From teaching image to image teaching

Abstract

The author discusses the need to establish dialogue with the great movies and produce educational films and videos that in and of themselves are a learning space on images in movement. Two essential practices in a day and age in which the images, ever so much more present in the educational processes, teach, paradoxically, increasingly less. The article highlights the fact that, largely, education has been appropriating itself of images in movement as if it were in search of a supplementary technology to sustain the educational processes that already exist without such images being transformed, in their essence, based on the contact with the new object. In Brazil, thus far, no discipline directly connected to the study of movies and audiovisual work was created in grade schools, elementary schools and high schools aiming a new education for observation. Sometimes, teachers of the Portuguese language do try, using comparative literature, to bridge over to cinema. But these are localized initiatives, which unfortunately have been unable, for example, to account for the dimension that is both ethical and aesthetical that could answer the following question: "What is an image?" To the author, as long as it is not possible to answer this simple, but fundamental question, we are condemned to visual illiteracy, to the policy of good intentions, turning images into a proper teaching tool, but without this leading us to a true praxis of audiovisual or cinema, a praxis that would question the image's teaching capabilities.