Transforming Rita and Educating Students

We watched the second part of “Educating Rita” in class.  I had watched the movie at home this week. I watched the movie in my computer and used Netflix. I also used headphones. All of these circumstances made me appreciate the movie in some ways. First, the movie as just another good British film with Michael Cain; second, as class material, and third as a cultural product of the early 1980s. The title, “Educating Rita,” already screams “school.” This is the reason why I didn't want to think that I was watching a movie for a future discussion in adult education. I enjoyed the story, the acting, and the photography. However, the synthesizer as almost the only source of music was very difficult to forget. The synth contextualizes the movie as an 80s flick. Thanks God for Julie Walters and Michael Caine. Otherwise, I would have stopped the movie after the first 15 minutes!

But watching the movie in class probed that movies need to be seen in large screens and with a group of people. Sometimes we need other people to compare our reactions and emotions. Watching a film in group or community is similar to transformative learning: you need a point of reference to reassure that you have indeed learned and transformed yourself. Our laughs and laments need to make be heard by the community and the community needs to respond to us, either with an echo or a whisper. We all laughed in some points, and expressed compassion for the characters in others. At the end, we were transformed by the movie: we all now have the same experience, we all had to relate the story to concepts learned and discussed in class. Yes, we all know the movie is fiction, but it is also similar to storytelling in a community.

Although we are a community—because we take the same class, read the same articles before coming to class, and have similar goals after taking this class—we are also different. I believe that something is good or bad when people of different backgrounds agree that something is good or bad. It seems that several of us agreed that the music in this movie was annoying in some scenes, which makes me think that we are all eager to learn: we did not complain about the music until the movie was over. We were like Rita. She didn't stop until she wrote good essay and became an expert in literary criticism. We didn't give up watching the movie until we saw the credits.

This is not a synthesizer from the 1980s, but it illustrates the idea of one keyboard playing most of the soundtrack.