100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

1. Prelude

1. Trailer
2. Introduction
3. Behind the Scenes

2. Methodological Play

1. Introduction
2. Thin Description & Data Visualization
3. Media Archaeology
4. Multimodal Performance
5. Methods of Data Collection and Coding

3. Visualizing the Archive

1. Introduction
2. Trends Across the Corpus
3. Radio
4. Film & Video
5. Television
6. Computer
7. Word Frequencies by Decade
8. Zooming Out

4. Listening to Audio Pedagogies

1. Introduction
2. English via the Airwaves
3. Mid-Century Audio Recording Pedagogies
4. Afterlives of Radio
5. Pedagogical Inspirations

5. Re-Seeing Film & Video Pedagogies

1. Introduction
2. Silent Film Devils
3. Making Movies in the 30s
4. Super-8 and Camcorder Fun
5. Pedagogical Inspirations

6. Remembering the “Perils” of Television

1. Introduction
2. TV Talk
3. McLuhan Redesigning Pedagogy
4. Pedagogical Inspirations

7. Conversing With Computers

1. Introduction
2. Act 1: Imagining Computer Futures
3. Act 2: PC Software Revolutions
4. Act 3: A Networked Social Turn
5. Act 4: Reading & Writing the Web
6. Act 5: Digital, Multimodal Literacies
7. Pedagogical Inspirations

8. Coda: Back to the Future

1. Introduction
2. The 7 Keys to Multimodal Pedagogy
3. Can You Really Believe They Said That?
4. The 5 Weirdest Classroom Technologies
5. Which English Journal Author Are You?
6. Playing in the Archives

9. Credits

1. Acknowledgements
2. References
3. Production Notes

Remembering the “perils” of Television

Pedagogical Inspirations

Despite some real misgivings held by many English teachers toward the growing, attention-hogging menace of television, there were also some innovative attempts to bring the small screen into the classroom in ways that attempted to harness the medium’s popularity among students. A look back at these attempts can offer us reinvigorated approaches to using the TV—as well as its technological  descendants—in pedagogically mindful ways. Here’s a sampling of assignment and activity descriptions based on ideas from English Journal authors.

1. The Nielsen Classroom The first TV-focused article in our corpus, Lieber Anker’s “Television, Here I Come!” (1951), presented a fascinating early account of an English teacher coming to terms with the new medium. In part, Anker measured television’s influence on students by administering a questionnaire that asked students as well as their parents for information on viewing habits and patterns (duration, type of shows, etc.), as well as opinions concerning recently read literary works. You can update this assignment by using online survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to design a digital survey to gauge students’ media consumption habits and preferences (you might choose to focus on television and streaming video, or make it a more comprehensive survey of media consumption across the spectrum). Include qualitative and quantitative questions (How long/often? What shows? Why do you watch?). Based on survey results, generate visualizations of the various answers and discuss them with the class: What strong concentrations or patterns do they notice in terms of what they watch, how much, and why? Where do there seem to be areas of disagreement or lack of cohesion? What might these findings suggest about the role of media to influence attitudes, beliefs, tastes, and so on? 
2. The Motherlode One early advocate of creative TV pedagogy was James Brunstein. In fact, his 1958 article, “Ten Uses for Commercial Television in the English Classroom,” offered a stockpile of assignments and activities—many of which could, with some updating, still be useful today. In this article, Brunstein suggested having students view and discuss television adaptations of dramatic works, with a specific emphasis on having students explore the medium-specific effects of that adaptation (568–569). Elsewhere, he discussed creative writing activities that had students draw upon their favorite television programs for inspiration or backstory—a kind of proto-fan-fiction (567). Perhaps most novel, he described a talk-show-like activity where students produced a mock TV program addressing common writing problems, and then shared audio-taped performances with other class sections (566). While this article was certainly a reflection of its day (it heavily emphasized the promotion of canonical Western culture), we appreciate the collaborative spirit in which Brunstein frames his central theme: “[T]eachers and students must study TV cooperatively in an effort to define standards for what is good and what is poor” (569).
3. Network Executive Simulator Marshall McLuhan, along with Katryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan (1978), made an appearance in the pages of English Journal to discuss their recently published media-centric textbook City as Classroom. The following prompt from that source lends itself nicely to current reinterpretation:
   

   Pretend you have to set up the weekly program schedule for a local TV station or for an entirely imaginary one. First, estimate the size and nature of the audience: who will be watching? When? Then, calculate the number of on-air hours per day, the effect you want to create, the sort of program offerings that will best achieve this effect, the number and placement of ads, and the probability of keeping the audience’s attention. In what ways is your schedule different from the schedules of existing stations serving the same audience? (72)

   You might refine this prompt to reflect the current state of television—for example, having students develop concepts and programming schedules for an imaginary cable network or streaming service that’s hyper-focused on a particular subject, demographic, or lifestyle. Nevertheless, the rhetorical emphasis on audience analysis combined with creative play still makes for a solid activity. Taking this idea a step further, you might also consider having students produce a short promotional or preview video using some combination of found and original footage.   
   
4. Facebook Archaelogy  In their article “The Laws of Media,” McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan (1978) made a case for the need for students and teachers to think more broadly and comprehensively about the dynamic contexts in which media exist and evolve. One key concept they promoted was to have students consider the figure/ground relationship when studying a particular medium, where “figure” represented the discrete performance or text at the forefront of a media event, and “ground” comprised the underlying information, prior media, and technical infrastructure that serves as a backdrop for the figure. As an example, they write, “Thus the figure of the printed page now exists in a ground of TV news and programming” (92). You might ask students to likewise adopt the figure/ground heuristic in an analysis of their current media ecosystem: What earlier media forms serve as the backdrop of our current social media platforms? How does the introduction of new technologies (e.g., laptops, smartphones, tablets) help support changes in how content is delivered in terms of format, audience, purpose, interactivity, and related factors? Working in small teams, students could prepare media archaeology presentations in which they trace the historical influences on current media forms. 
5. Public Access 2.0 While Dennis Kraynak (1987) offered us an impressively ambitious vision of how students can be engaged soup-to-nuts in the production of television programming, many of us will not find it easy or feasible to partner with public access stations in order to take to the airwaves. Fortunately, the rise of the web—and video hosting/streaming solutions such as YouTube, Vimeo, Sprout, and others—has helped mitigate that particular obstacle. You might consider a similar project where students write, perform, and produce a class-wide video series for the web. Students could assume specific roles (e.g., writer, video editor, producer, on-air personality) based on their own interests and skills; digital video content could be determined according to student or community interests, topics otherwise covered in class, or live feedback from the web (comments, tweets, etc.); in lieu of studio-grade equipment, students could even use technologies they already have some familiarity with and access to (e.g., smartphones, tablets).     
6. #FakeAds Margo Sorenson (1989) demonstrated how television commercials—a genre full of common language-based and visual tropes, not to mention occasionally disingenuous rhetorical appeals—were ripe for rhetorical critique . . . and parody. In one sense, Sorenson’s parody commercial assignment could easily be lifted wholesale into today’s classroom with little to no modification. However, in the world of streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube, you might also consider having students study the genre conventions of newer forms of commercial advertisement in streaming video (many of them much shorter in duration, or involving conspicuous product placement or mentions within the main content). As with the original assignment, students would be expected to produce their own parodic version of such ads to demonstrate their awareness of such elements.

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