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In this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful instruction in media viewing and collective discussion. Cain will consider how and why these reformers came to conclude that “civic spectatorship” was essential to modern education and democratic participation, and reflect on the significance of their experiments for schools today.
Victoria Cain teaches in the Department of History at Northeastern University. She is the author of Schools and Screens: A Watchful History (MIT, 2021), as well as numerous articles and chapters on media, technology and education, and the co-author, with Karen Rader, of Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History (Chicago, 2014). Her newest project explores the history and politics of adolescent privacy.
The following is a transcript of the video’s content, generated by Otter.ai fittingly enough, with human corrections during and after. For any errors the human missed, please reach out to cms@mit.edu.
Heather Hendershot 00:49
Hi everyone, thank you for coming. It’s great to see some people here in person. And I’m sure we have many people with us virtually online via zoom.
Heather Hendershot 00:59
Just a little plug. Next week we’re having a closed session that is an alumni session with just our graduate students. And then the week after that, we will be having a session that is exclusively virtual with Nick Thurston in the UK, who will be speaking, the title of this talk is “Document Practices: The Art of Propogating Access”. For today we have Victoria Cain, who teaches in the Department of History at Northeastern University. She’s the author of “Schools and Screens: A Watchful History” from MIT Press 2021, as well as numerous articles and chapters on media technology and education. She’s the co author of “Life on Display: Revolutionising U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History” from the University of Chicago Press 2014. And her newest project explores the history and politics of adolescent privacy. And I believes as a consideration with MIT Press as of like three days ago. So yes,
02:00
onward. That’s great. So every new Victoria Cain. All right,
Victoria Cain 02:03
Well, thanks, thank you Andrew
Victoria Cain 02:07
so much for coordinating all the logistical details. And thank you guys, for showing up at 5pm on a Thursday, as Heather mentioned, I’m here today to talk about this new book project, or I guess, new book, it’s left the project stage, schools and screens, which is a history of efforts to reform Elementary and Secondary Education in the US through educational screen media. So it’s funny that we’re sitting right across from Justin Reich’s office, because in some ways, I feel like I have done pre history to a lot of what he talks about. And I think,
Victoria Cain 02:46
tonight, I’m going to share some of the findings from the research I did for this book, describe two case studies and conclude with a reflection on how the book relates to our current moment. So I started thinking about the history of educational technology in US schools A few years ago, because the gap between rhetoric and reality seemed so enormous to me. As soon as common schools were established in the United States in the early 19th century, people started talking about ways to improve them through technology. And that kind of talk only grew louder and more persistent in the 20th century. And yet, despite all of this emphasis and effort on introducing new technologies to make schools better, it actually took a really long time for schools to embrace and integrate the same screen media technologies that had long permeated the rest of society. So the question of why were they so slow, that piqued my interest.
Victoria Cain 03:54
And I was very lucky to start this project. Just as a whole wave of historians of media and technology, were beginning to wrestle with different aspects of this history. I also benefited enormously from new digital access to publications on non theatrical media, and this is my little plug for the media history Digital Library if people haven’t used it yet, you need to. So the Internet Archive was the other sort of wonderful, you know, repository that you guys should all check out, particularly if you are interested in the early history of conflict, personal computing. So I started pawing through these online resources. But I also started going into school board records and education journals and all kinds of archival materials from the early 1930s when schools first started using film on a more regular basis, and then I have gone all the way up through the early 2000s when nearly every school in the United States was Fully if you know, connected with some fragility, but fully connected to the internet, I also read as a starting point, a lot of Larry Cuban, were Cuban is a terrific story of education, who wrote several books about classroom technologies in the 1980s, and 1990s. And he’s really the guy who created the master narrative of the history of educational technology. And according to Cuban, the story of anti cyclical efficiency obsessed school administrators foisted new technological tools on teachers.
Tomás Guarna 05:44
The technology was poorly designed, or existing classroom norms, teachers have little incentive to change those norms. Teachers refuse to use the technology, the technology gets relegated to storeroom shelves to die, rinse and repeat. And he makes this argument that this happens with a whole bunch of different kinds of machines. And in fact, those of us who have either been students or teachers may have seen that cycle, play out ourselves wherever you like, shiny new tool comes in, and then it kind of works but kind of doesn’t, and then eventually goes away to some library shelf, and nobody ever sees it again. Somebody has to pay is actually very persuasive. But his scholarly interests were very much located in the specifics of classroom teaching. And in school infrastructure, as a historian, educator is really interested in classroom culture. And when I was writing these books, his archival base was very limited. So I started thinking, you know what, there got to be other ways to answer this question of why schools are so slow to adopt and make effective use of screen media. I kept thinking, Well, you know, expanding the frame of this research, and really digging into different sets of archival materials might help shed new light on this situation. And that is I’m hoping the contribution that I’m making here, what I found was that there were four really pivotal debates over schools re media, and these debates, the tensions that people got all heated up over, often slow to schools embrace of these tools. I mean, sometimes they actually hasent schools, integration of new screen media technologies. But either way, it was these four tensions that were pivotal in shaping when and how and why schools adopted screen media technologies. So here are the research findings, and I’m just going to go over them one by one. First, I would argue that tensions of race and racism were pivotal in shaping the history of scrimmages in schools. People like to talk about technology as race blind, even though as scholars media, you know, it’s a thing but and yet, school screens were also anything but progressive educational reformers often looked to small screens to help loosen the Gordian knots of racism and the multitude of ills that it caused, but at the same time, particularly in the 50s, and 60s, as well as later on. Conservative white politicians and school administrators also made heavy use of screen media technology to justify and often reinforce school segregation. Despite performers hopes that school media technologies would help to overcome the quandary of race school screens usually exacerbated race based educational inequities, instead of eliminating them. And I’m happy to talk a little bit more deeply about that in the q&a. Another theme that came up repeatedly is that the history of school screens is a history of the ongoing distrust of educators. skepticism about educators abilities was a major impetus for the introduction of classroom tech. At the same time, when classroom technology did make its way into American schools. Americans often wonder whether teachers were even competent, competent enough to handle these tools. So did they serve our school screens were usually debates over exactly what teachers and schools could were should do, and also whether visual media technologies could better accomplish those tasks that actual human beings.
Tomás Guarna 09:51
Third finding was that the history of school screens is a history of the growing influence of private funding. In public schools, from the 1930s through the 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, other major philanthropic institutions, they initiated and they propped up experiments and educational media development and use and you’ll certainly see this in some of the case studies that I offer later on. As a result, these foundations wielded outside influence over the politics and practices surrounding school screens. But it was really in the late 1970s 1980s and early 1990s, the for profit corporations became really powerful players in promoting the school use of media technology. And the lobbying, donation and marketing efforts of these corporations truly expanded the use of screens and schools, but also helped to shape the way that education was implemented in public institutions in this country. A final discovery was the way and important attentions over the appropriate role of screens in citizenship education. Schools have long been charged in the United States with preparing youngsters for engaged responsible participation in an overlapping set of political, economic and social communities. But what exactly made students good citizens and what exactly they required from schools to get there? That was hardly a matter of consensus. screens just raised the temperature on all very heated discussions about citizenship education, especially given Americans long standing anxieties about what screens did to kids, right, and people worried back in the 1930s, just as they are today, that screens are going to unleash unpredictable desires or reduce youngsters to unquestioning passivity. So experiments with debates about media technology from schools, often revolved around how not only how they influence us, and there’s a lot of moral panic, right, that gets associated with this. But it’s really thinking about the ways that they influence us as part of the broader community thinking about how they influenced future citizens. So those were four major textures that came up in every decade sad over and over and over again. And those were the as you can see, I’ll show you my little table of contents, I ended up organizing the book kind of around the debates chronologically, and you’ll see those four tensions in each chapter. But in addition to considering what shapes the projector, screen media technology in school, I also began to think about who was engaging in these debates? Um, you know, Cuba had talked a lot about school administrator. So those are, you know, the anxious well meaning villains in his narrative. But who were the reformers that were like pushing screen media, our schools, do teachers embrace them? Were parents excited about them? What about industry writ large. And what I found is that these reforms could generally be assessed or sorted into three groups. First, you had advocates for what I call civic spectatorship and the other talk about that group today. They’re one of the earliest Coalition’s pushing screen media into schools, progressive, politically liberal educators who believe that schools have a responsibility to promote civic engagement. And what we might now describe as social justice based schools as the engines for reconstructing society better for from the 1930s on this group of reformers argued that we need screens in schools in order to give students the opportunity to practice skills that will help them navigate a civic realm, increasingly organized around screen media.
Tomás Guarna 14:16
second group pushing screens into schools was made up of men and women, but mostly men who believe that technology provided and managed by experts was the key to improving educational quality. These technocrats promised that schools would modernize outdated educational practice scale, high quality teaching and ease long standing educational inequities, and that they would do so at little to no cost to taxpayers. So a lot of the rhetoric you hear coming out of Silicon Valley now that is pre saved by like our gentlemen of the Ford Foundation in the 1950s. Making grandiose promises About educational television and its powers. And the last set of cheerleaders and advocates for reforming schools through screenings are people who are actually in the business of producing and selling media and technology to schools, as well as their allies in journalism and government. These are the people who directly stand to profit from screens, whether it’s financially or professionally. And these three groups coexisted. They often overlapped. Each one was involved in major experiments with school sprains over the course of the 20th century. And all of them sees moments of perceived educational and social crisis, which is pretty easy, because American schools, if you listen to the media are always in crisis, there is always a crisis going on in education. Whether it’s moral panic, or economic depression, or domestic unrest, or international conflict, or declining sh t source, like there’s always a crisis somewhere. And always, technology is going to be the thing that saves us. So the books chapters are, as I mentioned, organized chronologically, and in them I analyze the most what I see is several of the most notable experiments who are that are initiated by each performers. And I have to examine and analyze the debates that result from their work. Okay. So today, what I want to do is I want to go over two case studies, two curriculum experiments that illustrate some of the tensions that I just watched. One is a success story, and it takes place in the 1930s. And the other is a cautionary tale of from the late 60s, early 70s. But both focus on progressive reformers, progressive politically and progressive, pedagogically interested in using screen media as a way to promote civic engagement. That is very much of the moment that they are operating in. So my first story takes place in the 1930s as a very loose coalition of educators and psychologists and documentarians, filmmakers of oopsie, you know, activism through the realm of film, as they’re, so they begin to push Olds to embrace popular cinema as a tool for citizenship training and political engagement. These reformers include film appreciation advocates like Ed Dale, William Lewin educators, like NYU education Professor Alice believed her social activists like Mary Lucy, who basically got kicked off the merger time because everybody thought she was a communist. And they were all interested in promoting a constellation of visual analytical and social skills that I described in the book as civic spectatorship. Now, the term is a borrowed one. It was coined by photography theorist ariella Azoulay to describe the way that spectatorship of visual imagery can actually create new social, political and ethical relationships among the viewers, and the view
Tomás Guarna 18:33
and communication scholars Robert Cameron and John Louis Lucaites elaborated on as a way as ideas in the American context suggesting that in the United States in the 20th century, United States, civic spectatorship is the equivalent of literacy. When it comes to civic engagement. It contributes just as much to share political discourse. And to me the term very neatly sums up what this kind of motley crew of reformers hopes to accomplish. They believed that schools were in the business of preparing students for citizenship in this wild, wooly, liberal, increasingly media saturated democracy. And so they argue that schools have responsibility to prepare students for this new world. They had to help students rehearse the skills that would be necessary to parse through visual propaganda cinematic arguments. The visual media that was beginning to splash itself across every movie screen every newsstand You know, every Billboard and they wanted them to know happy skills, but to be able to apply them in a way that will help them engage constructively with civic life. So these reformers that’s that’s their idea. That’s their ultimate ambition in there. But actually, if you how that translates into a K through 12 classroom. That’s a whole different deal. So they consistently and somewhat radically for the time, argue that the best way for schools to accomplish this lofty goal is to show popular films in class are often paired with news articles, and short social science readings. And then what kids to watch the films or shorts based on these films, do these readings and then discuss the sociological and psychological and political dilemmas that the film’s grace. It sounds very contemporary and therefore very natural to us. But let me tell you during the 1930s this is like, you know, people were were a little shocked with this idea. And the folks there suggested you can go wide ranging, they included dramas like cavalcade, or Alice Adams or haptens courageous documentaries like Joris ivens, Spanish Earth, and lots of newsreels, like the march of time. Now, reformers, they were ambitious, but they were also extremely practical, and many of them politically savvy, and they recognize just how large films need in the lives of the students they hoped to reach, especially during the Depression. But and everybody’s sitting there Nichols, to go to the movies during the Depression. And it’s one of the former Alice Comey who wrote in 1936, quote, the life of the American adolescent is colored markedly by his movie experiences. So schools have an obligation to acknowledge the inherent power of the photoplay and turn it to good use. So part of it is practical, but part of it is deeply psychological. They believe they have this conviction that films one two punch of visual information, and then emotion, prepare students to engage more openly with the world that surrounds them. As Edgar Dale put it, a book dealing with the scientific mechanics of soil erosion, may leave us cold, but it feels like the plow that broke the Great Plains stirs us. So through the practice of civic spectatorship of films, performers hoped students would begin to deliberate empathetically and collectively about issues ranging from as Dale put it, in 1938, quotes the abolition of war to a new point of view regarding Crime and Punishment to the more satisfactory distribution of wealth to a deeper insight into the problems of democratic government to an understanding of the Negro problem. And educators were actually quite enthusiastic about the idea of using popular film in school teachers were into this idea. They actually stood in line, there’s this amazing petition that someone gathers in 1830 about teachers who want to use popular film school.
Tomás Guarna 23:20
And 100 150 1200 people find their name to this one, like local New Haven petition. The teachers are all in the district administrators originally, you know, initially visit strong financial depression that can barely cover teacher salaries, you know, much less electrify their rural schools and deal with you know, rental fees for dramas and documentaries and the projector purchases and other cultural obstacles to older principles often for baby screening modern motion pictures at school on moral grounds. Even when you know, they pass muster popular bills tended to be too long, only peripherally relevant and quite expensive. Film exhibitors had zero interest in having films exhibited in schools because they saw schools very legitimately as a threat to their business model, which are movies at noon in the cafeteria. Why would you go to a film and actually pay money to see so Dale and her we her and all of these other reformers, they’re determined, though, to push this notion of civic spectatorship. So they go hand in hand to the Rockefeller Foundation into a few other factions. And then he can negotiate studios for the right to exert and use them in the classroom. They help districts develop relationships with local theaters to allow students to see second run films in the middle of the day. They generate lots and lots of curriculum, sometimes standalone units for like history or English classes, sometimes whole courses. Use film exerts and associated texts to prompt student discussion of social and political values and relationships in modern American culture. And here actually theory Um, so scholars like Frank Vidal and Eric Snowden Sabine and kdd good, have also done a little bit of work touching on these curriculum in various places. And, you know, we all agree, it’s really obvious when you look at the actual stuff, I mean, these curricula are extraordinarily progressive. They would give a lot of Republican members of Congress dude on the job today, both pedagogically and politically. You know, they’re talking about uncomfortable civic issues, economic inequality, racial discrimination, violence. So for instance, Dale and Hillier both developed curriculums that respectively use the film fury 1936 Spencer Tracy film, featuring the near lynching of a falsely accused prisoner, and then use it as an entree into the discussion of the injustice of the political and the justice system, and the epidemic of racial terror lynchings in the American South. These kinds of curricular units were a big hit with urban educators whose politics means left. And by the mid 1930s, some 10,000 classes and groups relied on Dales guides to promote civic spectatorship in and out of school leaders human relations film series curriculum, or enjoyed similar popularity by the end of the decade and was used in several 1000 schools. Those are just a couple examples. So this is increasingly adopted. And yet the tensions that I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, frequently slowed schools adoption and use of such curricula and film more generally, into industry advocates, and administrators objected to the political undertones of these curriculum. Conservatives Express reservation over the Rockefeller support for the curriculum, reservations that would eventually take fuller form. In the investigations of the risk committee. Launched in the late 1940s. Upcoming big bear fruit in the early 1970s. There was widespread skepticism about teachers abilities. To handle these films, very small boards looked askance at the pedagogy that was promoted on which training and civic spectatorship attended and proclaimed that students were never going to be able to control students or teachers were never going to be able to control student discussion about such fraught topics like oh, it’s too risky, it’s too politically dangerous. What happens if the students get out of control after they’ve been adults by films?
Tomás Guarna 28:06
educators themselves were sometimes a little bit wary as well, they should have been they knew that controversial films or juvenile sort of experiments and posing and discussion could skit off course and that has real peril for them, resulting in scolding official inquiries even job loss. Edgar Dale himself is leading classroom filled advocate is a professor at Ohio State University. He got swept up in the wake of a 1939 red hunting investigation by the trustees of his own university, and he was required to testify as to whether or not his approach to movie viewing had resulted in student support for stripers in Columbus. Now, we can also see the way that contests over citizenship hampered the adoption of films in many schools of global politics jargon at the end of the 1930s Films used in school rooms assumed newly threatening civic dimensions. Radio was propagandists preferred instruments in the 1930s. But Europe’s rising dictators made extensive use of films political potential, conditioning, hundreds of snuff films to prop up their regimes, and American parents, educators and politicians. were really worried that these films are going to leak into American classrooms one way or another, and that the practices of civic spectatorship would just be no match for the power of this insidious imagery. And such fear is really tempered enthusiasm for the kind of emotionally driven discussion oriented pedagogy that these performers were promoting. Rather than encourage open ended discussion, declared main high school principal, Robert Rubin. White educators should take a firm hand and use school films to, quote, inspire a democratic philosophy in the personal, creative American youth and assist in the formation of a patriotic spirit of national unity. In other words, race for whites explained. They need to provide students with a clear and explicit instruction in how to act, think and be American. As you can open a discussion. You know, that was not part of that. Once the war began explicit and widespread desire to promote the war effort, further depth and schools enthusiasts for exploratory discussions of sometimes ambiguous film messages. But what’s the war one doubt? civic spectatorship, really the new film based curricula drew very heavily on the work that had been generated in the 30s by these media reformers, the practices and the principles that had been espoused by Dale and Lee, her and all of these other kind of Interwar Education Advocates. And both American educators and the newly organized educational film industry, adopted critical analysis and open ended group discussion as standard viewing practice in the 1940s. because too many Americans cultivating these practices really stand stood in stark contrast to the education that had resulted in totalitarian regimes the repression that they associated with German and Russian schooling. So critical viewing and group discussions seemed to embody and reach toward the kind of postwar democratic ideals of free expression and tolerance, and rational compromise and consensus building. So the work of these Interwar reformers that I write about actually offer something as a prelude to the Cold War embrace of televised and post viewing discussions that Anna McCarthy writes about in the citizen machine. That’s not a 50s phenomenon that gets established earlier. Indeed, by the end of the 1940s. There is broad agreement among teachers, parents, and policymakers. That civic spectatorship represents a powerful social technology capable of producing new and constructive modes of citizenship. So that’s my success story.
Tomás Guarna 32:40
Yay, progressives. But educators commitment to this kind of viewing and pedagogical practice, it really addresses flows quite a bit over the next several decades. But it remains the sort of undercurrent in Discussions tool springs among champions of progressive pedagogical ideas and realism, you know, everybody just up on people’s radar. And in the mid 1960s, and early 1970s, this kind of pedagogy again, fluoresces becomes more popular once again, as educators and activists seek to meet the era’s challenges by teaching future citizens to analyze and discuss new visual narratives quickly, again, in experimental multimedia curricula, that is sponsored by foundations and universities. And it’s this that brings me to the second case study. In this era, the mid 60s to early 70s. The single best known curricular experiment was a curriculum called man, a course of study. I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of that. Not really, like, you know, ping that your generation, but I remember when I was a kid, and I’m old, but I’m not that I’m so mad, of course of study, which was nicknamed makers was conceived in 1962 and launched in 1969. And they passed with a fifth grade social studies curriculum that was created by psychologists and social scientists and educators over at Harvard University. And it was one of an alphabet soup of curriculum reform projects that flooded American schools after Sputnik 1957 watt, Americans got completely freaked out that we were behind the Russians and they were like, Oh, we have to reinvent education. I know we’ll launch 1000 different curricular ships and this was one of those ships was created with money from the National Science Foundation and also a series of private foundations. And this curriculum was intended like the others of this era to provide students with disciplinary grounding and critical thinking skills. Would equip them for more advanced study of subjects consider essential to the United States or war against the Soviets. Like other federally sponsored curriculum produced in this era makers made extensive use of screen media, by the 1960s, educators of all stripes from, you know, the top dog superintendent to prestigous. In class educator or principal, everybody was embracing spring media, it was new, it was essential. It was how you proved yourself a modern School of designers makers believe that film would enable fifth graders to do things that they otherwise might not be capable of doing to grapple with sophisticated evidence, through close observation and thoughtful interpretation they might not have been able to read or understand are really difficult. printers are stuck with it. But surely everybody can look. Everybody can observe, everybody could analyze. That’s the thinking behind this. So they created a curriculum around 16 short documentaries that depicted different animal and human communities. And the idea behind these documentaries were students to act as socio biologists and anthropologists. They would watch footage, then they would ask questions and develop and test hypotheses based on this footage. And then they would draw conclusions based on their hypotheses and a lot of back and forth discussion. And in this way, declare one makers designer, students would learn what he called, quote, a methodology of least thinking in a social science way. But as a historian of science, Erica Milan has pointed out, the makers team believes these films actually awkward far more than disciplinary training. The makers team hoped that guided viewing and discussion so sort of civic spectatorship but 30 years later, of these films would shape students self concept and social character and will ultimately alter their way of being in the community and the quality and the world. There’s the visual side that they hoped that observing and analyzing visual evidence would give students practice in the kind of critical measure reasoning upon which they believe democracy depended.
Tomás Guarna 37:29
But they also again interest that emotional state also really hoped that these big Great American students would identify deeply with the indigenous subsistence cultures that were depicted in these films. And by identifying with the kids they saw on the screens, who would radically different lives their own, but students would develop empathy and appreciation for human commonalities make us team member and psychologist Richard Jones, neatly summed up the team’s ambitions, quote, if these objectives can be realized, then both the future scholar and the future citizen are served. Think of the contemporary social ills that could not exist. If a generation of Americans could be taught to identify in heart, mind and stomach with the human species. Cold War confrontations abroad, and civil rights battles at home. Let’s these endeavors a terrible urgency, raising students consciousness about their shared humanity seem to these curriculum designers The only antidote to atomic peril, and the only solution to racial violence, swayed by Marshall McLuhan portentous intonations, makers planner believed that their films would help students to stretch their senses, and glimpse the global village of which they were a part of. So the ambitions of bakers designers were very similar to those of our progressive educational reformers in the 30s. But the film’s the actual material they rely on awaken this kind of feeling and to help people practice the visual and analytical
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skills
Tomás Guarna 39:20
radically different. Rather than rely on excerpts from Hollywood epics or the march of time, make us course designers they’re using hardcore anthropological and biological footage. They rely on ethnologists to create films of salmon and herring bowls and baboons. As well as the culture and lifestyle of the sun, people of the Kalahari Desert, and the net select people based in Nunavut, Canada, and the shorts that they produced, looked and sounded radically different from most classrooms. They were shot in color for one thing And they offer almost no on screen narration. So if you go to YouTube and you look at like many midcentury vlogs from this period where they’re telling you like smoke pot or whatever, you know, it’s like the stentorian overtones the narrator is going on. That’s not what’s happening here. You hear waves, you hear birds, you hear wind, you hear people talking to each other in languages that you don’t understand. And the reason for that, is that, that live who is commentary, the curriculum desire to pick up kids to sleep, they thought kids need to sort of check out and accept whatever the narrator said, right? They wanted students to really listen and focus and engage students what they believe forward if they tried to decipher what was happening on these screens. It was actually a very elegant solution to anxieties about passive spectatorship. Females challenge viewers with little exposure to subsistence cultures. Students watch children their own age hunters by stoning to death. They would watch men harpooning seals in a fishing pole. They watch and this is something I remember from fifth grade if any of the other older people in this room saw that that like there was a scene where kids ate the seal. I was like a delicacy and and you know, so you got to watch little kids like delightedly chopping away on this on this Seelye. And it was and you know, wrapping your head around that as a general there’s a big act. Students have learned about that sort of culture before they encountered these films with readings and games and projects, so that they could contextualize the act that the images did retain their emotional intensity. And this was quite intentional curriculum designers were committed to what they believed as honest presentation of culture. And they hope these seams would plunge students and teachers into deep conversation about the foundations of human culture, behavior and morality. Such seeds wrote the curriculum lead developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner, they forced students to quote, rethink or reorganize the moral judgments and the role taking in which they themselves were engage. So when the course was finally launched in 1969, educators and psychologists hailed it as a triumph. I mean, it’s not often that a fifth grade social science curriculum course makes the new york times the best one day like all over the mainstream media as well as the educational press. People praised its innovative design its multimedia strategy, its unflinching examination of topics that certainly have not been addressed in elementary school social studies prior to, of course, evaluation course evaluators had special praise for the film, reporting that they quote, worked magic all their own, and, quote, Drew students into a shared experience with the people show.
Tomás Guarna 43:14
But as the course began to filter into American schools, critics also emerged. evangelicals, john birchers, social conservatives began to stage aggressive protests against this curriculum at school board and community meetings. So at all of the hubbub oversee our tea right now, you can think about that, but you know, 45 years earlier, um, protesters regularly cited the film’s, as of course, the single most objectionable element. Like I said, Nico’s designers had seen these films is like honest biological and cultural records that would prompt critical thinking and thoughtful discussion. Conservative protesters, on the other hand, denounce these films, as being the forms of x rated decadence that will lead to psychological damage and classroom anarchy, amounting seen in one of the hearing goalposts provoked almost a riot at a community meeting is set in a suburb west of Denver. Because parents believed that showing sexual behavior even if that behavior were occurring in the bird world, ran close to sodomy and was downright immoral. Much of the criticism centered on student’s physical and psychic reaction to the film’s more intense scenes, which critics described as nauseating, violating and fuck Is there any gain in giving young children pictures in which they see animals being skinned alive? asked what opponent Protesters definitely do not trust teachers to guide students through this content. Conservatives argue that the average teacher either bumbled discussion of children’s reactions, or refused to address the reactions altogether, leaving students blown aware about what to think and heavily traumatized to boot. Critics also oppose the film’s quiet message of cultural relativism and what they call one world ism. As California based makeups critic john Steinbeck recalled it by presenting desolate culture in straightforward terms. The film suggested that the behaviors that deviated from middle class American Christian norms were possible, tolerable and sometimes even admirable. And to conservatives confronting the chaotic culture of the early 1970s. presenting these alternatives as valid, seem to treacherous unpatriotic even. They rejected the ecstatic humanist vision that makers designers have articulated and that they invoked this media would help students realize, and they store and the ideologies and skills that make those films are intended to promote. This was not the kind of spectatorship that classrooms should engender, these opponents are viewed and this was not the kind of citizenship that schools should see. Chicken pocket. So to pitch over, the curriculum became so heated, and again, let me remind you, this is a fifth grade social studies curriculum, right? It gets so heated that this guy, Republican Congressman john conlan, took the matter to the floor of the US House of Representatives, where he demanded the Congress itself, ban the curriculum from American schools, according to komlin makers, and it still functioned as quote cultural shock techniques, and that they were designed to persuade children to project the values, beliefs, religions, and national loyalties of their parents and American society. The film’s he argued, had no place in the public schools of America.
Tomás Guarna 47:23
So the most generous reaction to this course permanently quibble not only make those sales, but also federal funding for classroom media production for several years thereafter, after Conlon brought the attention, or this curriculum to Congress’s attention, NSF Director of National Science Foundation director guy Stever, he backed off, I mean, he promised to withhold funds from any pre college science course curriculum, development or implementation until a special panel could review all NSF efforts. And what this meant in practice, was that these kinds of gold multimedia experiments simply became on affordable. Private publishers had zero interest in seeking the money and to create elaborate films and multimedia. At least until you know, gaming came about. And computer software made it profitable again. And we had federal funds to prop up this kind of sophisticated multimedia curriculum development. It simply fell into disuse. So what can we take away from these two very different moments in the history of school springs? Well, in both instances, the curriculum were animated by educators concerned about racism in the 1930s, about anxieties of lynching in the 1960s an effort to sort of support civil rights in an arm’s length way, an effort to really get students to think of themselves as members of a larger human community. And they motivated the use of screen media in particular, educators believed that the emotional and experiential elements of visual screen media would enable students to tap into a kind of immediate empathy that other forms of media simply would not elicit. And as a result, they hoped that this kind of film or film strips or other kinds of visual media would really help a generation students relate to one another in new ways. In both instances, the question of who was funded school three, it was a major point of concern and attention. As I mentioned, the production and purchase a high quality screen media and technology often require resources far beyond what an individual district could muster. And so experiments with school screens, but getting them into to schools and then generating the curriculum that was used. It’s really required either philanthropic or federal funding. But the American education system is intensely local. And over the course of the 20th century, communities communities vacillated between a commitment to run local schools without intervention from outsiders, and a desire to be modern and to adopt media products, technologies and curricula that was produced and sponsored by, say, the Rockefeller Foundation or the National Science Foundation, often in conjunction with broader industry. But that screens became political biting lots, and so questions over the appropriate role of the philanthropy and government in media production that just amplified these controversies. In both of these case studies, reformers attempted to use film in classrooms to teach students new ways of reading relating to screen media for the purposes of citizenship, to help them cultivate both the skills and the cells that they thought was important for American citizenship in an age of screws. But again, in both eras almost immediately, questions arose as to what kind of skills and selves school should actually be trying to construct, and whether or not educational media that was being used for that purpose could actually accomplish it.
Tomás Guarna 51:32
As the anxious debates over these two sets of very different classroom films make clear pictorial screen media pressed hard on the tenuous boundaries between emotion and reason, body and mind, self and society. blurring these boundaries within the carefully guarded confines of the classroom, unnerved parents, administrators, and even educators. And as a result in the 1930s educators, even those who embrace the idea of using popular films in their classrooms often backed away from films that had ambiguity about where national loyalties lay in the instance and make us the perception that these films were blurring the same boundaries resulted in a political firestorm that was too hot for any curriculum to survive. The history of schools screens is ultimately a history of changing ideas about screen media’s impact on students. It’s a history of evolving arguments about who should control classrooms. And most of all, the eight decades struggle to determine the proper relationship between schools and screens. Is the history of ongoing disagreement about schools purpose in US society. Now, as they’ve done for nearly a century, educators today still debate how and if schools can use screens to minimize rather than reinforce existing inequities, they ask themselves to what extent is respect for teachers is driving we’re shaping future school plans for screens. And whether or not money invested in technology might be better spent elsewhere. Like on the teaching staff, and everyday still wants to know how screens can be used to promote positive positive civic engagement and how to prepare students for citizenship in an even more complex digital age. preparing students for citizenship in a media mad media made democracy remains an urgent task today. In an era of media convergence, this is enormously challenging you know that yourself right educators, they’re struggling with data breaches and questions of digital surveillance. Pundits and parents argue about schools ethical and legal responsibilities. When it comes to things like racist means or screen addiction or cyber bullying, other troubling aspects of school life in the digital age, and the problem of how to confront misinformation sobers even the most optimistic educator. In 2016. For instance, the Stanford history education group released a report announcing that quote, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the computer screen can be summarized in one word, belief. Without more attention to civic reasoning skills were predicted American societies shipped to screens with deeply damaged democracy. And this report was completed two months before Trump was elected. So in this contemporary moment of profound fragmentation, much of it taking place over media. Part of me wonders whether we should be going the same route encouraging the same kind of classroom pedagogy that our depression era advocates have said expect leadership and the makeup folks encouraged slow down carefully or analyze and discuss all manner of media in small diverse groups with an eye towards considering how to use this media for productive civic ends. As we all know, there are considerable risks to doing this. It requires trust and educators skill in guiding discussions. You know, and discussion can seem real challenging right now perilous event. And yet classrooms greens still guarantee a physical place in which people of varying backgrounds can gather to practice civic behavior and discussion in a country that is badly in need of common ground. That’s my talk.
Heather Hendershot 56:01
Thank you so much. I’m wondering about the two question over it. Um, one is Wow, he’s like a lot of things you said really resonated with a lot of material we’ve been reading in our graduate class right now one media position. fluid and so we just read an excerpt for the pain one study, delinquency crime. Excellent. bloomer bloomer. yazar love it. Thank you, 33. And I will spend quite a furia doing this for 30 to 60 minutes. And I was wondering if the first case study was specifically of a pain point studies moment where there’s a kind of like a we see how movies are bad and how the study were popularized in our movie the children as if they show the unequivocably that it’s so hard to do, but here’s the flipside. I wonder if that discourse is sort of having that dialogue? And also to what extent the film industry is like on board with this is like great PR for them, right, as opposed to some of the earlier publicity before the production code administration stuff in 1934. So that’s my first question. And my second question is just about sort of cost efficiency and economic issues with the makers project. I’d like to know if you know, if these films were rented, for example, as opposed to being purchased. And it seems like there’s a way this is a little unusual here, but I’m obsessed with film strips, okay, and one of the Theravada home strips and he talked about this, but like with notes, once you buy them, and so they’re not there. I don’t know if everyone knows these, but they both were projected one frame at a time. And there’s a cassette or a photograph album that go with it that plays along with audio, right. And once you buy it as a teacher in a public school classroom, you can just put it in the closet and whip it out whenever you want. And the school board doesn’t have to keep track of it and the way they look like rental materials or you know putting a new curriculum every year and so it means that you can have your say creationist filmstrip in the closet, or your or your Google like, like Black Panther comes
Heather Hendershot 58:10
right and coexistent like you know, sex education was a huge thing, which actually the makers
Tomás Guarna 58:16
curriculum was often use repurposed for sell your materials, you have initial controversial perhaps and then you don’t because it just sort of goes subterranean. So I’m wondering, like, are they sustaining controversy because they keep really, you know, publicizing it, so that more people buy it and, or thrive or with, you know, whatever. So to sort of very different questions. So we start with the first question, and it’s a terrific question, because you’re right, in the 1930s, is this a watershed moment where people I mean, because the movies are becoming so enormously popular and such a critical sort of economic engine, they’re transforming theatre and education in their life. And people are wondering, What does what does involve, you know, and particularly pain, what does this mean for our kids everdale actually, is one of the offers on the pain point studies and he his little like, very accessible readers guide like, I don’t watch the movies. Um, you know, this helps to kick off the film appreciation for them, which is an effort to use movies, sort of analyze them, again, for constructive purposes. And a lot of the people that I was talking about were very much affiliated with this film appreciation moment. Now, film appreciation had it was like a big spectrum. Some people were like, we’re just going to watch Charles Dickens and use this as a way to pull the novel. And some people were a little bit more politically radical, like Dan himself starts out a little bit more conservative, but by the end of the 30s, he’s like burn it all down. You know he’s he is much more committed to the idea of using films to engage students. In what sometimes in the educational world gets called social, social deconstruction. So the idea that schools are going to reconstruct society in a better image of itself and he is is often involved in meaningful debate and pressure on Hollywood There’s a famous debate he gets into Martin who is the editor of the show? Yeah, and I actually almost through one of the headlines that where it’s like they’re having this debate and actually maybe I can even included one yes. Now can educators with free for films have social insight. So in some ways, industry is embracing this when it is convenient for them like they love themselves and Alice believer, because they see her as acceptable. She personalizes and D politicizes. A lot of issues really interested in the psychological angle. And the idea of introducing students to film in order to help them psychologically adjust to the challenges of modernity, she’s got this very forward thinking way of helping students tangle with their own identities and think about their own position in society, and how that could be changed over time. But other reformers, Dale, among them, Mary Lucy, who edits and creates a whole film curriculum that goes with the march of time, which is crazy to have wrap it like it’s it’s really fun to hire William Lewin at the march of time to create one full curriculum, and then they hired losee. And if you read them in context, it’s they don’t match up politically or pedagogically. But you know, those folks who are pushing industry to create classroom films and to create films that are what one might think of as more socially engaged, to promote and push issues of what we now call social justice, and what they then called social insight. So industry saw this kind of group of warmers in a couple of different ways. In some ways, they were like, you annoying Socratic horsefly. Get out of here, stop talking at us, we’re going to make the boat we want to make, you know, our profit is is ultimately productive for America, what’s going on classroom is not our problem. On the other hand, they were delighted to use seize credit when they saw a film based curriculum as fundamentally unobjectionable, and when it was getting praised in the press. So again, let me go up here. So this is actually part of the MGM house publications, like every year, MGM would put out a yearbook of what it had done for the community. And this was featured large, you know, in terms of the shorts that have had created, you know, one of one of the things that I did was like, most of all of the shorts that are provided to Kim can be her and the Rockefeller Foundation for the purposes of educating future citizens. So industry is really playing both sides.
Tomás Guarna 1:03:12
So that is question one. Question two, thinking about the economics of makers. To me, this is a really funny thing. And this is what happens when you get a whole bunch of experts in a room who are not talking to anyone else. Because as these Harvard guys, who are, you know, again, brilliant social scientists and psychologists and educators, they’re starting to workshop the film in schools actually in Newton and Cambridge and Brookline throughout the 60s. And every time they go in the teachers, you know, these nice like, fifth grade teaching ladies are like, this is great, but you really need to worry about two things that seems really complicated and expensive. Number one, and number two, we this might raise some eyebrows among parents, we’re not really sure how we’re going to explain it. And you know, the people who are designing the curriculum, like no, no, it’s gonna be great if they don’t try to go around the corner. And of course, both things explode simultaneously. The one big issue is cost when it comes when they finish the curriculum is the most expensive, most comprehensive studies curriculum ever designed. Because when I say multimedia, I mean what truly multimedia, there are games, there’s like a life sized seal puzzle. There are you know, like, there are there are 54 booklets that go along with this. Each kid has, you know, seven or eight booklets. The teacher material alone requires separate training films, plus the curriculum development team wants in order because they know this is gonna be hard. They know the films are weird and disturbing and ambiguous. And so they want to make sure that teachers are going to be trained to To use them properly, so they don’t try to require like 40 hours of teacher training in order to make this happen. They can’t find a publisher, nobody’s going to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole. Because what does fifth grade traditionally teach in the United States this time, that’s American history. So you’ve really got to ask American history for like, weird films about the nuts, luck. And like baboons, you know, that like if people know how to make it. So they end up going at the end of the day with this tiny little one join a kind of curriculum development, shock, Educational Development publishers, and they simply don’t have enough money to sink into it. So this is sort of, it reminds me of one of these films that is, you know, gets glowing reviews. And nobody actually does make us creates this enormous splash. And it lingers for a long time in American schools, that it really is an amazing curriculum. But it’s incredibly expensive. And so most of the users of it, quite honestly, are private schools, where you have, you know, enough investment in materials to get it, or liberal leaning public school districts within wellfield suburbs. And then there’s also some penetration into inner city in terms of sort of gifts or grants in order to purchase this very forward thinking curriculum.
Tomás Guarna 1:06:36
In terms of the actual films themselves, they were largely purchased. And that becomes, again, a really big issue. At this time, it was possible to rent them. But because the curriculum was so expensive, it was limited to certain communities. And that’s another sort of interesting thing about the activists backlash, because in a lot of the schools, the activists were not actually people with children in schools themselves, they were coming from the outside as part of a sort of more generalized frustration about the direction American education was going. Because remember, this is the same era where busing is taking place. So all of a sudden, there’s a lot of discussion about who schools are for and what schools are for theirs. This is the same time that we’re starting a new conversations about sex ed curricula. And during schools, we’re starting a new conversation about bilingualism in schools and the Supreme Court has just banned prayer in schools no longer Is there like a 10 commandments slept on the wall, and every kid like taking a minute to pray after saying the Pledge of Allegiance. So this is a time of enormous sort of moral and ethical turmoil in terms of thinking principles. And a lot of times, these activists can jump on the train of objective makers, because they see that as part of a larger declension in American education, that there’s something about the makers films that they really object to. And it’s interesting you say this, because it’s really descriptions of the films that they object to because they don’t have to actually watch the color they can’t actually see. The film’s The one exception to that is in Washington, DC, where there is a reporter who wants to make a name for herself. So she creates a kind of like a two piece show about how, what are kids watching in schools and she manages to get shorts from the actual curriculum producers itself. No, it’s interesting because a lot of the shorts she ends up showing up as clips in this new story are actually shorts that ended up getting cut. So for instance, they had this whole unit on the sun. People have a Kalahari that they end up getting cut, that they end up cutting because they’re like, Whoa, it’s 1969 we really want to have a short of black men who are you know, effectively undressed and punting with spears, you know, in like going out into American schools in 1969. We think this is a terrible idea. Like we don’t want to perpetuate negative stereotypes. We think this is gonna be way too hot to handle. So that killed him. And yeah, it winds up in the news report as something that is seen so so visual media provides a particularly explosive and yet weirdly wonder, like, it has all the power of gossip. But no, very few adults who are activists have actually seen the movies in Washington. Other Yeah.
Tomás Guarna 1:09:53
I have two questions. One is very quick. Is it possible to see the MGM shorts and then make those films and if so, where But I also wondering if you think that these kinds of practices, these kinds of curricula fluoresce, as you would say, during moments of kind of pronounced media transition and social transformation, you know, this kind of 1930 moment, Denis late 1960s moment? And if so, you know, is that something that could be kind of plotted?
Tomás Guarna 1:10:24
I, that’s a really interesting question. And I would say, you know, yes, perhaps even as I’ve drawn her model to the cyclical story, exactly. I mean, as a short answer, yes, I think it’s much easier to embrace this kind of multimedia curricula had moments where progressive pedagogy resurfaces and becomes enormously popular. And a lot of times that is, that takes place in times of deep social change. I think when you see, curriculum, and pedagogy particularly become more conservative, and ratchet back our moments of kind of unified fear, you see that in the 50s, for instance, where there’s sort of a reaction against progressive pedagogy is associated with communism, and to see people get very nervous, and we need to, we need to have more top down content oriented, teaching in order to compete. And Phil is a tricky media in the classroom in certain ways, because it is rich with information. And in some ways, it delivers information very efficiently, but it’s very hard to assess. And often students don’t need as much from a film content wise as they do from a textbook page. And so in moments where there’s a lot of emphasis on quantitative assessment, so here I’m thinking about the standardized testing regimes of, you know, the 21st century, which you guys all grew up in and experienced, and everybody who like went through that, if you’re watching movies, and interpreting them and talking like Hi, valuate, that like Hi, like, it becomes a much trickier proposition. So at times when America is feeling particularly anxious, whether it’s about its own participation in the global economy, whether it is about, you know, some kind of international crash, or internal or domestic threat, like sometimes people ratchet back. And it’s not that they run away from screens, but they use screens in a very different way, the kind of, there’s a lot less disk, there’s a lot less comfort with the ambivalence, that visual images like the ones I show brought. I don’t remember the first part of your question, just where can we can we see the film? Yeah, you can see them? Absolutely. They’re sort of around on YouTube. A lot of libraries will have makeup, so no wonder that you can see and then there, there are some odd collector’s websites like there’s a Nico’s online where you can watch some of the movies. And that’s fun and weird. Yeah, and then the MGM shorts a little harder to track down. I believe there may be the Rockefeller Foundation has most of the materials that the guy talked to with the credit profile news at the University of South Carolina and he runs their educational Film Archive. The he is really the specialist on the human relations film series. So anybody has a collection of their shorts? He does.
Andrew Whitacre 1:13:28
Let’s do one student question. I saw what we have.
1:13:32
Here. That’s my apologies for kind of half formulating question. No need to. Yeah, areola azulay. And her ideas about civil contract and photography. Civic spectatorship is that she really differentiates between kind of the peak of subjects, the photographs, those who are marginalized, on the periphery, right, and then basically kind of those of us in the last two, and my understanding is that she’s actually quite against this kind of formulation that photography can be used to start empathy, this kind of Western humanist, like argument for the power of photography for that instead, you know, it should make clear to us the ways that we are complicit in perpetuating dominance structure. So I guess I’m curious, like you mentioned briefly, the makers curriculum was sometimes donated to any school, just kind of like the particulars of where this is being utilized, but it is being utilized differently, perhaps in predominantly black, you know, yeah, you know, like, what was going on and how is it being used, how our teachers being trained, because it does seem that the kind of empathy model is quite not
Tomás Guarna 1:15:01
Yeah, not very good at what she’s talking about. And I’m really glad you bring that up, there is a big break. And it’s something these reformers in the 60s and then in the 30s, were highly conscious of. And I’ll give you an example of the makers, reformers themselves. So they were very worried that the empathy that would be evoked would be like a kind of weirdly colonialist. And there’s not a lot of time, they’re like, Oh, my God, here, we had one workshop, and the teacher was like, let’s send them care packages. And like, we have to figure out how to, like present this in a way that they don’t feel sorry for you to that there’s me, how do you encourage a kind of cultural cultural relativism but also like engagement on the terms of the people involved, and they actually end up making a short. So the net select people who are filmed for this series, they are reenacting to, like complicated get really meta, and here, they are reenacting many of the traditions of their but this is common in documentary. Yeah. And this is something that comes up in the documentaries modalities that get used in a lot of these classrooms. And even see it like in when a kid’s like wearing martyred underwear. There’s a yellow bandaid and like one scene and the fifth graders are like, Oh, I see that they’re there. What noticing. So the biggest designers realize that they’ve got, first of all, they don’t want to play into exactly what you’re talking about. So they actually make a film about making the making of kind of film that you’ve been next to like here, today, and then the next leg in the past. And one of the other interesting elements, there is the Netflix end up loving and being extraordinarily grateful for the Mega Stones, because they see them as part of the legacy and embrace of their own tradition. They see this as an act of presentation of their own culture rather than an exploitative gesture. So there ends up being a series of films about not just the making of the film, but the use of the film, and how to navigate these complicated discussions about race anthropology. And I guess even maybe othering is I mean, that’s not the word that’s not the language they use in the 60s. And part of the teacher training is showing these films to and anticipating student comments and students tendencies to pity or distance, the subjects on screen rather than engaging with them on their own. How do teachers how should teacher sample it, and they show a range of possible questions that students are asking a range of possible responses. There’s also an anthropologist themselves for generating these films. And they too have a lot of takes on how the films get edited, in order to ensure that they are as respectful as possible to the people and sort of captured the proper vision of the people who are, you wouldn’t really say a story, but the people who are whose lives are being represented. So these are issues that people have in mind, and they are wrangling with them in real time. They’re very explicit about that in the 60s and 70s, in part, because I mean, it’s a moment in anthropology, where people are wrestling with that in new ways. In the 30s, they’re sort of a wider range, in part because many of the films they’re using are not documentaries. You know, they’re they’re fictional films. And so the kind of empathy that is being unleashed is slightly different than what as a way of talking about, but the documentaries that they’re talking about, and that they’re making use of they are trying to, again, engineer not not the distance that comes with pity but more than equivalency and a sort of sense of
1:19:24
engage connection
Tomás Guarna 1:19:26
to me orient that relationship between subjects and other so that it is I mean, again, it’s more visual contract. Yes. Yeah. So thank you for that answer your question. We had a question from Justin. So
Andrew Whitacre 1:19:41
he actually he noticed that we’re running short on time, so he said, students
Tomás Guarna 1:19:52
and so little question for your entire work medical studies. I’m interested in the point you’re trying to solve eds. On Screen replacing teachers, all certified for body teaching at a facility that is so powerful, you’re totally right. I know at some point this PowerPoint said they can be as they do, it’s like you call the class math and see public service as providing services, or whatever. I’m interesting if if this kind of procedure to your suit
Heather Hendershot 1:20:20
to suit the very last bit again,
1:20:23
so I’m interested in this if screens can operated in some way, this discourse as homogenizing kind of articles in one way.
Tomás Guarna 1:20:32
So I mean, in terms of screens, replacing teachers, this has long been an undercurrent of discussion. And it is not in the best interest of any producer of media to be like, yeah, we’re putting people out of business to definitely buy our wares. So usually, they are sort of putting a foot in both camps, like oh, it will enhance it will compliment under no circumstances will ever replace teachers. And yeah, if you actually read margin notes, marginalia of letters or memos, if you, you know, over, if you read through the transcripts of these conversations, where teachers are not present, that is very much part of the mix. There’s a lot of disregard and disrespect for what teachers do, particularly particularly among technocrats, who will often say, you know, the media is going to do an infinitely better job, you know, or the programmers will do a far better job of handling these issues, whether it’s content advanced, or skills practice, then teachers will, so why are we wasting money on these human beings? So you see that prominently in the 1950s. With Educational Television, where people, especially for Foundation, which is what I talked about in the book, they start telling this idea of Oh, well, why why would we rely on this is Hubbard able to teach fourth grade music? Well, we could get like the best of the best, let’s get Leonard Bernstein to teach the fourth grade.
1:22:04
Sounds like master class?
Tomás Guarna 1:22:07
Absolutely like that. But you know, as anybody who had a fourth grader last year, during COVID knows, sometimes you don’t want to let her Bernstein on the screen. Sometimes you want if it’s humperdinck with like symbols and the you know, the Orff instruments, there’s a difference in terms of live classroom communication. It’s really easy to say that there is it. But I think that’s where educators, you know, emphasize over and over again, and it’s interesting, because the development and the age groups, the conversation changes with age groups, people get more excited about the possibilities of screens, replacing actual teachers in the later stages of education. I mean, nobody’s suggesting that that is a good idea in kindergarten, like everybody’s a guest early. But um, you know, it’s something that gets floated over and over again, well, you know, a school might not have the, the, the the resources to hire a mandarin teacher, or like an advanced calculus teacher. So why would we use technology as a replacement? And, you know, within the like, I’m not a sort of contemporary ed tech person. And here, I feel like I should defer to Justin Wright, who was apparently in the audience. You know, there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not media can replace or can sort of supplement. But, you know, even though every single media producer who absolutely disavow the placement in public, if you go into the archives, in private, at least historically, there is far more discussion about the possibility of techno utopian replacement than you anticipate that you will find.
Heather Hendershot 1:24:00
Well, I guess we have run up against time. So we will stop here. Thank you again, for the wonderful talk and a very special thank you to everyone.
