Alternative Pedagogies

This chapter looks at how documentary filmmakers approached alternative therapeutic and educational environments for children and adolescents with complex disruptive behavioural disorders, autism, and other disabilities. The chapter compares two examples within this context: the collaborative films of Fernand Deligny from the early 1970s, and Allan King’s Warrendale (1967). For Deligny, the pedagogic potential of filmmaking (or “camering,” as he called it) was considerable, especially in helping to dissolve the notion of autistic or neurodiverse children as “other” and reducing the effects of alienation and estrangement through “language.” King’s film centres on “everyday life” in a controversial special educational facility outside Toronto. Warrendale not only observes the relationships between the young residents and their carers, it also frames King’s support for new and more radical ways of caring for disturbed and marginalised children and young people.