Why Does Precious Have to Lighten Up or Shuffle? Teaching with Lee Daniels’s “Adaptation”

Abstract

We want to be clear from the outset that this chapter is about the teaching of a film—Lee Daniels’s 2009 Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire—and that our primary goal is to think through some pedagogical issues that may arise for instructors who are considering using this film to help teach the works of Sapphire. While there may have been a time in some distant past when film was used unproblematically in a classroom, teachers and scholars are increasingly interested in thinking through the actual pedagogical values of a given film text. In the introduction to his Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom, John Golden engages some of the complexities entangled with any attempt to use film as a pedagogical tool. He begins with a simple, yet significant, query: “What really happens when we show movies in the … classroom?” (xiii). Golden notes some of the diverse reasons that have been suggested for teaching with film: “Oftentimes, what we show is the film version of a written text that our students have read or are in the midst of reading, or an extension of the written text that might have similar characters, time period, or themes. In addition, some teachers are fortunate enough to be able to teach film history or film as its own separate and unique text” (xiii). Implicit in Golden’s observation is the understanding that teaching a film text carries with it a number of complex considerations.