In relation to Lincoln, it’s neat when a major motion picture can spur greater understanding of those periods in history that we want K-12 students to know about anyway… but it’s also distressing when that movie becomes the end point, not the beginning, of learning. This occurs when students don’t have opportunities to follow up by exploring and responding to primary-source texts that pertain to that history because the movie is thought to have made such research and interface-with-the-real somehow superfluous.
