Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Movies and Psychology

When I attended a day-long seminar in the early 90s about critical thinking in the social sciences, I was instructed never to show an entire film during class time-that time was too valuable.  I abide by that advice to this day.  In class, I show film clips, but prefer documentaries.  I do have AP Psych Movie Nights outside of class time. 

However, the time after the AP exam often presents us with lots of time and low interest by our hard-working advanced students.  Given that reality, many of us will be showing films.  Following a recent thread on the AP-PSYCH listserv, I did a couple quick searches and rediscovered these gems.


APA Division 2's page with two resources

PsychMovies dot com (I posted about this site back in late 2009)
http://www.psychmovies.com/
Exceptional descriptions and overviews with ratings













APS guide to using film in teaching psychology
This is an excellent resource including steps to use in using film, solving ethical issues within the film, following copyright, and more.  Thank you Dr. Raymond J. Green.

Regardless of your views on the pedagogy of showing films, these are some excellent resources.


posted by Chuck Schallhorn

1 comment:

Steve Jones said...

PsychFlix is another great site, where they have films grouped by topics. For example, if you're looking for a film that addresses how mental illness impacts families, PsychFlix lists a dozen films to choose from. Doesn't look like it's been updated in the past two years though. http://www.psychflix.com/theme_index.html