"A teacher wrote this movie": Challenging the myths of one eight seven

The electronic media-television, movies, music, and news-have become a powerful pedagogical force, veritable teaching machines in shaping the social imaginary of students regarding how they view themselves, others, and the larger society. (Giroux, 1997) You willing to die for stupidity Cesar? See, I am, if it'll teach you something. You can't kill me homeboy-what I am, what I was, died over a year ago. Everything I've ever wanted has been taken from me. No matter how many of you I get rid of, I can't get it back. I was a teacher! I wanted to help you! You can't kill me! And you can't scare me. (Reynolds, 1997)

Education has always been a subject of some fascination for American filmmakers. From The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Dangerous Minds, filmmakers have shown us compelling teachers, questionable institutional practices, and troubled students with hearts of gold. However, these "educational" movies are not simply movies about education; they are also, perhaps more importantly, movies that educate.

Movies like Dead Poets Society, Lean on Me, Stand and Deliver, and the like, serve as a commentary on the process of education, whether or not that is their intention. These movies teach us something about what it means to be a good teacher or student, how the educational enterprise has been or might be, and how Americans (teachers and students, administrators, and parents) should anticipate or fear the possibilities of educational reform.

One Eight Seven (187), a recent film starring Samuel Jackson, is one such "educational film." In 187 Jackson portrays Trevor Garfield, a teacher who is committed to working with at-risk students, students slipping through the cracks of an uncaring, impersonal, and, as the movie suggests, somewhat vindictive educational system. However, unlike its predecessors, 187 does not portray students as diamonds in the rough, nor does it portray teachers as infallible agents of social change. This movie does not intend to tell the story of a single teacher or a single student, but rather to tell a story about how schools "really are" in this country. The filmmakers' final words, "A teacher wrote this movie," suggest the intent behind 187-it is an indictment of schooling and the dangers teachers and students face in school with increasing frequency.

As an indictment, 187 functions as one possible critique of education as it exists currently; however, this movie also suggests the improbability of meaningful systemic reform. By restricting empowering action to the figure of Mr. Garfield, the film privileges individual commitment and sacrifice in lieu of collective struggle and mutual implication in a larger nexus of social structures. This is to say that, while the filmmakers may have succeeded in showing parents and interested others some of the more violent aspects of teaching in public schools, 187 does not leave its viewers with any possibility for hope that things can someday change. Moreover, by ending on this nihilistic note, the filmmakers allow the audience to escape considering the ways in which they are implicated in the violence.

Critical Media Literacy

187 as Text

A whole host of disciplines, including, but not limited to, Cultural Studies, Critical Pedagogy, and Mass Communication, consider the effect of popular films on society. The analysis of contemporary films seeks to uncover the subtle and overt rhetorical messages embedded within those cinematic texts. Cultural Studies scholar bell hooks (1994) argues that a critical reading of popular cultural texts serves the practical purpose of engaging representations of patriarchy, racism, and other systems of oppression and dominance that may be embedded within and communicated through film, literature and television (p. 5).

This article takes as its charge a call to engage 187 as a text, as a site where critical reflection can serve to uncover and explore meanings emergent in and promoted through the film. To this end, we advocate critical media literacy, a critical perspective that allows individuals to engage in, reflect upon, and strategize the communicative techniques and choices that popular texts use to endorse a particular ideology or ideologies.

Our perspective derives from critical theory, a perspective that assumes that "reality is simultaneously constructed and construed" (Conquergood, 1983, p. 28). 187 exists both as a constructed object in the world, as well as a communicative act that constitutes meaning. The active process of making and rendering sense to our social reality incites the urgency of critical media literacy.

Because 187 exists as a text, viewers are enabled to engage in those ideas and simultaneously create counter-texts that stand alongside or in opposition to that reading; whether people confirm or reject a text depends upon how they feel it promotes (or fails to promote) a desirable communicative representation. In this article, our reading of 187, we offer a counter-narrative that attempts to engage the film as a social text, while also challenging the ways in which this text serves a potentially harmful social function.