The Agency of Film in History Education: A Ventriloquial Analysis of ZOOM Teaching Interactions

Abstract

The study examined the film performance in the context of history education; the agentive role of film in history-making; and the film as a mediated communication in history education through the use of a ventriloquial analysis with agency framework as a lens. This study was essentially constructed from the video lectures (recorded teaching materials via Zoom meeting) of the history teacher in three of his class sessions. The teacher-participant’s conversation and interactions in the Zoom video lecture were transcribed to analyze and to determine the performative role of film in the context of history education, and were used to know how the historical film acted as an agent that participated in history-making. Also, this study examined the agency of interactions to determine what way the film mediated in teaching history and what knowledge in the interaction had been produced. The researcher divided those film performances according to their discussed themes, so as to identify the film agentive roles that emerged repeatedly using thematic clustering and assigning of activity. Thus, this study established some theoretical propositions that may contribute to understanding what the film performed; its agentive role; the way the film mediated; and what knowledge generated in the context of history education through the voice of the teacher-participant.