Abstract

The particular focus of this paper is to properly elucidate the use of film as a valid and productive teaching tool when working with students who have behavioural and emotional exceptionalities. This perspective is grounded in the marriage of the Eisensteinian concepts of film form dialectics, conflict and pathos construction and social constructivist approaches to cognitive development, including peer regulation, social interaction, modeling, and scaffolding. Children with behavioural and emotional exceptionalities often do not possess these mental tools, nor do they know how to acquire them because of their inability to adjust socially, their lack of social skills and ability to externalize. By amalgamating many of the theoretical approaches that film theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and psychologist Lev Vygotsky established, we can see a wonderful opportunity for emotional and cognitive growth that, in essence, allows for the empowerment of the exceptional student in the context of their own development and adaptability. Since film has the power to invoke such an emotional response within the spectator, it also encourages them, or directs them, into externalizing those emotions and ideas, and accordingly to participate in the development of a distributed cognition, which can in turn lead (with teacher direction) to the internalization and development of individual mental tools essential to learning, and influential to behavior.