Incorporating Film Into the Research Paper    

Teachers face two serious difficulties when assigning research papers. The first appears to be an issue of motivation but is really one of mental disposition. Many students are so deeply influenced by contemporary visual culture--especially by film--that they lack familiarity with close reasoning. They are accustomed to absorbing entertaining, but loosely connected, streams of images in an impressionistic way and are uneasy and anxious when given a major assignment in an exclusively written medium. Inexperienced in the systematic compilation and analysis of information, they often perform poorly. These students may appear to be unenthusiastic about their topics; in fact, they do badly because they are methodologically disoriented. They run aground while sailing in the unfamiliar seas of organized, sequential, linear logic. This problem often shows itself in the frequent, and frequently gratuitous, use of illustrations in research papers. Instructors often comment that 'students love pictures.' It would be more accurate to say that students understand pictures and are comfortable with them. The second difficulty is a by-product of the Web. Plagiarism has become so widespread that it poses a real threat to the academic enterprise. Yet its detection is both difficult and time-consuming, and an instructor must be on absolutely solid ground before bringing a student up on such serious charges. Furthermore, even if available, an expensive counter-plagiarism program such as Turnitin cannot always deliver conclusive evidence. Plagiarism must be addressed, but today, articles that existed previously only in print can be optically scanned, free essays are available online, and papers can be purchased and downloaded from numerous commercial outlets. We have addressed both of these problems by strategically using appropriate motion pictures as entrees into the subject matter and as points of comparison to help organize research papers. We first provide our students with a list of films that bear on relevant topics.

Fontenot, Michael J. and Karen A. Fontenot. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Education>Research>Multimedia