Introduction

Abstract

Films and TV programs that include educational settings, students, teachers and learning are abundant; they speak to common, or comparable experiences that the audience will have shared and they are richly imbued with narrative potential in their evocations of power, status, discipline, knowing, discovery, and desire. Perhaps inevitably, much work has focused on the iconic figure of the teacher, identifying her or him as hero, villain, grafter, or martyr, and whilst acknowledging the significance of such work, this collection makes a different kind of intervention in the field. In earlier work about representations of teachers and educational settings, such as Fisher, Harris and Jarvis’ wide-ranging exploration of popular culture, we see how different kinds of investment (emotional, intellectual, sexual) in places of learning are played out in cultural products. Their final sentence reads: