Monsieur Lazhar Analysis

“The film Monsieur Lazhar is a french langage film about childhood, death, grief and mentoring. Monsieur Lazhar is a small story with dark, deep reverberations that may have the power to heal: it is about the response of young children to the death of their teacher, a woman whose attempt to soothe a young boy with a hug was misinterpreted, and it is about the authoritative but wounded man who replaces the deceased teacher as an instructor.” (Garrett,2013) This paper is going to prove how main themes in the film are relevant to the course material in the course Childhood in Canadian Context taught by Hannah Dyer. Moreover, the paper will specify about three of the main themes in the film loss and trauma, peer and school socialization and the …show more content…
Some of the children are not sure how to react therefore they lean on their peers to help illustrate how to act. This can be explained by Charles Cooley’s theory the “looking glass self” meaning that people go through “steps of imagining what we appear to others, imaging how people judge us and we feel pride or modification based on what we think others think of us. We build a notion of the “self” based on how others reflect us back to ourselves” () therefore the children lean on each other to help get through their emotions even if they may be not aware of them. For the students their biggest agent of socialization was their school and peers, which are the institutions and relations that help, produce, enforce and maintain socially accepted expectations and roles. The teachers to try and put their feelings about the death away and continue teaching in the same way to try and distract the students from the death socialized them. This can be explained with Brofenbrenner’s bio-ecological theory of child development where the “microsystem is the student’s school and peers because that is the most direct level of interaction and the interactions of these two agents would be classified as the mesosystem” () and helps understand how the school and peer interaction either positive or negative has an influence on the students. For example, one student Simon, who was one of the main characters, dealt with his grief with anger lasing out at teachers and classmates which lead to other students having the same reaction leading to fights among students. Simon was going through more emotions than just anger he also felt guilt of what happened to the teacher because of what other students were saying to him for example Simone says “it 's not my fault? It 's