The real hearts of oak

The power of the lens, food and hospitality drive the hope in Ken Loach’s last film. Krish Kandiah reviews The Old Oak.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A man and a woman sit in a cathedral pew and incline their heads towards each other.

Ebla Mari and Dave Turner play Yara and TJ.

BBC Film.

In the dusty back room of the rather rundown Old Oak pub in County Durham, northeast England there is a faded black and white photo. It shows the very same room packed full of hungry families sharing a community meal together. Below it is written a sign:

“When you eat together you stick together.”

Pub Landlord Tommy Joe Ballantyne explains to young Syrian refugee photographer Yara that the picture was taken by his uncle during the miner’s strike when the community made it a priority to feed each other’s children no matter what.

This is the pivotal scene in Ken Loach’s latest, and some suggest, final film: The Old Oak. The multi-award-winning director has produced another masterful piece of cinema which, although set in 2016, provides vivid social commentary on our current cost-of-living crisis and our struggling immigration and asylum system.

By setting the film in an old colliery town facing its own challenges with social deprivation, Loach allows those communities who feel left behind by the rest of the country to raise legitimate concerns about immigration. The film powerfully portrays local people expressing frustration at being used as a dumping ground by government for ex-prisoners while also feeling trapped by unemployment, falling house prices and rising costs. Into this community then arrive refugees fleeing the brutal war in Syria.

The film is not just depicting some sort of Hollywood romantic utopia. It is powerfully celebrating what is happening in communities all around the UK.

Yara arrives camera in hand, snapping photographs of her family’s arrival on a bus. They are met with hostility from the beginning. We see the conflict through the lens of Yara’s camera - black and white photographs that foreshadow the photos of the miner’s struggle she will later discover on the wall of the pub’s back room. We see another photo – the one Yara’s mother displays pride of place in the lounge – of Yara’s father who is lost in the brutal Syrian prison system. These photographs provide beautiful symbolism throughout the movie signalling the themes of solidarity and resistance.

We see in the film the power of the camera to change the way that people see their world and view others in the face of hatred. We see the power of food to unite divided communities. We see the power of hospitality in the face of hostility. We see families from both communities caught in impossible situations.

What this film does most brilliantly, in the rich dialogue which sounds less like a script and more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, is allow the strongest arguments against refuge and asylum to be raised. Ultimately this dialogue opens the eyes of the two communities, and enables them to discover that they have so much more in common than they might have imagined.

I have witnessed these eye-opening moments connection myself. I have seen Afghans resettled to hotels find a welcome into a village community through integrated cricket matches. I have seen women with no common language forge friendships over a picnic. I have seen children change from sullen and suspicious to animated and inseparable in minutes with the help of an X-box. I have seen the beer and pub industry offer support and help to Ukrainians. I have seen churches open their doors and their hearts to Muslims from Kosovo and Syria. The film is not just depicting some sort of Hollywood romantic utopia. It is powerfully celebrating what is happening in communities all around the UK.

The mining community, that once lost jobs, financial stability and heritage, eats alongside the refugee community – those who have now lost their homes

That dusty pub back room is transformed to the bustling hub of community life once again, as families from different worlds befriend and support each other over shared meals and recognition of their common mortality and humanity. The understanding that both communities have experienced displacement has brought them together. The mining community, that once lost jobs, financial stability and heritage, eats alongside the refugee community – those who have now lost their homes, their country and their heritage.

In a beautiful moment of reconciliation in the film, the Syrian families present their new neighbours with a banner made in the style of the traditional mining banners used on gala days – the ones that took pride of place on marches just behind a brass band. The banner is inscribed in both English and Arabic with the words that have drawn the communities together: Strength, Solidarity, Resistance.

I believe the film, like the banner, offers a rallying cry to those who see it. It helps us understand two of the most marginalised communities in Britain at the moment – the impoverished towns of the North, and the refugees and asylum seekers. It challenges us to find ways to come together with empathy and hospitality. It proffers significant mutually beneficial consequences – love, joy, peace, hope, friendship, forgiveness, reconciliation - when we learn not only to live together, but to share food, time and lives together.

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Education

Leading

26 July 2024

5 min read

Why I teach over my students’ heads

Successful teaching is a work of empathy that stretches the mind.

James K.A. Smith

James is a philosopher, cultural critic and author.

A blackboard covered in chalk writing and highlights.

James's chalkboard.

I’ve been teaching college students for almost 30 years now. As much as I grumble during grading season, it is a pretty incredible way to make a living. I remain grateful.

I am not the most creative pedagogue. My preference is still chalk, but I can live with a whiteboard (multiple colors of chalk or markers are a must). Over the course of 100 minutes, various worlds emerge that I couldn’t have anticipated before I walked into class that morning. (I take photos of what emerges so I can remember how to examine the students later.) I think there is something important about students seeing ideas—and their connections—unfold in “real time,” so to speak.

I’ve never created a PowerPoint slide for a class. I put few things on Moodle, and only because my university requires it. I’ve heard people who use “clickers” in class and I have no idea what they mean. I find myself skeptical whenever administrators talk about “high impact” teaching practices (listening to lectures produced the likes of Hegel and Hannah Arendt; what have our bright shiny pedagogical tricks produced?). I am old and curmudgeonly about such “progress.”

But I care deeply about teaching and learning. I still get butterflies before every single class. I think (hope!) that’s because I have a sense of what’s at stake in this vocation.

I am probably most myself in a classroom. As much as I love research, and imagine myself a writer, the exploratory work of teaching is a crucial laboratory for both. I love making ideas come alive for students—especially when students are awakened by such reflection and grappling with challenging texts. You see the gears grinding. You see the brow furrowing. Every once in a while, you sense the reticence and resistance to an insight that unsettles prior biases or assumptions; but the resistance is a sign of getting it. And then you see the light dawn. I’m a sucker for that spectacle.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy.

Successful teaching is, fundamentally, a work of empathy. As a teacher, you have to try to remember your way back into not knowing what you now take for granted. You have to re-enter a student’s puzzlement, or even apathy, to try to catalyze questions and curiosity. Because I teach philosophy, my aim is nothing less than existential engagement. I’m not trying to teach them how to write code or design a bridge; I’m trying to get them to envision a different way to live. But, for me, it’s impossible to separate the philosophical project from the history of philosophy: to do philosophy is to join the long conversation that is the history of philosophy. So we are always wresting with challenging, unfamiliar texts that arrive from other times that might as well be other planets for students in the twenty-first century.

So successful teaching requires a beginner’s mindset on the part of the teacher, a charitable capacity to remember what ignorance (in the technical sense) feels like. To do so without condescension is absolutely crucial if teaching is going to be an art of invitation rather than an act of alienation. (The latter, I fear, is more common than we might guess.)

Such empathy means meeting students where they are. But successful teaching is also about stretching students’ minds and imaginations into new territory and unfamiliar habits of mind. This is where I find myself especially skeptical of pedagogical developments that, to my eyes, run the risk of infantilizing college students. (I remember a workshop in which a “pedagogical expert” explained that the short attention span of students required changing the PowerPoint slide every 8 seconds. This does not sound like a recipe for making students more human, I confess.)

That’s why I am unapologetic about trying to teach over my students’ heads. I don’t mean, of course, that I’m satisfied with spouting lectures that elude their comprehension. That would violate the fundamental rule of empathy. But such empathy—meeting students where they are—is not mutually exclusive with also inviting them into intellectual worlds and conversations where they won’t comprehend everything.

This is how the hunger sets in. If you can invite a student to care about the questions, to grasp their import, and experience the unique joy of joining the conversation that is philosophy, then part of the thrill, I think, is being admitted into a world where you don’t “get” everything.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy.

When I’m teaching, I think of this in a couple of ways. At the same time that I am trying to make core ideas and concepts accessible and understandable, I don’t regret talking about attendant ideas and concepts that will, to this point, still elude students. For the sharpest students, this registers as something to learn, something to be curious about. Or sometimes when we’re focused on, say, Pascal or Hegel, I’ll plant little verbal footnotes—tiny digressions about how Hannah Arendt engaged their work in the 20th century, or how O.K. Bouwsma’s reading of Anselm is akin to something we’re talking about. The vast majority of students won’t be familiar with either, but it’s another indicator of how big and rich and complicated the intellectual cosmos of philosophy is. For some of these students (not all, certainly), this becomes tantalizing: they want to become the kind of people for whom a vast constellation of ideas and thinkers are as familiar and present as their friends and cousins. This becomes a hunger to belong to such a world, to join such a conversation.

This gambit—every once in a while, talking about ideas and thinkers as if students should know them—is, I maintain, still an act of empathy. To both meet students where they are and, at the same time, teach “over their heads,” is an invitation to stretch into new terrain and thereby swell the soul into the fullness for which it was made. The things that skitter just over their heads won’t be on the exam, of course; but I’m hoping they’ll chase some of them for a lifetime to come.

This article was originally published on James K A Smith’s Substack Quid Amo.