Collective school memory, cinema and television: use of sources and interpretive perspectives

The contribution is centred on the role of audio-visual media in the construction of collective school memories. The essay offers a heuristic framework for this field of inquiry. First, it historiographically situates the research theme and then it addresses the use of filmic and television sources, homing in on two specific lines of inquiry: the general public, and its attitude to the images of schooling conveyed by audio-visual productions; and the representations of schooling that are communicated via cinema and TV productions. Finally, the essay proposes two interpretive strategies. The first is to reconstruct the history of how school pasts have been represented in the cinema and on television via a thematic approach and/or intertextual analysis of sources. The second is to study the history of the collective school memories informed by cinema and television, that is to say, to pursue an even more ambitious goal: the deconstruction of the processes whereby the collective educational imaginary is formed.