Media Review of “Entre Les Murs (the Class)” and “The Hate U Give”

Abstract

How to support students to intellectually and emotionally untangle and grapple with systemic oppression in education is the subject of this media review. Especially for students carrying privilege, the micro(and macro-) aggressions toward historically marginalized groups that occur in classrooms and school yards and that reflect larger societal inequalities, can be opaque, confusing and unrelatable (Benson, 2013). Film can present the often intangible and multilayered oppression more viscerally, as a kind of language itself, that expresses lived experience, authenticity, and involvement across and through social relations (Agha, 2007) in ways textual documents can never do. Two films offer opportunities for examining theoretical concepts such as cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991), integration (Ager & Strang, 2008), fugitivity (Campt, 2014) and heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) through selected themes and characters across continents and decades: Entre les Murs (The Class) from 2008 France and The Hate U Give from 2018 United States. Unable to tackle all possible issues in this short review, we first summarize each film then briefly analyze the symbolic power of language (Bourdieu, 1991). To conclude we suggest additional critical questions and teaching tools for university-level education courses.