In the future, my goal is to teach students, specifically highschoolers, an English curriculum. Because of this, I wanted to put myself in the shoes of a teacher in order to better prepare myself. For my Capstone project, I created mock lesson plans as if I was an English teacher. I created two main units based on my own interests. One of them is called Passing Gatbsy, in which the unit is based around the books Passing by Nella Larsen and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The other is a Cinema Studies unit, which works as an abbreviated introduction to film course. I started with an inquiry into teaching in a way that was creative, engaging, and effective. I also wanted to explore how to incorporate film into an English classroom, as I am a CTE DigVid student, and film is a passion of mine. I figured that the best place to begin my research was all around me, interviewing my own teachers as guides. From there, after conducting my own research, I began to assemble my lesson plans. Each lesson plan, done in a UBD (understanding by design) format, contains several links to resources that I created or curated for the course, including relevant articles, project descriptions, and slide decks.

For research, I emailed (see above) several of my teachers, both past and current, asking if they would be willing to talk with me about the process of creating lesson plans. In addition to physical notes (see above),I voice recorded each interview, which can be found in this Google Drive folder.

In addition to the research via teacher interviews, I also researched on my own. For the filmmaking curriculum, I watched and took notes on (see above) several films and analysis videos. I also physically traveled to the Museum of Moving Images (see above) to deepen my understanding.

You can find the links to the lesson plans here:

Passing Gatsby UBD

Cinema Studies UBD

Each UBD doc contains hyperlinks to the other learning resources.

[Annotated Bibliography] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z3nk-BjRiqpxi5nvDKiqjkPNWpBvw3fwhA4iEyJHx1E/edit?usp=sharing)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is essentially a love letter to the western genre. It employs several cinematic and narrative choices that symbolically allude to its timely downfall, as well as respecting the genre with a sense of esteemed devotion.

The western film is notorious and unmistakable. They are set in the wild American west sometime between the mid 1800s and early 1900s. They follow a hat-wearing, gun-slinging cowboy who tackles themes of civility, nature, and change. As old as film itself, the western movie captivated America, being heralded as the genre that perfectly encapsulates the American zeitgeist. Freedom, exploration, oftentimes racism, and a cool, quick-witted, tough-as-nails main character. Western’s are America’s myths, the fables and lore that the young country developed to promote its founding values as a nation, something essential to empires. It reached its prime in the 1950s following the cold war and other events that invoked a sense of patriotism and superiority in citizens. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the genre began its decline, a time when Americans lost hope in their government and began to self-reflect on its roots. From then, westerns became relegated to prime time television until eventually fading away, never to make a recovery.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid premiered in 1967. The movie begins with the sound of a film reel against old-timey footage. It explains who Butch and Sundance are, as well as their “Hole in the Wall” gang. It is in full sepia tones, reminiscent of the first waves of westerns from the silent era. This first impression sets the stage for the audience, where we are being transported back in time to the beginning of the frontier flick days. These credits serve to infuse nostalgia into the audience, reminding them of the days past. It effectively begins two stories: the film’s story of its titular characters and the overarching symbolic story of the western genre that the characters parallel. As the film continues, it keeps its sepia tones and we see the main protagonists in modern (to the time) film. This slow transition takes the audience back gently, allowing them to immerse further into the story and period.

The plot revolves around Butch and Sundance, notorious outlaws, as they commit robbery a few too many times and end up being hunted by a hired group of police and master trackers. Fundamentally, it is about two men trying to outrun their fate. The film makes it abundantly clear that their days are numbered when Sheriff Bledsoe warns them that their, “Time is over and [their] gonna die bloody, and all [they] get to choose is where.” The group pursuing them is never shown on screen, all the audience sees of them are distant silhouettes and their hats, giving them an elusive, intangible quality, perfectly representing destiny.

Additionally, Butch and sundance are running from time itself, as the world they are living in advances right in front of them. In an iconic scene, Butch takes Etta, Sundance’s girlfriend, on a bicycle ride, amazed at the new technology. Before leaving for Bolivia, where they attempt to escape, Butch throws out the bicycle, yelling that the “Future’s all yours, you lousy bicycles!” The camera cuts to an exceptionally modern-looking close-up shot of the wheel on the ground. In doing this, it shows the characters’ rejection of modernity, and in turn, their affinity for the past.

This mirrors the arc of the western genre as a whole. By the time the film premiered, the western’s fate was clear. Just as the days of the wild west were over, the film type would fall behind as well. It could not keep up with contemporary audiences, a similar fight against modernity as the leading protagonists. This is among the way’s the film honors its history in a self-aware way, poignantly characterizing this in some of the west’s most famous bandits. The nostalgic beginning also serves to give tribute, eliciting a romantic sentiment of the genre.

In its final act of love, the film’s closing scene evokes the words uttered by Etta earlier in the film, where she states that she will join them in Bolivia on one condition. “I won’t watch you die. I’ll miss that scene if you don’t mind.” Her words ring true, as the audience does not witness their deaths. Butch and Sundance are in a seemingly hopeless situation, with, unbeknownst to them, the entire Bolivian government in a position to kill and capture them. In one last stand out, they are badly wounded and attempt a daring escape. They run out of their shelter in a blaze of glory, and as several gunshots are heard, the camera freezes on them midrun, fading back into sepia tones.

This ending literally does not let them die. It immortalizes them, symbolically turning them into legends, which, of course, never die. Furthermore, the sepia tones and photo-like composition solidifies the idea that this is the past. The fugitive’s days are no more, and what we have left of them is the great epics they’ve left behind. This reflects the concept of westerns as a whole. It serves as a swan song to the genre, its story mirroring the story of the western with a sense of attentive adoration. They may be dwindling, but they are an important part of American society, and they will never die. Their fates as an expired variety are sealed, but as is its fate as folklore, sowing mythology into the fabric of the culture, never to truly be forgotten.

The release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho revolutionized cinema and changed the horror genre forever. Premiering in 1960, it effectively marked a dramatic shift in the kind of horror seen on the big screen. This shift mirrors a larger, cultural change in the mindset of Americans as the 1950s aged into the 1960s. It represents the fears of America, and how the evolving world affected the widespread societal anxieties of those time periods.

Mid-Century horror films can be marked by the prolific science fiction subgenre. These movies can be dubbed “monster movies,” where the central problem, and the thing that brings the fear, is a monster, or at least something not human. Some examples being Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Blob (1958). These films have many common themes, the most obvious being science creating the monster. Films such as Them! (1954) displays the atrocities of radiation. The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) show the dangers of alien invasions. The Fly (1958) has its plot set in motion when a fly gets caught in a scientist’s experimental teleportation device.

It makes perfect sense as to why science would be hailed as the enemy of this time. The 50s was the Atomic Age, with the threat of a nuclear winter looming over everyone’s heads. It was an age of uncertainty, where technological advances presented a world without control. In regards to said uncertainty, there was also the percolating fear of communism and the loss of the democracy that supposedly created the American dream. These factors create a phenomenon where the solution came in the form of the government, which used the same science that started the disaster to fix it.

All this changed when Marion Crane was brutally stabbed to death while showering in 1960s Psycho. The abrupt stabbing is reflective of the change this film brought to horror, where it broke up the comfortably uncomfortable stagnation of the 50s ago of convenience. Psycho had no aliens nor creatures, but rather a human that didn’t require radiation in order to frighten. It turned a mirror onto the 50s, asking them who the true monsters were. The 60s saw an age of civil progress, where Americans turned inward, shifting a focus on their own already occurring injustices, rather than the Cold War politics of the possible horror. In 1963, their president was assassinated. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war raged on harder than ever before. The anxieties became more tangible, less idle. The foreboding trepidation made way to suspenseful angst, perfectly symbolized by the master of suspense’s most iconic work.

This transformation can be seen in numerous ways. The 50s red scare was reflected in the way that the monsters had no sympathy, a divergence from the charismatic horror villains of the 1940s. The monster flicks shed no empathetic light on them, othering and creating an “us versus them” mentality. The 60s brought the trend back, where they humanized the monster, both literally and figuratively. It did not try to other the enemy, it instead told Americans that the enemy could be us. Peeping Tom (1960) follows a voyeuristic murderer who the audience elicits sympathy for and The Sadists (1963) has a murderous young couple as its antagonists. Carnival of Souls (1962) tells the story of a woman dealing with her shattering mental health through the poetic allegory of a man following her.

Additionally, Psycho was a film that broke the aesthetic distance of horror pictures, which is the gap between the moviegoers’ consciousness and the fictional reality of the film. Monster films created this distance by having their settings and characters be generic. This meant that while it seems like it could happen anywhere, the viewer doesn’t register it as happening to their reality at all. It provides a security blanket where they know that, after all, it’s just fantasy. Psycho, and movies that follow destroy that distance. They do this simply enough by adding small setting details and dismantling restrictions caused by what was thought to be taboo. Psycho was the first film to feature a toilet flushing, injecting realism into the sheltered minds of the aesthetically distanced audience. In the mid-century, you left the theater feeling vulnerable, like one would with the social convictions of the time, but after films following Psycho, you left feeling attacked.

As a whole, Psycho had an immeasurable amount of impact on horror, a quantity of which wouldn’t even be felt until the 70s, which saw a renaissance of the horror genre that can easily be found with Psycho as its inspiration. The film created an entirely new genre: the slasher flick. Movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Black Christmas (1974) have the film seeped into its cores. It brought America away from the nuclear, prepackaged scary movies of the time and flipped them over their heads. It told them that no, the monster wasn’t some unfathomable scientific abomination, that it was me and you and your neighbor Norman. It represented the slaying of the American themes that permeated their escapist horror. It reminded us that our mutually assured destruction wouldn’t have to come from our weapons of war, that we were perfectly capable of ravaging each other all on our own.