Research pick: Watch with teacher - "Using cinematic gangsters, samurais and robots to teach economics through film"

The days of “chalk and talk” lectures are not yet ancient history, but teaching has adopted new paradigms in recent years. One of these is the use of cinematic output to teach principles in seemingly unrelated subjects. A paper in the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education focuses on a small group of films and a documentary to demonstrate how a teacher might extract pertinent concepts from the plot of such films, or movies, to expose their students to those concepts in an entertaining and informative manner.

Daniel Diaz Vidal and Robert Beekman of the John H. Sykes College of Business at the University of Tampa, Florida, USA, suggest education in economics is already using innovative and attractive approaches to teaching. Given the world of multimedia output, always-on communication devices, and social media, it is almost obligatory that teaching involve those aspects of the modern world. The wily teacher can use them intelligently and subtly to educate in memorable ways to the benefit of their students.

The team presents several movies and a documentary and offers economic theories and concepts that can be related to specific clips within those movies. The team has chosen the following as their exemplars: Wall-E (2008), The Last Samurai (2003), Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991), and American Gangster (2008). They also examine the first episode of the television series Altered Carbon (2019).

“The economics classroom has changed, and we live in a time in which an economics class session can be engaging, interactive and fun for both students and faculty,” the team writes, “We enjoy a vast supply of technology and educational resources at our disposal to be tapped by an instructor’s creativity and passion.” In this context, they offer the titles as useful examples of how teaching might evolve given the ease of access to movie and TV streaming and related services. The handful of examples they give are merely suggestions, there are many other movies and television programmes that offer lessons to be learned in economics and across other disciplines.

Vidal, D.D. and Beekman, R. (2021) ‘Using cinematic gangsters, samurais and robots to teach economics through film’, Int. J. Pluralism and Economics Education, Vol. 12, Nos. 3/4, pp.282–307.