A cinematographic look about the city: the experience of using films in geography classes for young and adult education

Abstract

The concept of education at the begging of the twenty-first century has profoundly changed when compared to the second half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, with the expansion of knowledge and techniques, new relationships have been established among men, nature, and technical means, which also changed people's forms of communication and languages. Media like television, radio, publications, the internet, and movies have been increasingly present in the lives of thousands of young people and adults, thus it is necessary not only to think about them as teaching tools and aids, but also to include them in the teaching-learning process. Through the teaching of geography, this paper aims to analyze the concept of media education. The intent of fiction movies developed for Youth and Adults education in schools in the city of Ourinhos/Brazil is to develop a didactic sequence about aspects of urban geography. This approach of merging cultural products, in this case, movies, and educational content it extremely important for the student's intellectual development, because he/she is constantly influenced by mass culture through different means, which requires from educators a critical and continuous exercise to demystify ideologies presented by such products. The professor, in this process, mediates between the information presented by the media and the school's educational content. Addressing the media in the classroom, as an object of study and as a teaching tool, has become increasingly necessary given the media's increasing influence on a significant portion of the population, building consensus and conveying ideologies. (AU)