary or metaphorical worlds of fiction).
Nichols’ own theorisation of documentary practices has been highly influential.
Nichols initially argued strongly that the development of documentary forms could
be understood in chronological fashion. To this end, he defined five successive
modes:19
 the expository mode (characterised by “omniscient” narration; an ostensibly
direct relationship between images and voice-over; a conventional narrative
structure; a clear “point of view” supported by minimal use of interviews)

14
Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: IB Tauris, 2007), 1.
15
Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2001), 145.
16
See also Elizabeth Sussex, The Rise and Fall of British Documentary (Berkeley, CA: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1975), for a detailed examination of Grierson’s seminal role and
his theoretical influence on British documentary film.
17
Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?”.
18
Grierson, quoted in John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the
Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 72.
19
Nichols has amended and relaxed his categories more recently. Compare the five categories
outlined in Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts of Documentary (India-
napolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), with those outlined in Bill Nichols, Introduction to
Documentary, 145, wherein a “poetic” mode is also posited.
 Paedagogica Historica 463

 the observational mode (ostensibly “non-interventionist”, fly-on-the-wall pre-

sentation; editing that creates an impression of “real” time; use of zoom
lenses and hand-held cameras)
 the interactive or participatory mode (akin to participant-observation in the
social sciences; the film-maker is shown encountering or “living” a particular
social world)
 the reflexive mode (acknowledgement of the documentary medium and atten-
dant problems of production; reflections on issues of representation and real-
ism)
 the performative mode (also self-reflexive, with the film-maker becoming a
deliberately obtrusive screen presence in order to interrogate questions of
meaning and understanding).
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However, Stella Bruzzi has queried Nichol’s apparent reliance on a chronological/

teleological model. She points out that Nichols himself has retreated somewhat from
a linear understanding and she argues that, rather than superseding one another,
these modes overlap, co-exist and hybridise. Bruzzi also addresses the over-anxiety
(as she sees it) of debates about “reality” and “representation” in documentary film.
Rather than agonising over the documentary’s supposed perpetual failure to depict
“actuality”, it is, she argues:

perhaps more generous and worthwhile to simply accept that a documentary can never
be the real world, that the camera can never capture life as it would have unravelled
had it not interfered, and the results of this collision between apparatus and subject
are what constitutes a documentary.20

Moreover Bruzzi asserts that readings overly concerned with the fact that documen-
tary cannot “be decontaminated of its representational quality”21 misunderstand the
pact between film-maker, film and audience, which is “far more straightforward
than . . . theorists make out . . . the spectator is not in need of signposts and inverted
commas to understand that a documentary is a negotiation between reality on the
one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other”.22
Worth noting also is the recent critical work of John Corner, who has suggested
reviewing the very idea of “documentary”, particularly in relation to the myriad
forms of non-fiction film that pervade television schedules in the twentieth century.
Given the increasing dominance of non-fiction television (as opposed to current cin-
ema, where fiction still overwhelmingly dominates) and the proliferation of sub-gen-
res, such as docusoaps and variants of “reality” television, the term “documentary”
might, suggests Corner, have lost its value as a generic identifier. It might be safer,
he argues, to think of documentary in terms of practice, rather than product: to “ask
‘Is this a documentary project?’ . . . [rather] than to ask ‘is this film a documen-
tary?’”.23 Corner identifies “three classic functions to which documentary exposi-
tion, testimony, and observation have variously been harnessed”. These are: “the
project of democratic civics” (Grierson’s notion of promoting dominant versions of
20
Bruzzi, New Documentary, 7.
21
Ibid., 4.
22
Ibid.
23
John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions”, Television and New Media
3, no. 3 (2002): 258.
 464 P. Warmington et al.

citizenship); “journalistic enquiry and exposition” (documentary as reportage, an act

of witness); and “radical interrogation and alternative perspective” (a determinedly
unofficial “criticism and correction of other accounts in circulation”).24 To these
three “classic” modes, he adds the function of “documentary as diversion”. There
has, Corner claims, been a marked shift (in television) away from expository, ana-
lytic and propagandist aims towards “popular factual entertainment”, characterised
by “high intensity incident . . . anecdotal knowledge, and . . . snoopy sociability”.25
In style and technique, this recent phase (from the late 1990s onwards) has seen
reciprocal borrowing of styles, so that documentary television has taken on elements
of fictional style and vice versa. Moreover, evident in documentary as diversion is a
rethinking of notions such as “public interest” (indeed “a quiet but deepening inter-
est over the very idea of ‘the public’”) and the emergence of “a version of ‘the pop-
ular’, grounded in consumption, which is often in direct tension with notions of
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‘the public’”.26 For Corner, these shifts and tensions may signal a post-documentary
culture.

What are school documentaries?

The issues of form, function, technique and reception raised by producers and crit-
ics of documentary film guided and problematised the DFER project’s definitions of
what might comprise a school documentary. First, there is definition by what (as a
simple descriptive tag) we might term content or subject matter. There was general
agreement that the project should concern itself with non-fiction films set in and
around schools: that is, films organised around visual images of schools and school-
ing (we did not look at films on post-compulsory education but there is no reason
why future research might not extend into documentaries on colleges or universi-
ties). We were not concerned with “educational” films used in schools (as teaching
aids) unless they were also films about schools (perhaps used in initial teacher train-
ing or continued professional development settings). However, a definition of non-
fiction films with school settings or a school focus might include films about educa-
tion per se (focusing on, for instance, curriculum, pedagogy, pupil attainment,
policy and reform) and also films in which the school is presented as a microcosm
of wider social phenomena (multiculturalism, changing gender roles, attitudes and
behaviour among young people). Out of these, might emerge a vast range of styles,
formats and representations: critiques of local and national education strategies and
policies; case studies of practice or school experiences; reviews of the state of the
education system or speculations on its future; representations of “good” schools,
teachers and practices or of “failing schools”; depictions of “heroic innovators”;
accounts of the history of education; explorations of schools as communities and
schools within communities; documentaries on specific topical issues; reflexive
analyses of how documentary-makers construct narratives of school life; or analyses
of inter-field relationships between film, journalism and education policy.
A second tag might refer to intended audience. Films about schools and school-
ing might be geared variously toward education professionals, parents, pupils, the
wider public (and the wider electorate). Needless to say, these might overlap. Third,

24
Ibid., 259–60.
25
Ibid., 260.
26
Ibid., 265.
 Paedagogica Historica 465

to return again to Corner’s typology of functions, school documentaries might

encompass diverse aims: the project of democratic civics; journalistic enquiry; radi-
cal interrogation; or diversion. Related to these functions was the extent to which
films were intended to record, log or “document” in the strictest sense, or else to
promote reflexive professional practice, or else (either as a normative or an aspira-
tional text) to encourage society’s self-observation (consideration of what might be
done to improve science teaching, to improve pupil attainment or to strengthen the
state sector).
As indicated earlier in this article, genre and sub-genre are notoriously difficult
to define and distinguish. As with function and audience, issues of genre are also
related to the complex, sometimes unfathomable (because of lost production and
cataloguing data) issues of commissioning, production and design. In simple terms,
our range of viewing included cinema and television; it encompassed the genres of
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commercially produced documentaries; locally produced documentary film not

intended for commercial use (such as those produced by schools themselves); and
local and national television documentaries. In other research contexts “genre”
might be defined differently – along the lines of, for instance, producers or funding
bodies, subject matter and/or audience, comparisons of “establishment” and “non-
establishment” sources, or format and style. Our viewing offered sufficient range (in
terms of genre, technique, function and national origin) to enable us to consider
methodological problems and possibilities but, clearly, only begins to point to the
mass of potential resources (“the avalanche of data”) contained in national and local
archives, retained in schools and government departments or lying unclaimed in
stock cupboards and attics. Future research might explore: self-contained documen-
taries made for cinema or television; documentary series; news footage; current
affairs “magazine” segments; propaganda films; party political broadcasts; teacher
recruitment and training films; educational films aimed at students (but focusing on
school or college life); amateur films made by pupils or teachers; Open University
and schools television programmes; and docusoaps, docudramas and historical
recreations. To this list might also be added an extension into the field of fictional
films about school and schooling.

School documentaries: data in context

We have provisionally mapped out the fuzzy and porous boundaries of “school doc-
umentary” but to what uses might we, as social and cultural historians of education,
put these film artefacts? How do we construct film as data and what is the status of
that data? What is the “use value” of documentary film to researchers? As close
readers of Marx will recognise, the use-value of any commodity is not fixed; use-
value is determined only at the point of consumption. A bell is a cup until it is
struck and so forth – and so it is with the consumption and usage of research data;
the ways in which film data are constructed is dependent on the research context
(which also includes the positionality of the researcher). We return here to questions
about film as source and/or object. Thus when we watch Gerry Bryant’s 1945 short,
Children’s Charter, we might make use of it as a source of detail about the post-
war initiation of tripartite schooling in England and Wales. We might opt to focus
more minutely on it as a source of information on pupil–teacher interactions, the
design of indoor and outdoor spaces or school uniform. Alternatively, the film itself
might become the object of study. What representations does it offer of pupils, of
 466 P. Warmington et al.

teachers, of notions of “need” and “ability”, of the function of schooling within

liberal or social democracy? How does it position the viewer? How does it con-
struct “commonsense” and “normality”? In addition, how do the technologies of
production and distribution and the conventions of genre shape the visual and
visual-aural constructions that we are viewing?
From these questions proliferates a further set of concerns about how the
research context and the historical context(s) of school documentaries intersect. The
problems of context are myriad and both quantitative and qualitative. First, how
much contextual information is either necessary or desirable? This, again, will
depend on the research context. If, for instance, the researcher’s aim is to examine
the establishment of the post-war tripartite system and Bryant’s Crown Film Unit/
Ministry of Education film is treated as a source of information, how much (and
what forms of) additional/contextual/comparative data might be necessary to “make
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sense of” the film and further the researcher’s understanding of the post-war
reforms? “Triangulation” is a treacherous research term but should it be reclaimed
as a necessary method when using documentary film as a research source? One
research possibility is to use documentary film as a historical capsule, containing
visual records of school practices, materials and spaces. However, even a cultural
inventory approach (in which we might use film to scrutinise school spaces and
material) arguably derives its authority from certain forms of contextual knowledge.
If, for example, in Alexander Shaw’s 1938 short, Children’s Story (produced by
Films of Scotland, under Grierson’s supervision), we view children learning to
recite spellings of words and the names of their towns for their teacher, what com-
parative examples do we need before we can confidently describe the lesson as typ-
ical or atypical of a particular time period or locality? If we choose to examine
school materials in Ten Years On, a film produced by the Lincolnshire Education
Television Consortium in 1976 about the “progressive” primary school, Eynsham,
can we safely describe a Formica table as standard issue? Was the school’s foyer
peculiar or generic in its approach to signing and decoration? Moreover, how much
of what we view, in terms of classroom practices and materials in a school docu-
mentary, can be read as “ethnographic” (that is, a naturalistic capture of everyday
behaviour) and how much might have been staged for the purposes of the film (and
why was staging considered useful to the visual construction of the film’s argu-
ment)?
Even if, as researchers, we are, in certain instances, content to treat film purely
as a source of historical information and to minimise our concern with film as
object, our consumption of additional data will depend on our prior familiarity with
a range of historical features. These might include the national political landscape
of the period, the processes of national (or local) education policy, the structure of
state (or private) education and national and/or local pedagogic practices. Alterna-
tively, the researcher might be concerned with the film itself as an object of
research. Within an object-orientated reading, how much and what forms of contex-
tual data might be required? The researcher might make use of other examples of
the given genre or production category: for instance, government propaganda or
examples of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) television’s Panorama pro-
gramme in the 1980s. In addition, in order to understand the stylistic conventions
of particular genres of school documentary, might it be necessary to compare them
with other contemporaneous film genres, in order to accrue knowledge about the
technical aspects of editing, scripting or marketing?
 Paedagogica Historica 467

These questions are not straightforward ones about whether or not such contex-
tual information is inherently useful but, rather, they require researchers to decide in
what particular research contexts different forms of knowledge might be useful – or
not. Production context is, without doubt, another salient contextual dimension.
However, the information a researcher seeks about commissioning, design and per-
sonnel may not always be readily available, in which case our knowledge of the
“film-maker” may be vague or partial. It is customary to invoke directors’ names
and biographies as “significant”, as a tag or an indicator, as shorthand for particular
genre features or ideological positions. Thus we may refer to a John Grierson or a
Michael Moore film. However, this already locates the researcher who does so in a
particular conceptual paradigm (the paradigm of the auteur) in relation to authorship
and context. Critical consideration of the context of production makes us aware that
film is produced through networks of human actors, concepts and materials travel-
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ling across the period of the creation of any given film. For historians, each element
of the actor-network27 has its own historical context. So, depending on the research
context, knowledge about the availability of colour film, digital technology, sound-
tracking devices or the formation of government film units might offer us contextual
knowledge as “significant” as knowledge of education Acts or curriculum reform.
Reception, like production, is also a key contextual issue, and one that may be
even harder to capture in terms of solid data. Reception should not be confused
with attempts to evaluate audience impact in any crude sense. Media theorists have
wisely warned against over-confident speculation about the likely impacts of films
on those who view them. However, in some circumstances it is possible to access
material that affords insights into the contemporaneous reception of documentary
films. Information on how widely a documentary was programmed or distributed,
the likely size of its audience and the format in which it was distributed or broad-
cast may have been recorded. Other information about contemporaneous trends in
viewing films in cinema, on television or in other settings may also be available.
Reception data may include contemporaneous print, television or electronic reviews,
internet discussion or follow-up documentaries. These should not be taken as direct
evidence of the wider social impact and, of course, recent films are better served
with newspaper and internet reviews than older documentaries but such data may
be important in aiding researchers’ analyses of the responses that films garnered at
the point of original release or broadcast.
How far should we put our trust in contextual knowledge, though? Making
meanings and drawing historical insights from film is contingent on acknowledging
and understanding, where possible, the intention of the commissioning body and
the “film-maker” at the moment of production (or rather the network of moments
that comprise production). However, we should also be willing to look for other
possible disruptions, to elicit meanings that are grounded in the captured reality of
the moving images and the interplay between image, soundtrack and the nexus of

27
Space, of course, precludes extensive discussion of Bruno Latour’s development of actor-
network theory. However, John Law’s paper, Notes on the Theory of Actor Networking:
Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity (Lancaster: Centre for Science Studies, 1992), pro-
vides an accessible guide to Latour’s rethinking of the sociology of science, which empha-
sises the ways in which social effects are produced by patterned networks of diverse actors,
not only human actors but also conceptual and material “actors”. Thus digital editing tech-
niques might be considered a “social actor”, just as a scriptwriter or director is.
 468 P. Warmington et al.

voices (narration, interviews, incidental conversation).28 Foucault advised, “Never

consent to being completely comfortable with your own certainties.”29 Foucault was
not an aphorist but there is an ever-present possibility here, of course, of being a
too “knowing” viewer who looks at the film, but does not see or hear. The “know-
ing gaze” can be a barrier to seeing, a limitation on the fluid economies of mean-
ing.30 Further, “knowing” is always accompanied by a particular form of
understanding; there is a subjective quality (raced, gendered, classed and disciplin-
ary) to our looking.31 That said, the notion of the “knowing gaze” as a block to true
seeing must itself be interrogated; to employ the notion of a “knowing gaze”, after
all, risks implying that we can access an “unknowing” or “less knowing” gaze. To
paraphrase Zeus Leonardo,32 the search for an originary gaze is betrayed when
upon interrogation what appears general becomes a front for the universalisation of
a particular racialised, gendered or classed experience. It is, therefore, more impor-
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tant to acknowledge our own particular forms of knowingness than to conceal them
behind claims to a “less knowing” eye.

The three Rs: reading, writing and archiving

In considering the multiple contexts in which film might be constructed as research
data, we have discussed technologies of production and representation. Three other
“technologies” should also be addressed. First, any discussion of the technologies
of reading and writing (that is, ways of offering critique of film) must acknowledge
the challenges presented by documentary film as visual, or rather visual-aural data.
There are problems inherent in writing about film, in putting the visual to paper.
Robert Rosenstone has claimed that:

Exposition to the medium of film, especially in its narrative forms, can have a subver-
sive effect upon the historian. So many techniques of film (like those of modernist
and postmodernist writing) seem to cry out for use by the scholar. Montage, intercut-
ting, collage, the mixing of genres, the creative interaction of fact and fiction, history,
memory and autobiography – why are these not part of the (re)presentational modes
of the historian as narrator or essayist?33

28
Zadie Smith, “Rereading Barthes and Nabakov”, in Z. Smith, Changing My Mind: Occa-
sional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), offers a compelling re-discussion of the
perennial tension in reading between claims for authorial intention and claims for fluidity of
meaning, warning equally against privileging the Reader and the Author, and concluding
with a depiction of “Author and . . . reader . . . stumbling towards meaning simultaneously,
together.”
29
Michel Foucault, “For an Ethics of Discomfort” in S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth, eds., The
Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault (New York: Semiotext, 1997), 144. See also, Valerie Har-
wood and Mary Louise Rasmussen, “Studying Schools with an ‘Ethics of Discomfort’”, in
Bernadette M. Baker and Katharina E. Heyning, eds., Dangerous Coagulations, The Uses of
Foucault in the Study of Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 305–21.
30
For a discussion of the “knowing gaze”, see Ian Grosvenor, “The School Album: Images,
Insights and Inequalities”, in Educació i Història 15 (2010): 149–64.
31
Nick Peim, “The History of the Present: Towards a Contemporary Phenomenology of the
School”, History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 177.
32
Zeus Leonardo, “‘Through the Multicultural Glass’, Althusser, Ideology and Race Rela-
tions in Post-civil rights America”, Policy Futures in Education 3, no. 4 (2005): 400–12.
33
Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995),
226.
 Paedagogica Historica 469

Rosenstone draws attention to the “forms” and “styles” that researching film might
impel historians to develop. Film creates narrative and argument through complex
and deceptive visual and visual-aural constructions, not just through a linear para-
graph-to-paragraph, footnote-to-footnote motion. Its visual constructions are enabled
by continual developments in recording and editing techniques. Much has been
written about the simultaneous development of early avant-garde cinema and mod-
ernist literature and the ways in which exchanges between them created new gram-
mars that have pervaded the whole culture, that have made new ways of reading
the visual-aural integral parts of our subjectivities and of our propensity for objecti-
fying others.34 What obligations does this place upon historians of education who
write about film? Rosenstone argues for reflexive writing practice and for radical
approaches to communicating our “readings” of film:
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Admit all the problems involved. That this should not be a written document but a
visual one. That one should write about film in film. That words are an especially dif-
ficult (impossible?) way of talking about film, without boring people to tears with
details of plot and analyses of film language.35

Perhaps Rosenstone’s quote merely paraphrases the remark apocryphally attributed

to Frank Zappa: that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. More
than one person has contested that aphorism by pointing out that, in fact, writing
about music is like writing about architecture; people do it regularly, some better
than others. After all, should C.L.R. James have put aside the draft of Beyond a
Boundary and instead staged a cricket match36? Are we to assume that there are
greater problems inherent in writing about 15 minutes of film footage than, say, two
years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork? Over-anxiety and special pleading are
also potholes laying in wait for academics.
That said, there is a danger, as with writing about music, that writing in rigidly
traditional forms about film may create a bias towards those aspects of film that are
most readily represented by the written word: script, interviews, plot details, pro-
duction histories, relationships to policy and practice. Equally, though, we must be
wary of regarding film as a visual medium in a straightforward sense. Where a
school documentary contains a soundtrack we must read/view the film as a fully
visual-aural medium. Our methods, at various points, may include isolating visual
footage or soundtrack but the visual and aural in “talkies” are co-constitutive; they
exist in an internal relationship. Open to us as historical researchers are the various
methods that current audio-visual technology affords us: the viewing of stop frames,
the capacity to playback repeatedly, to slow footage, to produce inventories of
sounds and images. All of these are valid and valuable methods but they should not

34
Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005), is a notable recent example. She explores, for instance the
simultaneous development of modernist techniques of montage in American literature (Ger-
trude Stein, William Carlos Williams) and European avant-garde cinema of the 1920s (Ger-
man expressionism, French surrealism).
35
Rosenstone, Visions of the Past.
36
The reference here is to James’ 1963 cultural history of Caribbean and English cricket,
wherein cricket, as sport, art and political space, is treated as a means by which to grasp the
wider social formation of the Anglophone Caribbean. See C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary
(London: Hutchinson, 1963).
 470 P. Warmington et al.

entirely displace our consideration of “real time” viewing, our sense of how viewers
might experience the “whole”, as well as the sum of parts.
However, Rosenstone’s anxieties also relate to a base issue that makes problem-
atic the compact between the (academic) writers and readers. It is that, unless read-
ers of a paper on a film have access to the footage described in that paper, they are
reliant on the writer’s descriptive focus. The reader of the paper “views” the film at
one remove, in highly mediated fashion. When the writer describes an interaction
between a pupil and a teacher, the layout of a classroom or the inflection created by
the use of incidental music, the reader is required to invest immense trust in the
writer’s judgement, attention to detail and vocabulary. Again, this compact is not
entirely peculiar to writing about film. When Paul Willis describes an encounter
between a teacher and a disaffected 15-year-old, we have access only to Willis’
account; the actual event cannot be recaptured.37 Indeed, it could be argued that
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those reading and writing about film have the advantage: in many cases it is possi-
ble to access film, not so the moment described by the ethnographer.
However, Rosenstone’s general argument remains pertinent. Ideally, a piece of
writing about a documentary on schools and schooling would be linked to footage.
In certain settings, such as conference presentations, this may be possible. As inter-
est in the study of documentary film grows among historians of education and
access to technology and archives improves, it may be possible (copyright laws
allowing) to make full use of hyperlinks or, at least, references to websites.38 The
legal status of YouTube, for instance, is currently contested but such websites may
become key resources for using film in historical research on education. In print,
some papers may make use of stills, as is increasingly common. Stills are a limited
resource and should not encourage us to view film only as “moving photographs”
but they can be highly useful in enabling the reader to “see” data.
Lastly, the question of the availability of film to readers and researchers points
to the vital role of archives and archivists in developing documentary film into a
regularly consulted resource among historians of education. There are issues here
both of method (in the technical sense) and methodology (in ethical and epistemo-
logical senses). In short, a vast amount of work remains to be done in collecting,
cataloguing, restoring and maintaining the array of documentary films that have
been produced, over the best part of a century, on schools and schooling. As yet,
our knowledge of historical “patterns” of development in the production, distribu-
tion, genre and function of school documentaries is fragmentary. Our ability to
communicate what we know is limited by constraints on the accessibility of the
films about which we would write. There is also a question about the validity, the
“correctness” of writing and publishing on films, which may be extremely difficult
for a general readership to access. On what basis can we claim historical signifi-
cance for films that are not available for debate and counter-argument? A priestly
function is not what we seek; we are making a case for research on documentary
film as an integral and accessible part of the historian’s craft.
37
The reference is to Paul Willis’ critical ethnography of working-class boys’ experiences of
schooling in the English West Midlands. See Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working-
class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977).
38
The Documentary Film in Educational Research project team is currently planning to make
available online resources for researchers and students, ideally to include guides to uses of
documentary films in historical research on education and an international database of school
documentaries.
 Paedagogica Historica 471

Conclusion
By this point it will be apparent that this article, while it attempts to “admit all the
problems involved” in utilising documentary film in historical research on
education, is also a piece of advocacy. This position requires us to shed some of
the jealously guarded dignity of the historian, to distance ourselves momentarily
from academia’s cool deliberations, in order to make a plea. As this article has
explained, for historians of education, documentary film has vast potential, both as
resource and object. The intention of the DFER project has been to map the possi-
bilities of what is still an inchoate field of research as well as an underused data
source. We are not the first historians of education to advocate in this way; we fol-
low the earlier research of, among others: Peter Cunningham and Catteeuw et al.,
film research in related areas of social history (such as that by Kelly Loughlin39 in
medical history), the work of ECER’s Network 17 and the vigorous movement
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towards image-based research in general that has been led by scholars as diverse as
Jon Prosser and Peter Burke. We are indebted both to those who have produced
documentaries on education with a conscious intention to “make” and “record” his-
tory and to those whose intentions were more modest and concerned only with cap-
turing the “now”.
There is a wealth of existing documentary footage on schools and schooling dat-
ing back, at least, to the 1930s. Substantial amounts of material are available in the
UK through public sector media archives, such as the British Film Institute,
the Scottish Screen Archive, the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, the
Media Archive for Central England, as well as bodies such as British Pathé, the
BBC, Independent Television News (ITN) and many local libraries, museums and
universities. For DFER colleagues based in Portugal, the National Archive of
Moving Images, the Museum of Cinema of the Portuguese Cinematheque and the
archives of the Institute of Audiovisual Education and the Institute of Educational
Technology at the Open University of Lisbon, have proved valuable. Numerous
archives have been consulted by DFER colleagues in Belgium, including Cinematek
(the Royal Belgian Film Archives), the archives of the Belgian Broadcasting Com-
panies, Collectie Amsab, Collectie Kadoc and Collectie Liberaal Archief.
In this article we have drawn upon the research undertaken by the DFER project
in order to raise awareness of the richness and the multidimensional value of docu-
mentary film for historians of education (as well as those approaching from more
sociological or cultural studies orientated positions). Our aim has been to promote
and offer conceptual resources for opening up methodological debate. We have
pointed to a diverse range of potential research aims and methods and to salient
methodological problems and pointers but we make no claims for having produced
an exhaustive matrix. Many future research avenues can be imagined (and will, we
hope, be pursued). They might range from examining documentaries on post-com-
pulsory education, to considering exchanges between documentary film, fictional
film and educational films, to exploring the possibilities of making films that present
research on documentary film in education. There is, however, urgency to the wider
project of developing the uses of documentary film within the history of education.
Effective conservation of existing and as yet unearthed footage is imperative. In this
emergent field there are known unknowns – films of which we are aware but, as
yet, have been unable to track down; there are also unknown unknowns – films per-

Loughlin, “The History of Health and Medicine in Contemporary Britain”.

39
 472 P. Warmington et al.

haps buried in archives, perhaps as yet unreclaimed, that need to be collated, cata-
logued, restored and put into circulation. This will require full utilisation of the
kinds of network historians often propose: active collaboration between archivists,
academics, local historians, media companies, schools and colleges. Our understand-
ing of the history of the production and distribution of school documentaries, as
well as our arguments about their potential contributions to the study of history,
may evolve substantially in coming years if momentum is maintained in archiving
and distribution, as well as critique and conceptualisation. Our aim is to contribute
to making school documentaries historically significant and a core, routinely uti-
lised, historical resource. It is a project in motion.

Notes on contributors
Paul Warmington is a senior lecturer in the School of Education, University of Birmingham.
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In addition to work on media representations of education, he has researched, taught and

published extensively on race, class and education, black intellectual movements, critical
race theory and widening participation in HE. He is associate editor of the Journal of
Vocational Education and Training. Publications include: Improving interprofessional
collaborations: multi-agency working for children’s wellbeing (with Anne Edwards et al.)
(Routledge, 2009); Atlantic crossings: international dialogues on critical race theory (with
Kevin Hylton et al, Eds.) (HEA Books, 2011); ‘A tradition in ceaseless motion’: critical race
theory and black British intellectual spaces, Race Ethnicity and Education 14 (2011).

Angelo Van Gorp is assistant professor of history of education at the Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven, Belgium. His current research focuses on school culture (including materialities,
film, and new education), the history of behavioural sciences (in particular educational
sciences), special needs education, education in times of crisis and conflict (e.g. war), and
methodology and epistemology of the history of education. He has been vice-president of
the Belgian Dutch Society of the History of Education, and is link-convenor of the Histories
of Education Network within the European Educational Research Association as well as
member of the editorial board of Paedagogica Historica.

Ian Grosvenor is professor of urban educational history and deputy pro-vice-chancellor for
cultural engagement at the University of Birmingham, England. He is author of numerous
articles and books on racism, education and identity, the visual in educational research, the
material culture of education and the history of urban education. Books include, Assimilating
Identities. Racism and Education in Post 1945 Britain (1997), Silences and Images. The
Social History of the Classroom (1999) with Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere, The
School I’d Like (2003) and School (2008) both with Catherine Burke, Materialities of
Schooling (2005) with Martin Lawn and Children and Youth at Risk (2009) with Christine
Mayer and Ingrid Lohmann. He is one of the editors in chief of the journal Paedagogica
Historica and secretary general of the European Educational Research Association.

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