Prelude
Introduction
Looking back through the archives of English Journal is akin to studying a petri dish colonized by the wee beasties of technologies past and present. Through the lens of a microscope, one can observe a landscape teeming with magic lanterns, stereoscopes, Super 8 cameras, phonographs, radios, tape recorders, televisions, photocopiers, and typewriters, to name only a few of the older technologies one can find there. Recognizing the diverse, fecund nature of this media ecology, the two of us became inspired to develop an alternative genealogy or prehistory of computers and writing, a look back at how the field—as well as our kith and kin in English studies more broadly—has responded to the presence of communication technologies and media as they emerge, wax, wane, and recede from our collective view over time.
Placing 766 articles from English Journal from 1912 to 2012 in dialogue with other archival materials, 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy reveals common trends and divergences in how English teachers have theorized and practiced new media pedagogy. Moving beyond traditional alphabetic case study approaches to history, this book employs a combination of thin description, data visualization, media archaeology, and multimodal performance methodologies to see English studies’ evolving relationship to new media with fresh eyes. By taking an expansive, hundred-year view of media pedagogies in the field, we work not only to recover useful pedagogies for today, but also to enable contemporary scholars and teachers to avoid some of the pitfalls of the past.
Academic fields of teaching and study such as “English,” “computers and writing,” or “digital humanities” do not emerge into the world fully formed, but instead develop over considerable expanses of years and decades. Often, those changes are covered over with the dust of history, making it difficult to understand how we have come to be where we are today. This inevitable process of historical erasure leads to the creation and propagation of unexamined assumptions about the values associated with the discipline—for example, the common notion that the introduction of the personal computer ignited English studies’ interest in multimodal literacy. When we take a long view of the past hundred years of writing about media technology in English Journal, however, we can uncover a substantial history of visual and audio media production pedagogies in the field. We can track moments when media production pedagogies flourished, as well as moments when they floundered, and we can offer theories about why these shifts occurred. We can also track the deeply sedimented ideological topoi about “new media” that have both constrained and enabled innovative media production pedagogies over time. And finally, we can locate individual instances of eyebrow-raising classroom practices, be they either uniquely effective or potentially problematic.
This book argues for a more capacious vision of the diverse origins of the field of computers and writing, one that engages not only the rich history of the computer, but media and writing more broadly. Our work also presents an expanded history of the related field of digital humanities by outlining a long pre-digital tradition of English teachers encouraging students to employ new media tools to engage with literary texts. In addition to contending that digital humanists could benefit from a more thorough familiarity with the pedagogically focused research of the computers and writing community over the past thirty-five years (Reid 2012; Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson 2015), we suggest that digital humanists also have a great deal to learn from recovering a much longer pedagogical tradition of English teachers working with students to both analyze and compose a wide range of non-print, multimodal texts.
English Journal Covers Across the Decades
English Journal—sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and in continuous publication since 1912—offers us an ideal archive for tracing just how English teachers have adopted, adapted, and innovated with new media over a hundred-year span (not to mention how they have occasionally lamented, bemoaned, or abandoned them altogether). While the early years of English Journal focused on English pedagogy at all levels from K-12 to university, the later years of the journal focus primarily, although not exclusively, on pedagogy in secondary schools. Perhaps as a result of its focus on K-12 pedagogy, the English Journal archive has been largely ignored by university-based digital humanists and computers and writing scholars. We contend, however, that English Journal’s focus on K-12 education is actually a strength of the archive. After all, we must remember that both the field of composition studies as well as the subfield of computers and writing formed in part out of dialogue with K-12 educators and university scholars (Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe 1996; Lueck 2020; Schultz 1999; Stock 2011). Nevertheless, our choice of the English Journal as a focus also necessarily limits our view. Although the journal does include a diverse range of teacher perspectives, it features almost exclusively teachers located in the United States and also certainly reflects the institutionalized whiteness of its sponsoring organization (Inoue 2019). Ultimately, then, this book tells only a partial story of how some English teachers responded to new media in the United States—a story that we hope will inspire other scholars to turn to additional archives of instruction.
Our work builds on a rich tradition of historical scholarship within the field of computers and writing that has demonstrated the importance of situating contemporary digital writing pedagogies in relation to past teachers’ experiments with diverse analog, mechanical, and electronic composing technologies. In their foundational history of computers and writing, Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, and Cynthia Selfe (1996) paid substantial attention to how the field was formed through a collaboration between composition and rhetoric specialists and K-12 English educators; because the authors focused their attention on pedagogies of the personal computer, however, they began their history in 1979, and thus didn’t attend to the longer history of English teachers’ engagement with diverse media technologies throughout the twentieth century. Recognizing the importance of recovering the prehistory of computers in writing, a few scholars in the field have begun the work of recovering pre-digital approaches to English pedagogy—engaging such diverse technologies as the pencil (Baron 2009), the typewriter (Kalmbach 1996), the chalkboard (Krause 2000), and the instructional film (Ritter 2015). We remix this body of work with footage from the Prelinger Archives in the video below:
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Click to view transcript
Pre-Histories of Digital Pedagogy (.txt version)
[Audio: theme music]
[Video: handwriting on stationery reads, “Dear audience—The name of this
story is . . . ”; title reads “Pre-Histories of Digital Pedagogy” with Greek letters being carved on stone tablet in background; transition to classroom scene]
Narrator: The teaching of writing has long been a technological act. Today's digital writing instructor can learn much by revisiting the long history of technological instruction in both K-12 and university classrooms.
[Video: shot of Krause article page; transition to instructional film clip demonstrating proper writing with chalk]
For example, Steve Krause (2000) related the fascinating story of how the chalkboard moved from a supposedly transformative innovation in nineteenth century pedagogies to a “natural,” taken-for-granted piece of equipment in nearly all classrooms. Krause showed that the naturalization of the chalkboard occurred largely because it supported pedagogical approaches that were already dominant at the time, most notably the lecture.
[Video: shot of Baron book cover, A Better Pencil; transition to shots of handwriting on notebook paper, woman filling ink cartridge, and proper pencil-holding form.]
In a similar vein, Dennis Baron (2009) recovered the complex ways that the pencil and the eraser moved from contested new technologies to naturalized classroom writing devices. Reflecting on teachers who worried that the ability to erase would destroy literacy as we know it, Baron drew connections between past arguments about the pencil and contemporary debates about the use of computers in the writing classroom.
[Audio: theme music]
[Video: shot of Kalmbach article; transition to shots of typewriters, various scenes of typing]
Moving from pencils to typewriters, James Kalmbach (1996) explored how K-12 teachers in the 1930s moved beyond formulaic typewriting instruction to engage students in using typewriters for collaborative learning activities and for composing texts for audiences beyond the classroom. Kalmbach both celebrated this movement and also demonstrated the ideological forces that caused it to quickly fade away.
[Video: shot of Woman in Instructional Film speaking to camera; transition to demonstrations of proper typing posture]
Woman in Instructional Film: In order to become an expert typist, it is essential to master the correct typing technique. How you type is more important than what you type.
[Video: quotation in voiceover duplicated on screen; transition to various shots of women typing]
Narrator: In the end, Kalmbach sounded a cautionary warning that “our current uses of computer-supported classrooms are both predated by the typewriter-supported classrooms in the 1930s and framed by similar pedagogical arguments about the role of technology in education” (66). We think Kalmbach is right on about how much we have to learn from past failed K-12 media experiments. And, as we peruse all this footage of women typing, we're reminded too of Liz Rohan's (2003) and Janine Solberg's (2007) work that has revealed how gendered constructions of typewriting continue to influence how contemporary students and teachers engage with computer technologies.
[Audio: theme music]
[Video: shot of film projector playing in classroom; transition to cover of Ritter, Reframing the Subject; transition to student loading film projector in classroom]
Turning to the history of instructional film, Kelly Ritter's (2015) recent book, Reframing the Subject, recounted the problematic ways in which 1940s and 1950s K-12 English educators employed film viewing to promote “current-traditional” models of correctness in both writing and social behavior. For example, Ritter analyzed the classist and sexist literacy assumptions of such instructional films as this one about social letter writing.
[Video: Girl and Boy in Instructional Film sitting at dining room table, discussing Girl's letter-writing assignment]
Girl in Instructional Film: I see that there are different letters for different purposes, and I think I know the purpose of mine. It's a thank you letter for a visit.
Boy in Instructional Film: Mmm-hmm.
Girl: But, uh, well, that's what I tried to write, but it's not very good.
[Video: Girl hands letter to Boy; Boy rustles paper.]
Boy: On notebook paper. And torn out. Written in pencil! Hey, you'll want it neater than that.
[Video: Boy hands letter back to Girl, exasperated.]
Boy: And you better check that spelling, too.
Girl: Read it, please!
[Video: Shot of male teacher lecturing class; transition to three women watching film projector; transition to woman loading film projector]
Narrator: The history of mansplaining is very old indeed. Importantly, Ritter argued that the classist and sexist legacies of instructional film live on in some contemporary approaches to MOOCs that employ video lectures in similarly problematic ways. Although Ritter focused exclusively on teacher-centered approaches to instructional film in the 1940s and 1950s, our webtext seeks to offer a broader view of how English teachers have employed both film analysis and film production for a range of progressive and conservative ends.
[Audio: theme music]
[Video: Handwriting on screen reads, “This is the end!”]
[Video: Screen on text reads, “For a list of assets used in this video, please see the PRODUCTION NOTES section of this book.”]Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.
In addition to the histories we discuss in the video above, other scholars have begun to look specifically to the English Journal archive to historicize contemporary digital writing pedagogies. In “‘Making the Devil Useful’: Audio-Visual Aids in the Teaching of Writing,” Joseph Jones (2012) offered a look back at discussions of multimedia tools in English Journal from 1912 to around World War II, highlighting such diverse technologies as film projectors, stereopticons, phonographs, and radios. Engaging a relatively small number of articles, Jones argued that “secondary school English teachers often claimed audio-visual equipment to indicate a new professionalism, yet descriptions of its uses reveal that innovative technology was often used in retrograde ways” (95). Providing a similar historical critique of how English teachers have approached new technologies, Troy Hicks, Carl Young, Sara Kajder, and Bud Hunt (2012) offered a selective review of English Journal articles about media technology over the past century, which ultimately concluded that “despite all the cultural and technological changes in the types of texts we are able to produce and consume, and the revolutionary predictions we have made, not much has really changed in the teaching of English over the past 100 years” (68). Although we concur in part with the critiques of Jones and Hicks et al. regarding the limiting ways English teachers have sometimes employed media technologies over the years, we extend their case study approaches by systematically coding and visualizing a much larger collection of media-related English Journal articles—seeking to offer a more complex and multivalent vision of both innovative and “retrograde” uses of technology in English studies over a longer period of observation.
This book also contributes to broader interdisciplinary conversations about histories of “new media.” Taking to heart Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree’s assertion that “all media were once ‘new media’” (2003, xi), we look back to moments in the field when media such as radio or television were new and English teachers explored wide-ranging methods of incorporating them into instruction—often placing new media in dialogue with older print technologies. In this way, 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy contributes to the broader field of media history by documenting how English teachers have played a role in influencing the cultural patterns of “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin 1999) that have helped people make sense of newly emerging media forms and adapt to them culturally over time. We critically examine, for example, how English instructors often positioned new media as tools to enhance student engagement in print reading and writing—a rhetorical move that both opened up new possibilities for what literacy instruction might entail while also constraining the ability of new media to act as a fully disruptive force in English education.
Re-seeing the history of new media pedagogies at both macro and micro levels of scale, we complicate and extend common ways of narrating the history of technological pedagogies in English instruction. In particular, our data visualizations (chapter 3) and multimodal case studies (chapters 4 –7) suggest a number of noteworthy observations:
- student media production has long been a part of English pedagogy;
- moments when media are new present opportunities for pedagogical innovation;
- over time, English teachers have framed their engagement with new media through a relatively stable (yet also contradictory) set of ideological assumptions;
- new media pedagogies have “lifespans” (Selfe and Hawisher 2004) with predictable patterns;
- the evolution of computerized pedagogies in the field has differed in important ways from previous “new media” moments;
- women have long played a leading role in developing and enacting new media production pedagogies in the field;
- new media pedagogies have long been constrained by corporate logics of control and surveillance;
- arguments for innovative new media pedagogies have too often been employed in service of sexist, racist, classist, ableist, and/or heteronormative educational structures.
Although we make and support these tentative claims about the history of new media pedagogy in English studies, we most pointedly do not seek to tell a single or definitive narrative of the history of new media in the field. Ultimately, we hope that this book provokes more questions than it answers, inviting readers to continue uncovering this rich history.
Challenging the linear conventions of print history, we showcase a robustly multimodal approach to historical storytelling that simply cannot be contained in the pages of the traditional print codex. As we look back at the various moments in which media production pedagogies have faltered and been abandoned in the field’s past, we speculate that one reason media production pedagogies have not been sustained over time is that English instructors rarely have had the chance to compose scholarship using the new media tools they were teaching students to employ. By composing this history in multimodal, born-digital form, we therefore seek to challenge the print-centric, scholarly conventions that have for too long hindered pedagogical change in our field.
In many ways, the structure of this book is not unlike a mullet: business in the front, party in the back. The serious methodological theorizing of chapter 2 moves into the quantifiable data visualizations of chapter 3. Then, in chapters 4 - 7, we let our hair down a bit and present a series of performative multimodal case studies on audio, cinematic, televisual, and computer pedagogies that are composed in a wide range of multimodal genres—podcasts, silent films, eighties public access call-in programs, and GeoCities-style websites, to name but a few. Lastly, in our coda, we outline the key takeaway points of the book, using a range of contemporary internet genres.
You can read this book in a linear fashion, of course, but we also have designed it to encourage and support readers who might wish to jump around. For example, if you get bored with all our long-winded text, consider skipping right to chapters 3–8, which feature a lot more audio, video, and interactive graphical content. If you are here primarily looking for practical teaching ideas, you can skip right to the “Pedagogical Inspirations” sections that close out chapters 4–7. If you just want to get a sense of the major takeaways of our project, you can head directly to the coda, where we try to boil it all down in concise, web-friendly formats. In other words, we see this book not as linear text to be mastered, but rather as an invitation to play. You’re certainly welcome to click the “Next Page” button below—if you’re feeling whimsical, however, you might scroll back up to our menu and click on whatever random chapter strikes your fancy. However you choose to make your way through this book, all we ask is that you just have fun with it.
