Harnessing the power of the moving image for secondary classrooms

In an age of Playstations, multiple channels and hand-held video phones, it’s appropriate as well as useful to be able to hold the attention of secondary school children with the moving image.

This month the Film Archive is releasing the next chapter in the ON DISK programme for secondary schools all over the country – eight hours of edited extracts on Wellington's historical geography from 1840 to the present day.

Students will be able to watch rare film footage of beach fun in the 1920s, a giant sheep drive through the centre of the city in 1950, as well as important current issues from television news. The progamme Urban Settlements: Wellington is designed to cover important elements of the curriculum for geography students in Year 12 and comes complete with online study materials.

Education Programme Manager Alex Burton explains part of the motivation behind the project, “All New Zealand geography students study an Urban Settlement programme in Year 12 of their schooling and we noticed that by far the highest percentage use Auckland as their case study. This is largely because, apart from the city’s size and large school population, there’s a textbook written to cover aspects of the urban study specifically for Auckland. We hope this ON DISK programme will encourage teachers to look south of the Bombay hills for their classes and realise it’s not just the windy capital but one with an exciting historical geography.”

While Urban Settlements: Wellington becomes part of the Geography menu of the Archive's ON DISK library, it also provides a wealth of material for students studying Wellington from other subject perspectives. The Wellington region has an extraordinary story, and film is a comprehensive record of people, events as well as urban development all carefully selected and programmed on three multi-menued disks.

“It’s great to be able to highlight to kids onscreen how a city can undergo massive social and cultural change. There’s jaunty footage of New Zealand's first "American style" supermarket being recommended by Aunt Daisy in 1949, contrasted with grim amateur shots of slum housing in Te Aro in the 1940s. Then we can see John Campbell’s revelations about his Wellington childhood on the 6 o'clock news and the branding of Absolutely Positively Wellington in the 1990s,” Burton adds.

This programme is the latest and largest production to date from the Education Team at the Film Archive. Designed to harness the power of visual source material to enhance the learning process, teachers and students have been quick to recognise the usefulness of this resource. Funded by the Ministry of Education the scheme is currently running at over 300% of its usage targets. The ON DISK library contains over forty titles designed specifically for the secondary school curriculum and are available completely FREE of charge.

The research and editing process has unearthed a significant amount of Wellington footage now available for all Wellingtonians to view for free. The disks will be available on-site at the Film Archive Library in the basement medialibrary. Come down and see if you or someone you know has been captured onscreen for future generations.

Secondary schools are able to order this ON DISK programme or any from the catalogue of forty titles by contacting the Film Archive. More information is available at http://www.filmarchive.org.nz/education/ondisk.html