Finding the Possible Value of TV in the Classroom

by Lynn Clement

In addition to chemotherapy and radiation, self-care has been an important part of my cancer treatment.  Self-care can be difficult for many of us, despite how important it is, because of the expectation that we stay busy on productive, worthwhile activities.  Thus, for me, self-care often means exercise and reading-both useful and relaxing.  However, another soothing activity is watching television…way too much television.  Needless to say, I am at odds with this habit.  With access to Netflix, Hulu, AmazonPrime, HBO-GO, etc. it’s rare that I can’t find something to distract and entertain at any given moment.  However, while in graduate school a beloved professor/mentor likened watching television during the day to drinking before 5pm.  As someone who does most of their work at home, this slightly nagging inner voice prevented me from diversions that would have interfered with work.

However, does watching tv and doing something valuable have to be mutually exclusive?  After a particularly difficult day of doctor appointments, and after having already binged the new episodes of “The Great British Baking Show” on Netflix, I happened upon a show entitled “Fake or Fortune”.   “Fake or Fortune” is a BBC program hosted by journalist, Fiona Bruce and art dealer, Philip Mould.  The two come together, along with various researching side-kicks, to investigate the style, material, and provenance of art works in order to determine their authenticity.  From the start I was hooked, not only because I’m an art historian but also because the art mysteries were hugely entertaining.  However, the more I watched, the more I saw the value in the series also as a teaching tool.

Bruce and Mould, along with historians, curators, art historians, scientists, gallery owners, cultural institutions, and librarians, show the lengthy and laborious process of research.  What a gift this could be to students who struggle with exactly that.  The hosts, and hosts of scholars who help them along, rely on interviews with collectors, connoisseurs, and curators.  They dig through insurance inventories, gallery archives, and sales receipts.  They travel to local libraries, foreign countries, and scientific labs to find clues in the unlikeliest of places.  Perhaps most important in its accessibility to the viewer is the way they present research as a fun, and important, investigation.

Again, the more episodes I watched, the more I saw how I could use this in the classroom and how it could help my students in their approach to historical research. Although I have passed shied away from the use of videos in the classroom, and certainly pop culture programs such as this one,  I plan to show my students an episode in the next few weeks.  I’ll have to leave this post on a bit of a cliff-hanger (the value is currently in its theory stage), but my theory is that viewing research through this new lens will help them in their own projects.  At the least, they will get a fuller sense of what goes into the research process; it’s just not lonely hours in a library with mountains of monographs.  Research is also talking to people, reading journals, watching documentaries, looking at photographs, collaborating people in and outside your field, and confronting preconceived notions and hopes.

I’ve been taking a break from my own personal research projects during treatment, but watching tv has me getting excited about them again.  Wait…did I just tun my only self-care guilty pleasure into work?  Oh well.