Remembering the “perils” of Television
Introduction
I thought they were pulling my leg when they said that one of these days, pictures are going to be flying through the air—you’ll be able to see radio.
—Hal Kanter, comedian and television writer
In some ways, television was the “killer app” of the 1950s—the era when the first small, mass-produced television sets began to infiltrate the living rooms across the country. Like radio, television could bring engaging, timely content right into the home. Like film, television showcased robustly multimodal content (albeit in lower definition) that made meaning through visual, auditory, textual, and gestural modalities. When television sets started to enter U.S. homes on a mass scale, interest in television boomed in English classrooms, while interest in radio fell precipitously off a cliff—why listen to sounds coming through the air when you could watch pictures beamed into your home? English teachers apparently decided, to echo Hal Kanter, that they and their students would much rather see the radio.
As our graphs in chapter 3 demonstrated, however, English teachers were much more skeptical of television’s potential for literacy instruction than they had been with radio. While many English teachers engaged students in radio production activities in the early days of radio, English teachers in the fifties and sixties focused mostly on teaching students to critically analyze television, or on using television as a hook to interest students in print-based reading. Also, in writing about television, teachers were much more likely to fret about how it was harming alphabetic literacy skills than they were to consider how it might be utilized to inspire new ways of teaching writing and multimodal composing. Although we did locate a few innovative television production pedagogies in the latter decades of television—especially the eighties and nineties—these examples were much more sparse in the corpus, especially when compared with radio and film. It appears that English teachers worried that the new “killer app” of television would indeed do violence to the print literacy practices they so valued—and the hyperbolic (though at times brilliant) pronouncements of media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan only amped up these fears.
As we seek to historicize the relationship of television and print literacy, we are indebted to Kathleen Welch’s superb Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy (1999), which reveals how the emergence of such diverse technologies as handwriting, television, and hypertext all produced both substantial cultural anxieties as well as productive opportunities to reimagine rhetorical theory and practice. Historicizing the rise of television in relation to earlier technological shifts, Welch drew in large part upon the work of literacy historian Walter Ong, who argued that the twentieth century was witnessing the emergence of a period known as “secondary orality,” prompted by the propagation of electronic mass media that privileged sound and image over text. These media, and television in particular, were interdependent in their relationship to earlier rhetorical traditions, according to Welch, and thus could be better understood by drawing upon the concepts of the Western rhetorical tradition, primary among them the Isocratic concept of logos as socially contingent or transactional (103–104). Welch ultimately developed a critical pedagogy (termed “Next Rhetoric”) around the analysis of screen rhetorics, and the literacies that shaped them, in order to “resist this normal capitalist cultural imperialism” that replicated biases of gender, class, and race (among others) (189). The focus of Welch’s pedagogical energy was analysis, as she identified several visual, aural, and textual konoi topoi particular to screen rhetorics, such as the kinds of framing shots, captions, theme music, and related elements used in a televised news program (163–167).
In contrast to Welch’s very long view of how television can be situated within historical media ecologies, Bronwyn Williams’ Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing (2002) offered a more focused critical history of how compositionists have engaged and ignored television over the years. In particular, Williams showed how the composition class has traditionally been positioned as a kind of inoculation against popular visual culture—leading most writing teachers to either ignore TV entirely or to focus primarily on teaching students simply to critique it. While Williams noted the rise of cultural studies pedagogy in the 1990s as a promising moment in which more writing teachers sought to meaningfully integrate analysis of television into their classes, he critiqued prominent cultural studies readers for how these texts privileged the “academic, analytical essay” (29) as the primary “discursive form” (29) that students both read and wrote in order to learn to critique television programs. Challenging this reception-centered approach to cultural studies pedagogy, Williams outlined a variety of ways students might write television scripts or even perhaps produce television-inspired digital videos as way to inquire about the similarities and differences between composing with print and television media. Although we largely agree with Williams’ broader analysis of why compositionists have failed to meaningfully engage television, we note that Tuned In focuses almost entirely on university-based writing courses, and therefore doesn’t address the rich array of television pedagogy approaches contained in the English Journal archive.
In this chapter, we seek to offer a more robust accounting of the complex reasons English teacher’s resisted television more than other media; at the same time, we also recover some useful pedagogical approaches to television from the past that can inspire us to engage today’s streaming video media in more creative and critical ways. The centerpiece of this chapter is TV Talk, a deliberately awkward 1980s “public access” program that explores the range of reactions, from concerns to enthusiasm, that English Journal authors had in relation to television. In this video, we also highlight several of the more noteworthy pedagogical strategies English teachers employed to incorporate TV analysis and production in the classroom. Following our presentation of TV Talk, we offer an alphabetic case study, “McLuhan Redesigning Pedagogy,” in which we detail the influence that the controversial media theorist had within the corpus. Hardly unified, English teachers referenced McLuhan in the service of various ends, from supporting traditional literary values to promoting creative experimentation with multiple media. And McLuhan himself even wrote on the pages of English Journal to promote a complex textbook he co-authored that engaged students in analyzing making diverse media—situating television within a much broader conception of media ecology. As with all of our media case study chapters, we round out our focus on television with several “Pedagogical Inspirations” that draw upon the innovative ideas contained in the archive, reimagining them for today’s classroom.
