An education symposium at UF this week discussed negative portrayals of teachers in the media and their implications.
The event, Schools on Screen: Public Perceptions of Teachers and Students (and why they matter), took place Wednesday and Thursday. Two graduate students in the UF College of Education, Elizabeth Currin, 34, and Stephanie Schroeder, 30, organized the event.
Both Currin and Schroeder are former teachers who participated in similar conferences in North Carolina, inspiring them to host one at UF. Currin said they received a grant to cover the event cost of $2,300.
The two-day event featured a keynote speech given by Mary Dalton, a professor of communication and film and media studies at Wake Forest University. The conference also had a workshop and book panel, Currin said.
Dalton’s address highlighted the 15-year trend of the negative representation of teachers in film, Dalton said. This trend is increasing and can affect perception of teachers and education in general, she said.
“We get ideas about what our society values from the stories that we tell,” Dalton said. “Most popular stories now … tend to be (told through) television and film.”
Dalton said teachers traditionally played the role of a savior character in the media, but it shifted with the educational policies of the No Child Left Behind Act and, later, Common Core.
Currin feels the event’s topic has far-reaching implications beyond the College of Education.
“Because Dr. Dalton has identified a downward trend in on-screen portrayals of schools, we wonder if the general public has an accurate sense of what schools, teachers and students are really like,” Currin said, adding that this also affects people’s opinions about how worthwhile public education is.
Dalton said overly positive representations of teachers in film and television can also pose a problem — they create unrealistic expectations and unattainable goals for aspiring teachers.
“There’s a sweet spot somewhere, in terms of these depictions, these representations and we’re pretty far from it right now,” Dalton said.
