Formal Schooling: Guidance Pedagogy, Cinematic Form, and the Student’s Body
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Formal Schooling” theorizes cinematic form as a pedagogy of imperative guidance in what I term the mid-century guidance counsellor cinema, an American teen film corpus that reflects and responds to the guidance counsellor’s emergence as a figurehead of normative development following WWII. Made up of an eclectic group of texts, from teensploitation movies to educational social guidance films, the guidance counsellor cinema deploys cinematic form as an omniscient guidance counsellor to forcibly construct adolescent genders and normative understandings of healthy sociality. I thus develop a novel way of reading educational (and) teen media, wherein common techniques like freeze frames, acousmatic voiceovers, reverse-speed cinematography, and editing wipes are theorized as forces of visual, formal pedagogy bent on shaping, transforming, and reforming unruly teen bodies. “Formal Schooling” thus poses two primary interventions: firstly, that we can read most, if not all, teen films for their pedagogical cinematic forms; and secondly, that despite guidance pedagogy’s imperative call for the reproduction of normativity, the guidance counsellor cinema betrays resistance through unexpected moments of genderqueer embodiment, antisocial girlhoods, and juvenile delinquency. If we read carefully, we can find the unguidable’s persistence in the guidance counsellor cinema’s seemingly rigid, didactic forms. Drawing from and contributing to feminist film theory, gender studies, critical pedagogy theory, histories of American teen cinema, and formalist methodologies, this project reads cinematic form as guidance counselling to understand how American cinema creates adolescent gender—“proper” embodiment. I develop a unique methodology combining close readings of films, rigorous theoretical frameworks, and in-depth analyses of archival materials (teen magazines, promotional materials, film reviews, psychological discourses) to understand the guidance counsellor cinema’s student body as constructed through strategic mechanisms of (cinematic) formal schooling. In short, I ask: If binary gender was so obvious, why is it taught at all? This question permeates “Formal Schooling,” a question that resonates with today’s contentious cultural climate, wherein genderqueer youths and their teachers are continually attacked. “Formal Schooling” mounts a new historically grounded theory of teen embodiment on screen to show that even in the 1950s, strange misfits and their illegible bodies persisted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".