When I began teaching in Vietnamese public schools, I often had little more than a chalkboard, a box of coloured chalk, and a classroom of around thirty children with very limited English. There was no television, no projector and little in the way of resources, so I found myself instinctively falling back on story. I would sketch a knight, a castle, a dragon or a dark forest across the board, and the class could only move the story forward by answering questions, solving problems or stepping into the narrative through role play. At the time, I was not thinking about cinematic learning, narrative theory or meaning-making. I was simply trying to find a way to make language and ideas visible, memorable and shared.
A decade later, that instinct has not disappeared, but the doorway has widened. Generative AI has opened a doorway between what a teacher can imagine and what can realistically be created. The chalkboard story can now become a cinematic world with movement, sound, atmosphere, recurring characters and symbolic spaces. For me, this has felt less like discovering a new classroom tool and more like finding a gateway into Narnia: not a source of imagination, but a way of stepping more fully into it. The worlds already existed in imagination; AI made it possible to cross the threshold into them. I did not realise at the time how important that idea of crossing thresholds would become in my later practice, or how central it would eventually become to Cinematic Learning.
During my time at Vinschool, I began experimenting more deliberately with narrative, imagination and learning through interactive PowerPoint presentations. As part of a Grade 2 ICT curriculum, I created a series of recurring characters inspired by the visual language of Streets of Rage (SEGA, 1991), but set within our own school world. Each week, students encountered another ‘episode’ in their struggle against the villainous Commander Nosib and his hired goons. Through these stories, they were introduced to ideas around coding, computational thinking and internet safety, with otherwise abstract concepts given characters, conflicts and consequences. As generative tools began to emerge, Suno helped me experiment with the energy of Yuzo Koshiro-inspired game music, while OpenArt allowed me to recreate the visual language of 1990s arcade games. The world was becoming richer, but something was still missing.
Then, one day, I tested a short image-to-video prompt using Commander Nosib. It lasted only a few seconds, but watching a character who had previously existed as a rigid image on a PowerPoint slide suddenly move felt like a Dr. Frankenstein moment: the character was alive. Almost immediately, the question changed from What can I do with this three-second clip? to What if I had dozens of them? What if I put them together? That was the moment I began to understand that these tools might offer more than animated teaching resources. They might allow me to build an entire cinematic world. In retrospect, this was where I really turned the key and opened the doorway.
A further change came with a different working environment. Moving into an IB Primary Years Programme setting pushed my practice more firmly toward inquiry, conceptual learning and student interpretation. Just as importantly, at D-Prep International School, I found the space to experiment. That freedom matters. Schools can restrict innovation deliberately, through rigid systems and prescribed approaches, but they can also do it unintentionally through timetables, expectations, assessment structures or a culture that leaves little room for uncertainty. Having permission to test ideas, take creative risks and allow a unit to evolve made it possible for these early narrative experiments to become something more ambitious. The question was no longer simply how story could help students understand a concept, but how an imagined world might become part of the inquiry itself.
One of the strengths of the IB Primary Years Programme is the combination of structure and interpretive freedom, which makes it unusually compatible with cinema and literature. For readers unfamiliar with the framework, the programme is organised around six transdisciplinary themes across the school year, with schools developing Units of Inquiry around them. Each unit is built around a central idea and developed through three lines of inquiry, with subject knowledge and skills woven through the wider conceptual focus (International Baccalaureate Organization, n.d.). For a teacher entering this system for the first time, that freedom can also be daunting. How do you meaningfully connect mathematics, literacy, science, humanities and curriculum standards within a unit framed by an idea as broad as Who We Are? Faced with that problem, I returned to the same instinct I had relied on years earlier at a dusty chalkboard in Vietnam: story. A strong story often begins not with an answer, but with a question. Cinema is particularly powerful because it does not always resolve those questions for us; often, it creates the conditions in which we construct our own interpretations. That felt remarkably close to the constructivist philosophy underpinning inquiry-based learning, and it offered me a way to hold a transdisciplinary unit together without reducing it to a collection of disconnected lessons.
Constructivism, in simple terms, is the idea that learners do not passively receive meaning; they build it by connecting new experiences to what they already know, believe and notice. In that sense, it has an obvious relationship with cinema. A film does not enter the mind as a fixed package of meaning. Viewers bring their own memories, expectations and perspectives to what they see, often drawing different conclusions from the same image or scene. This was the connection that interested me most. If students could approach a film as active interpreters rather than passive recipients, perhaps the cinematic world itself could become a space for inquiry.
Although I arrived at some of these practices largely by instinct, the underlying ideas were hardly new. The educational importance of imagination, narrative and scaffolding has been explored for decades. Jerome Bruner’s work on narrative and scaffolding helped explain how learners can be supported in making sense of complex ideas without simply being given the answer (Bruner, 1986; Wood et al., 1976), while Kieran Egan argued for the central role of imagination, story, metaphor and emotional engagement in learning (Egan, 1986). What struck me was not the novelty of these ideas, but how easily they could be pushed to the margins in institutions focused on coverage, assessment and efficiency. Generative cinema offered a way to bring them back to the centre of the learning experience.
The result was Who We Are, a short film centred on Aya, a young schoolgirl who reluctantly moves with her mother to her late grandmother’s rural hometown in Japan. As she explores forgotten shrines, encounters mysterious spirits, and uncovers fragments of her family’s past, the ordinary world begins to blur with the supernatural. Guided through a journey of memory, ritual and belonging, Aya is confronted with questions rather than answers: Who are we? What shapes our identity? What do we inherit from the people, places and traditions that came before us? These were not simply themes in a story; they became the questions that shaped our classroom over the weeks that followed. As I developed Who We Are, I realised that the questions at the heart of the film were beginning to shape my own inquiry as a teacher. If Aya’s journey was about identity, memory and inheritance, I found myself asking similar questions of my own practice. That meant returning to the cinematic influences that shaped how I think about story and learning. Those influences did not sit alongside the film; they shaped its atmosphere, pacing and sense of ambiguity. In that sense, the creative process became part of the inquiry itself.
That process also sent me back to the filmmakers who shaped how I think about cinema. Directors such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa showed me how atmosphere, ambiguity and stillness can carry tension and meaning (Kinoshita, 2009). I began to wonder whether cinematic choices such as framing, pacing, silence and symbolism could have pedagogical value if students were inhabiting these worlds over time. Cinema was not simply the medium through which the story was delivered; its language became part of the inquiry itself.
For students, this was not about being told what the film meant. It was about being invited into a world that could be read in different ways. The cinematic choices were not there for style; they were there to hold space for interpretation. Students brought their own readings into discussion, writing and reflection, sometimes noticing things I had not. That was when it became clear that the film was not simply a resource, but a shared space for meaning-making.
That shared space also created natural opportunities for differentiation. Because meaning was carried not only through language, but also through image, atmosphere, sound and symbolism, students could enter the same inquiry in different ways. In increasingly multilingual classrooms, these visual and symbolic entry points allowed learners developing English to participate in conceptual discussions before they had the vocabulary to express every nuance in words. Rather than requiring different versions of the same lesson, the cinematic world itself offered multiple pathways into the same shared inquiry.
The reality, however, was far less effortless than the finished films might suggest. Although image-to-video tools had evolved far beyond that first three-second Commander Nosib experiment, creating a cinematic world still demanded significant time, iteration and compromise. Every scene had to be imagined, generated, revised and assembled within the rhythms of school life, often against the deadlines of an unfolding unit of inquiry. I worked without a production budget or dedicated institutional support, funding the tools myself. That points to a wider tension in education. Conversations about AI are increasingly common across education, yet practical investment in time, resources and creative space for teachers can still lag behind.
One scene in particular made me realise something had shifted. As Aya looked out of her bedroom window, the sudden appearance of an elderly woman made the entire class jump. It was the first time many of them had experienced a genuine cinematic jump scare in a lesson. But instead of closing discussion, it blew it open. Questions came rushing in. Was she a ghost? Was that a trick? How was it done? That moment led us into explorations of illusion, perspective, spirituality and belief, and then quite practically into rebuilding Pepper’s Ghost in the school darkroom. As students experimented with light, reflection and perception, we were meeting our science standards in context, not as an add-on, but as part of the story’s logic. That was when it became clear the film was not separate from the lesson. It had become the catalyst through which the lesson unfolded.
Later in the unit, we watched a scene where Aya’s grandmother leaves her a simple gift, a recipe for onigiri. We made onigiri together in class, using the moment to explore procedural writing, following and composing clear step-by-step instructions with a real purpose and audience. During that activity, one student became visibly emotional. When I asked if she was all right, she told me they were happy tears because it had reminded her of her grandmother who had passed away. It was a quiet reminder that stories become most meaningful when they connect to experiences students already carry. The lesson moved beyond understanding Aya’s journey. It became a space for students to reflect on their own. Together with the Pepper’s Ghost example, this shows how the film created a narrative space where science, literacy, culture and personal meaning could be explored together.
Our next unit, Where We Are in Place and Time, explored migration, belonging and how people carry memories across borders. Students met a new cast of characters navigating an unfamiliar world shaped by fog, objects and uncertain journeys. As with Who We Are, the story did not offer simple answers; it invited students to interpret, question and build their own understanding. Students followed Ploy, a young girl suddenly displaced from the familiarity of home and thrust into an unfamiliar world. Almost immediately, she is engulfed by a dense fog that obscures her surroundings, creating a growing sense of unease, uncertainty and vulnerability. Like Ploy, the audience is never entirely sure what is beyond the mist or what they might encounter next. The fog is not simply part of the setting. It was designed to make both character and viewer experience the emotional uncertainty of transition.
The choice of fog was not accidental. I found myself returning to the opening of John Carpenter’s The Fog (Carpenter, 1980), where an old storyteller gathers children around a campfire and, just before midnight, begins a ghost story. What captivated me was not simply the supernatural, but the complete attention of the children listening. I found myself wondering whether children are naturally drawn to what exists in the space between certainty and mystery, where the ordinary and the uncanny overlap. It was this space in between that I wanted to recreate in the classroom. Not to frighten, but to invite curiosity. Rather than explaining every image or resolving every question, the film encouraged students to linger in uncertainty, allowing metaphor, imagination and inquiry to emerge together.
Over time, the impact I noticed was not simply in engagement, but in the kinds of conversations students were having. They began using story and image as a way into ideas that are often difficult to articulate. The fog became a way of talking about uncertainty; Pepper’s Ghost became a way of exploring perception and reality. Stories became places where scientific, cultural and personal perspectives could coexist rather than compete. Instead of searching for a single correct interpretation, students began weighing interpretations, supporting them with evidence and considering viewpoints that differed from their own. I also noticed that this visual, symbolic approach created additional entry points for students learning through English. Images, metaphor and atmosphere often allowed them to contribute to conceptual discussions before they had the vocabulary to express every nuance in words alone. That, for me, was where the potential of Cinematic Learning became clearest. Not as a replacement for curriculum, but as a framework through which conceptual understanding could emerge more naturally.
These experiences gradually led me to believe that what I was developing was more than a collection of films or classroom experiments. It was the beginning of a pedagogical approach. Cinematic Learning, as I understand it, is not about replacing teaching with technology. It is about using the language of cinema to build worlds where inquiry can take shape. The film is not the lesson. It is not the answer. It is a shared environment that students can enter, question and interpret together. Other aspects of this approach, including the use of narrative structures such as the Hero’s Journey (Campbell, 2008) as a tool for reflection and metacognition, are still evolving and deserve exploration in their own right. What matters here is the wider principle: cinema can provide a framework in which learning is not merely delivered, but experienced and interpreted.
Looking back to that classroom in Vietnam with nothing more than coloured chalk and a blackboard, I realise that the impulse has never really changed. I was trying to build a world that students wanted to step into. Today, AI allows those worlds to become richer and more ambitious, but the technology is not the story. The story is, and always has been, imagination. Perhaps the real opportunity is not only to nurture the imagination of our students, but also to rekindle it in ourselves as educators. If Cinematic Learning has taught me anything, it is that the future of education may depend as much on giving teachers permission to imagine as it does on giving students new ways to think.
References
Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Harvard University Press.
Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). New World Library.
Carpenter, J. (Director). (1980). The fog [Film]. AVCO Embassy Pictures.
Egan, K. (1986). Teaching as story telling: An alternative approach to teaching and curriculum in the elementary school. University of Chicago Press.
International Baccalaureate Organization. (n.d.). Primary Years Programme. https://www.ibo.org/programmes/primary-years-programme/
Kinoshita, C. (2009). The mummy complex: Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft and J-horror. In J. Choi & M. Wada-Marciano (Eds.), Horror to the extreme: Changing boundaries in Asian cinema (pp. 103–122). Hong Kong University Press.
SEGA. (1991). Streets of Rage [Video game]. SEGA.
Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1976.tb00381.x