It's Not Kansas Anymore: It's Cinematic Thinking
A Q&A with Gardner Campbell
As an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and a widely recognized thought leader in education technology, Gardner Campbell has, for three decades, sought to understand and describe the qualities that comprise the ability to communicate effectively though various media and ultimately, to lead students in acquiring those attributes. Here, he explores what he's dubbed "cinematic thinking" and the processes and pathways that lead to it.
"You become a thinker of opportunities to see new connections or reveal those that might not have been apparent before." —Gardner Campbell
Mary Grush: Recently you've talked about "cinematic thinking." Could you explain a little about that? How did the term originate?
Gardner Campbell: The fact is, I may have made it up! I didn't consciously derive it from any particular thing I've read. I came up with the concept to help me understand and talk about a place where several paths in my experience seem to have met. It's what I might call a "heuristic."
Grush: Ah, so might we also call it a "Campbellism"?
Campbell: I guess so. [laughs]
Grush: That makes me want to hear about it even more. You describe cinematic thinking as a place you've come to. What were some of those paths you mentioned that have taken you there?
Campbell: One of the paths is that, like a lot of people — many of them philosophers — I've been fascinated by the relationship between reason and the imagination. Cinematic thinking in some respects comes from that lifelong fascination. What is it that happens in the process of insight or intuition or artistic creativity that's related to logic or reason or thinking your way through any problem?
What is it that happens in the process of insight or intuition or artistic creativity that's related to logic or reason?
Creativity and logic, on the surface, don't seem to have very much to do with each other, and yet both of them are approaches to what you might call problem solving or even just the joy of learning.
Grush: So how does all that feed into the idea of cinematic thinking?
Campbell: I've often told my students that I try to make a little movie in my mind of each of my courses, thinking about them not simply in terms of creative presentation — though that's part of it — and not just in terms of logic, though I certainly hope it's logical. In this mental movie, both creativity and logic, the odd couple, are right there, together. Grasping both at the same time, end-to-end throughout the experience — the movie — that's a big part of cinematic thinking.
Grush: Is cinematic thinking the same as making a narrative?
Campbell: A good narrative always offers more than a series of facts, and it has a form that substantially exposes the reasons why the story is unfolding as it is. But what I'm getting at with cinematic thinking is even more than that, so narrative is another path I'd like to try to talk about here.
A good narrative always offers more than a series of facts, and it has a form that substantially exposes the reasons why the story is unfolding as it is. But what I’m getting at with cinematic thinking is even more than that.
I'll give you an example from student blogging in my course: a journal of the experience of three or four months of their lives. There's a certain shape to the blogging experience. Students check in every week, writing in a very public manner about the story of their learning. Then, at the end of the semester they can look back on the series of blogs to see their progress and make connections among all the elements that contributed to it.