Why is Aladdin a Teachable Moment?
Welcome! Disney’s 1992 production of Aladdin probes many discussion points and therefore offers insight to many teaching moments to share within the walls of middle schools. Aladdin appeals to viewers across all ages. However, Disney’s intended audience lies in families and children. So, when viewing the film as children, a basic understanding of the movie engrains itself into the minds of the children. They sing the songs, laugh at Genie’s jokes, think Abu is cute, and learn about the characters. However, as the children grow into teenagers, they have the capacity to think critically about things that used to appear only as a basic Disney movie. Using a Disney movie in the classroom allows students to learn how to look at both sides of an argument and formulate discussion points while using a topic for which they possess background knowledge. Plus, who doesn’t love talking about Disney movies?
Each video essay includes our take on a different question formulated while taking a deeper look into watching Aladdin. Each separate blog post includes a short video discussing the topic and a blog post that dives a bit deeper into discussion. A lesson plan a week of class regarding discussion around the all four topics that incorporate the ways to teach your middle school student how to think exist along with each video. Finally, we created a tab that highlights other topics and prompts about the film with a few discussion points that the students can expand upon if necessary. This tab also includes the worksheets and resources that align with the lesson plans. Our videos and blog posts show how to dive into the additional questions we formulated and hope to continue to teach students to develop clear arguments.
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Feel free to contact us at anytime with questions! We hope you can use our website as a resource for your classroom and we hope you find the website to offer the things necessary to reflect to students! We hope to teach students to discuss ethical, social, political, and educational in order to spark awareness of the world around them. There’s no better way to teach these aspects than to teach with something in which students relate!