With dimmed lights, the students in American Studies sit back as the movie begins. Moving away from the lectures and note-taking, American Studies classes are leaning into an alternative way to support its students’ learning with a movie: the Crucible.
American Studies and AP United States History teacher Whitney Schell hoped the activity would effectively combine all of the topics students learned in the past weeks.
“We just had a lesson over the Enlightenment, the First Great Awakening, the Salem Witch Trials so we kind of just talked about those ideas and questions,” Schell said, “We then played lets find the witch to illustrate the way people behave when you have mass paranoia.”
“The Crucible is about the Salem Witch Trials,” junior Sydney Kiely said. “[It] is part of what we’re learning about in class currently as we explore early colonization, the Puritan religion, and the Salem Witch Trials themselves.”
Instead of using blue and black pens, for the assignment following the movie, students will talk amongst themselves in a graded class discussion.
“I feel like I was able to express what I was feeling about the subject a lot more,” junior Sraddha Pedaprolu said. “And I didn’t have to think about the words I chose and it was more about the ideas rather than the way I worded it which I couldn’t do in an essay.”
It’s a break from the usual lectures and note-taking, and it’s a welcomed one by students like Kiely.
“I think it’s really fun to watch the movie during class,” Kiely said. “It’s nice to learn about history in a different media; it makes the class less stressful while also creating visual cues with which to tie our learning to. The movie is enjoyable to watch and it’s nice that we get to watch it in class instead of having to read a textbook for homework.”
The movie offers audio-visual elements to help analyze the scenes more extensively than if students had read the play.
“I think that watching the movie will help us retain the information more because we’re able to understand our characters,” junior Anagha Konuru said. “It’s easier to follow along and understand the script because the actors are able to fully deliver and confirm the emotion/intention of the script. If you want to analyze it, it’s a lot more beneficial to watch it because you can analyze beyond the script in things like rhetoric and costuming.”
This article was updated on Sept. 5
