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After viewing “The Class” last week, I read Francois Begaudeau’s book “The Class,” on which the movie was based, this week. Two big differences emerge between the movie and the book.

The book is very loosely structured, in essence a set of Begaudeau’s vignettes and reflections on a year of teaching grammar and composition to his eighth grade class. It lacks a strong plot-line. Movies need a strong plot-line, and the vignettes were adopted and rearranged to create one. His confrontation with the two student representatives at the evaluation meetings occurs early in the book (p. 75 to be sure) and nothing more is heard of it. In the movie, however, that confrontation is elevated to the key turning point in the plot.

By the way, the derogatory term Begaudeau used to describe the student representatives’ behaviour was “petasses,” which appears to be most accurately translated by the word “skank,” which has a distinct connotation of sexual promiscuity. The women, not surprisingly, were insulted and offended by his choice of words.

The second difference between the book and the movie is point of view. The book is written in the first person and very clearly represents Begaudeau’s point of view. Thus we have his perceptions of and reactions to his students. He has a privileged opportunity to explain himself. Despite his idiosyncrasies, the reader is quite likely to finish reading feeling sympathetically towards Begaudeau.

The movie is more impartial. The camera observes the action from the students’ viewpoint just as much as from Begaudeau’s. So we often see Begaudeau as he is seen by his students. In addition, the students, too, have physical presence, energy, and attractiveness. From their viewpoint, as I reported last week, Begaudeau doesn’t seem so heroic.

Reading the book and watching the movie side-by-side is a good reminder of the differences between the two media and the influence these differences have on how we perceive narratives presented on both.

I’ll be taking next week off – one last week in the country before Labour Day and, to use the French term for it, la rentree. Au revoir le 10 septembre.

French filmmaker Laurent Cantet’s highly praised film “The Class (Entre Les Murs)” has finally been released on DVD. I think the film deserves high marks for its effective use of cinema verite style and demonstration of the complexity of the relationship between teacher and student.

In an interview with Dennis Lim in the New York Times on Sept. 21, 2008, Cantet said “I don’t want to make a version of

In my previous post, I concluded that what strategic planning needs is a more populist approach that engages more people from the organization(s) that would be implementing the plan and the public that will be affected by the plan. The question is how to do that. I think there are two answers, one involving information technology, the other narrative.

The information technology approach is to post draft plans on a government website and invite public comment. My co-author David Brown and I, in Digital State at the Leading Edge (www.digitalstate.org) discussed early initiatives of that kind undertaken by the federal and Ontario governments: for example the federal government’s dialogue on foreign policy and the Ontario government’s budget consultation, both undertaken in 2003. The challenge with such consultations is how to stimulate public participation and then how to incorporate the responses into the ultimate plan.

In the years following those early initiatives, social networking software has greatly improved, providing opportunities for enhanced outreach. So, rather than being conducted entirely on a government website, a planning process could also take place on Facebook or YouTube. If the plan involves controversial issues, it is a certainty that citizens on one side or the other will set up their own YouTube channels and Facebook groups. Again, planners in government will have to monitor, interpret, and incorporate what they read there.

I see narrative fitting in in the way strategic plans are presented. For example, plans often involve alternative scenarios. Rather than presenting scenarios abstractly, then could be presented as narratives. The narratives could include big pictures (for example, a future involving mainly renewable sources of energy) as well as vignettes involving households, businesses, or third sector organizations.

One of the issues posed in the previous post is how the strategic plans developed by forward-looking rationalist planners could deal with the limits on human rationality, for example the willingness of many people to act on the basis of backward-looking concerns such as retribution. A populist planning process will help, or perhaps I should say force, planners to take into account public sentiments, some of which may be very irrational. It would force them to confront strongly-held public sentiments either as constraints or as obstacles to be overcome through public advocacy. The example that comes to mind is Paul Krugman’s recent vignette of the citizen at a public meeting who wanted the government to keep its hands off his Medicare -willfully denying, even when told, that Medicare is a government program.

To summarize, I see online consultation, located on both government websites and social networking sites, and incorporating narrative as a way of communicating with the public, as the way forward for strategic planning.

I will be taking another week off next week, but will return during the third week of August.