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100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

Ben McCorkle / Jason Palmeri

Re-Seeing Film and Video Pedagogies

Making Movies in the Thirties

As we reviewed numerous archival sources about student filmmaking in the 1930s in English Journal and other sources, we were excited to discover many accounts in which collaborative student filmmaking challenged the traditional authority dynamics of the classroom, enhanced student engagement, and enabled students to make meaningful rhetorical choices in composing cinematic texts for real-world audiences. Despite the progressive potential of some 1930s film production pedagogies, however, we also noted how English teachers too often conceptualized film production in ways that reinforced classist and sexist biases, upheld dominant political ideologies, and ignored material inequalities in technology access. In the newsreel below, we attempt to give a sense of the complex mix of progressive enthusiasm and problematic exclusion that characterized the rhetoric of student film production in the 1930s and early 1940s. While the newsreel narrator presents a bombastic “voice of God” perspective on student film production, we do not intend that his voice go unchallenged. Accordingly, we follow the newsreel with an in-depth analysis of some of the problematic politics, as well as the more forward-looking possibilities, of cinematic production pedagogies in this era.

[N. B.: All of the still photos in the following newsreel come from two books about student film production, both published in 1941: Producing School Movies and Students Make Motion Pictures. All of the student projects we describe are based on those described in the aforementioned books and in the English Journal archive. The film clips come from diverse public domain sources of the era (cited in the production notes in the appendix). We also include a brief clip of an actual 1930s short student film, Spinning Spokes, used with permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The vocal narration represents our own parodic attempt to capture some of the (at times problematic) zeitgeist of student filmmaking in the era.]

English Teachers Take on the Film Industry

Before analyzing film production pedagogies in English classes, we must first pause and consider more broadly the ways in which English instructors sought to teach students to analyze movies, as well as to influence the work of the film industry. After a relative dearth of film articles in the 1920s, the early 1930s started off with a burst of interest in film—inspired in many ways by the growing popularity of the talkies. In making the case for the importance of engaging motion pictures in the English classroom, Gertrude Turner cautioned English teachers in 1931 of the stark reality that the talking film was eclipsing other forms of performance: “Every week, 50,000,000 people in these United States play vicariously by attending motion pictures, while 5,000,000 are to be found at plays, concerts, lectures, and religious revivals” (572). In a moment it which photoplays appeared to be outpacing live performance, Turner argued forcefully that students needed the guidance of English teachers to learn to discern and appreciate the highest qualify motion picture entertainment. As the 1930s rolled on, English teachers’ fears that film was killing the stage drama reached an almost fevered pitch. For example, in 1938, Constance McCullough mused that she was “not sure that drama is to die; but neither do I have much faith that artificial respiration can keep a weak heart going long” (341). While in hindsight the stage drama has proven more resilient than McCullough predicted, her writing gives an accurate sense of the hyperbolic rhetorics of technological change that propelled many English teachers to feel that they had no choice but to embrace and attempt to influence the ascendant medium of film.

Recognizing that growing power of film in the lives of young people, English teachers increasingly sought to guide students towards more morally uplifting and aesthetically beautiful movies. In 1932, Wiliam Lewin posed the rhetorical question: “Should not a committee of English teachers be set up to preview cinema productions and rate them from the standpoint of artistic excellence? English teachers are interested not only in clean pictures, but also in good pictures” (388). Taking up Lewin’s call, NCTE would go on to form a “Committee on Standards for Motion Pictures and Newspapers,” although it didn’t appear to rise to the level of power and influence in Hollywood that Lewin seemed to hope.

While Lewin worked to rally English teachers to encourage filmmakers to conform to established aesthetic and moral standards, some English teachers during this period offered more progressive critiques of the cinema industry that went beyond the conservative moralism of the Hayes Code era. For example, in a 1936 article, Edgar Dale argued forcefully that English teachers needed to critique racial stereotyping in mainstream Hollywood films and support the development of alternative motion pictures that dramatized and challenged persistent racist violence in the United States. In a follow-up 1937 article, Dale also went on to question if the for-profit movie industry could ever truly meet the public interest, arguing that more public financing of filmmaking was crucial for social improvement. Making the case for why filmmaking should be seen as public good (not unlike schools or libraries), Dale argued forcefully that English teachers “as a group are interested in child welfare. The producer of films is interested in profits. [. . .] I hope that we shall firmly resolve that when private profits and child welfare clash, that private profits must give way” (705). Sounding a similar note of caution about corporate filmmaking interests, Winifred Johnston (1939) wrote a stinging rebuke of the public relations departments of major film studios that “exist mainly to take the public in” (816). Johnston especially cautioned teachers to be wary of corporate movie guides provided for teachers that existed more to sell films than to advance educational goals. Johnston’s worry strikes us as still prescient today; teachers must continue to be wary of corporate-funded materials designed to “help” them—always pausing to critically question what other motives may be at play.

Student Filmmaking and the Politics of Access

Given English teachers’ increasing dissatisfaction with the products of the corporate film industry, it makes sense that some teachers ultimately turned to collaborating with students to produce their own independent films. As we review the evolution of discussions of student film production in English Journal throughout the 1930s, we can see that student filmmaking began as an extracurricular activity that eventually became integrated into the English curriculum in traditional class settings in the latter part of the decade. In one of the earliest discussions of film production in English Journal, William Lewin (1934) tells the story of “the photoplay club” at Central High School in Newark—a club that had been in operation since 1928. In addition to viewing and critically discussing professional films, the club also made original film newsreels about school and community events. While the photoplay club model was successful in providing support for original student media production, it was also exclusionary in some ways. To purchase and maintain equipment necessary for producing 16mm films, the Newark club sold tickets to newsreel screenings and also required its members to pay “an initiation fee of 15 cents and [. . .] dues of 5 cents a week” (43). While these fees may seem nominal today, we must remember that monthly dues of twenty cents in the 1930s could purchase substantial food in a time when jobs were scarce. Lewin did not mention subsidies for low-income students so we surmise that the experience of film production was likely limited to more class-privileged youth.

Although Lewin’s photoplay club was coeducational, he strongly emphasized the importance of accounting for the supposedly natural differences in the interests of boys and girls. Making an argument for the need to organize photoplay club work along gendered lines, Lewin cited a survey he conducted of students in the club that found that boys’ top five interests included: “1. Learning how to direct an amateur movie 2. Learning how to operate a movie camera 3. Learning how to operate a movie projector (showing films) 4. Learning how to choose interesting camera angles 5. Learning how to judge the light conditions” (41). Correspondingly, girls’ top five interests were: “1. Seeing photoplays in theaters 2. Discussing theatrical photoplays 3. Reading movie magazines 4. Learning how to direct an amateur movie 5. Learning how to operate a movie camera” (41). While one could look at this data and use it to suggest ways to help both boys and girls broaden their cinematic interests, Lewin did not do this and instead suggested that: “because of the superior interest of boys in technical matters, it is well to divide the club into two main sections, a technical section and a discussion section” (43). We can only surmise that it was largely girls who were relegated to the discussion section despite the fact they, too, expressed some interest in film directing.

While one might be tempted to dismiss Lewin’s sexist approach to student film production as an outlier, he was not alone in reifying sexist stereotypes about men’s technical superiority. For example, the 1941 Producing School Movies volume sponsored by NCTE included eleven images of men and boys using various kinds of film equipment, while featuring zero (zip! zilch! nada!) images of women and girls directly handing film equipment—although women and girls were often pictured with alphabetic writing tools. As we look back at the ways in which proponents of student filmmaking reified stereotypes that men were more technically inclined than women, we can be reminded to be wary of simply letting students’ “natural” interests dictate what roles they play in collaborative media work. When we are teaching video production, we need to encourage all students to play diverse roles in scripting, directing, shooting, editing, and analyzing. If we see a clear gendered division of labor emerging in a collaborative work, we should not further reify it (as Lewin did) but instead should work to intervene to encourage a more equitable sharing of tasks among students of all gender identities.

Although student filmmaking in the 1930s was governed in part by sexist assumptions, women teachers nevertheless often played leading roles in bringing film production to the English class. Indeed, on the pages of English Journal, it was women teachers who first documented filmmaking as part of the regular work of the English class and not as solely an extracurricular activity (Whitehead 1937; Hodge 1938). In 1937, Louise Whitehead enthusiastically responded to her students’ suggestion that they make a class film of the novel they were studying, David Copperfield. As Whitehead was teaching a relatively privileged student body in the film production hotbed of Los Angeles, she found quickly that “three pupils had cameras available, and one offered three hundred feet of film ‘all her own!’” (315). The class planned and shot nine scenes from the novel, and the project entailed substantial collaborative writing: “Members of the class wrote each episode. These contributions were criticized, discussed, and re-written until the script committee was satisfied” (316). Students spent weeks developing costumes and sets, rehearsing their roles, and even writing letters to their parents to explain the project. The leading actor was so committed to his role that he defied the reigning gender norms and let “his hair grow five weeks to look like David!” (316).

While Whitehead’s approach to student filmmaking was quite playful and improvisational, she also was committed to ensuring that serious (and wide-ranging) learning outcomes were achieved. Reflecting on the value of the filmmaking project for students, Whitehead asserted:

I have directed no class study of David Copperfield in which a comparable knowledge of the story was developed, nor a similar amount of thoughtful written work done. But the real value lay in the pupils’ growth in co-operation, self-confidence, independence, imagination, and ability to manage groups. Greatest value of all lay in their realization they had worked together successfully to create an artistic expression which brought pleasure to others as well as to themselves. (317)

Although Whitehead retained control over the topic of her students’ film production, her approach still productively challenged traditional teacher-centered classroom dynamics by granting students’ agency in collaborating with one another to produce a film that brought not only educational value but also pleasure as defined on their own terms. We greatly appreciate Whitehead’s playful, collaborative filmmaking pedagogy, but we also remain cognizant that her strategy of relying on class-privileged students to provide their own equipment was not a sustainable model for extending these kinds of pedagogical experiments into less-privileged educational contexts.

In a similar article about filmmaking as a way to engage students in literary reading, Mary Ruth Hodge (1938) discussed a collaborative project in a Louisville Junior High School in which students made a 16mm film adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, Lady of the Lake. Hodge initiated the project at the students’ suggestion. As Hodge did not herself have any experience with filmmaking, she turned to a fellow social studies teacher, Lillian McNulty, for technical and equipment support. McNulty, who had taken summer classes in filmmaking at the University of California Los Angeles, loaned her personal 16mm camera to Hodge’s class and also agreed to edit all the footage over the following summer when she would return more classes at UCLA. In the end, the class film of Lady of the Lake was quite extensive, with numerous scenes shot on location in Louisville. Students conducted intensive research into Scottish history and worked hard to find locations in Kentucky that were as similar to historic Scotland as possible. A local equestrian stable loaned the class numerous horses for a dramatic battle scene that featured school boys riding into battle. After McNulty edited the footage over the summer, the final film was screened in the school auditorium to much acclaim.

In many ways, Hodge’s turn to filmmaking pedagogy was an extension of her already established pedagogical philosophy, which emphasized students’ active engagement with literature over traditional teacher-centered models. Explaining her approach to teaching Scott’s poem (even before she added filmmaking), Hodge noted “I never give a test on The Lady of the Lake. It is too lovely and too wonderful. I, the teacher, take the only test given, and my grade depends entirely on how much the students have enjoyed the poem” (390). In this way, we can see that Hodge was receptive to filmmaking as an approach to teaching literature, because she had already come to question traditional models of assessment in which the expert teacher “objectively” tests students’ understanding. Having already committed herself to a pedagogy focused more on student engagement than traditional forms of literary analysis, Hodge was well primed to respond favorably to her students’ suggestion that they spend much of the last few months of the school year making a cinematic film adaptation. We value Hodge’s project for how it decentered the classroom, as well as how it inspired students to work in teams to extensively research the historical contexts of The Lady of the Lake. It appears that other teachers also found Hodge’s work inspiring, as we found a report of another school in Atlanta making a film of The Lady of the Lake a few years later, as well as numerous other classes around the country making film adaptations of portions of such classic works as Robin Hood, Little Women, and The Canterbury Tales (Child and Finch 1941).

Despite the value we find in the film production pedagogies of Hodge, Whitehead, and others, we also must remember that they were enabled by, and ultimately reinforced, material inequalities in technological access. In most cases, filmmaking equipment and training was not provided as part of regular public school budgets; rather, teachers gained technological access by relying on the equipment and technical expertise of more class-privileged students or (in Hodge’s case) colleagues—a model that ultimately did not prove sustainable or equitable as it left filmmaking pedagogies largely out of reach for the majority of teachers and students. Furthermore, while adapting literary works to film did provide a great opportunity for students to compose media for real audiences, the pedagogical emphasis remained on deepening students’ understanding of literature, not on developing their rhetorical flexibility in working with words and images in order to make arguments that personally mattered to them.

Although literary adaptation was a common genre for film production in English classes, some English teachers also more radically suggested that students might produce instructional films and newsreels about timely topics in their own communities (Finch 1939; Child and Finch 1941; Brooker and Herrington 1941). Rather than adapting literary works chosen by the teacher, advocates of community-based film projects suggested that students be given some choice to explore local issues. Eleanor Child and Hardy Finch’s 1941 book Producing School Movies (published by NCTE) showcased a wide range of student films on timely community topics including public health, bicycle safety, and literacy education. In addition to encouraging students to make instructional films on issues of public concern, Child and Finch argued for the value of students making activist films calling for change in their local contexts: “Community problems may be shown in films. It’s fun to make a film, but it’s even more fun to convince people that certain changes are needed” (15). While Child and Finch called for activist student filmmaking, the student films showcased in their book were decidedly non-activist in orientation, largely upholding the status quo. For example, Child and Finch included a detailed scenario for a film called “Our Water Supply,” produced by an elective film class at Greenwich High School in Connecticut where both Child and Finch taught. Although one might think that a film about the water supply could have provided an opportunity for activist muckraking, the actual film that students made was more a work of public relations that reinforced the water company’s own narrative about how it kept the community safe. Of course, it’s important to note that Greenwich, Connecticut was (and is still today) a primarily white, class-privileged community, and indeed the equipment used in the class was largely purchased by wealthy members of the school’s photoplay club. It’s not surprising, then, that when teachers in Greenwich asked white, affluent students to go looking for problems in their local institutions, the students apparently didn’t find any, and instead concluded that they were being well served.

Although we appreciate the progressive spirit of Child and Finch’s suggestion that students use filmmaking to advocate for change in their communities, we question to what extent (if at all) they engaged Greenwich students in interrogating positions of privilege and power in ways that might have helped them take a more critical view of their own city and how it was situated within wider contexts of class and racial inequality. In this way, we can see that while student media production has the potential to be used for activist ends, it can also be used in ways that simply reinforce dominant ideologies—especially when media production tools are concentrated in the hands of white, class-privileged, cisgender boys.

In another example of a student instructional film that mostly replicated dominant ideologies, Child and Finch discussed the silent bicycle safety film Spinning Spokes, produced by students in a Milwaukee area high school. We were able to track down an archival copy of the film at the Wisconsin Historical Society and received permission to share digitized clips from it (see above). While this film no doubt provided useful advice about how to ride a bicycle safely, it notably put all responsibility for safe bicycling onto the choices of the individual rider, who bore sole responsibility for avoiding the rising number of cars on the road. Notably, there was no discussion of the civic need to build better infrastructure to support cyclists, nor did we find any discussion of the need to retain and strengthen public transit systems that could reduce the number of menacing cars on the road! In addition to reflecting the dominant ideologies of the automobile industry, the film also reinforced gender hierarchies by highly featuring boys in dramatic action shots while relegating girls to more passive, supporting roles. Despite all these ideological limitations, however, it is possible to read the film against the grain to uncover some more resistant forms of meaning making hidden within it. For example, while the film’s stated goal was to promote more careful bicycle riding, much of the film’s footage actually consisted of students joyfully performing bicycle stunts on the road, vividly dramatizing precisely what not to do. In these shots of students on bicycles radically confronting cars on the road, we can see tantalizing glimpses of the kind of anarchist derring-do that characterizes more contemporary punk bicycle activism such as Critical Mass. Seen in this subversive light, Spinning Spokes can remind us of ways that savvy students can at times hack dominant pedagogies for their own more transgressive ends.

While most class film projects in the 1930s were pursued in a somewhat ad hoc manner, the Denver Public Schools stood out for sponsoring a more systematic program of filmmaking in interdisciplinary general education courses (in which English teachers collaborated with instructors of other core subjects). The Denver student filmmaking program was extensively documented in the 1941 book, Students Make Motion Pictures, by Floyde Booker and Eugene Herrington. In a model similar to that advocated by Child and Finch, students in Denver made instructional films about local community issues, including questions of public health, finance, and food supply. While these topics could potentially have provided much fodder for critical activism, it appears that students were encouraged largely to represent the point of view of dominant industry leaders. For example, Brooker and Herrington recounted the story of a class that “undertook to make a film on the problem of banking. The students were interested in learning about banking, and the bankers in the community were interested in finding some way to tell the students about banking” (7). Not surprisingly, the resulting student film, Dollars and Progress, presented a positive spin on the services provided by local banks. While the topic of banking during the depression area could potentially have led to some rather critical exploration of questions of financial regulation (and indeed the whole damn capitalist system!), this kind of critical investigation was unlikely to happen once the project became framed as helping the bankers tell their own story.

We see a similar problem at work in another Denver student film, entitled Food the Modern Way. While students in the class began with a wide range of questions about the food supply, they ended up narrowing down their focus to the role of “modern machinery” in the food system (4). They then visited local food industry leaders to learn more. Offering a cheerful celebration of industrial food production, the vocal narration for Food the Modern Way proceeded as follows:

What shall we eat? Denver, a modern city relies on men and machines for its food. Tractors and plows on the farm—processing machines in modern factories—testing equipment in modern laboratories—rapid transportation and modern refrigeration—modern retail methods—men and machines working together in a great industry to provide a variety of foods for the modern taste and the modern diet. (108)

In discussing this film narration script, Booker and Herrington reflected substantially on how hard students worked to condense their initially wordy and academic script draft into this final concise version that worked well spoken aloud in the limited time allotted. Indeed, we are also impressed with how well the student authors were able to produce a script that fulfilled the genre expectations of the promotional film. Once again, however, we also see a great opportunity lost in that students merely reproduced the dominant rhetoric of progress of the industrial food system while leaving aside critical questions of labor politics, food insecurity, and environmental impact.

Although most of the Denver student films described by Brooker and Herrington worked to reinforce dominant corporate ideology, they also included the story of one student film project about housing in Denver that more critically and complexly interrogated the social and economic politics of housing inequality. In explaining how the topic of housing was chosen by the class, Brooker and Herrington noted that the students were motivated to explore housing because many of them came from less-privileged backgrounds and “knew all too much about slums themselves” (6). Rather than turning to the local chamber of commerce for their take on housing issues in Denver, the students tried to take on the more complex question “of the work of the federal government in assisting the local community to alleviate bad housing conditions” (6). Although students made some progress on their film, their guiding question about governmental solutions to housing inequality ultimately proved too difficult to address within the limited time frame of a single semester. In explaining why the housing film project remained unfinished, Brooker and Herrington noted warily that:

In Denver, as in many another community, the problems of housing [. . .] are complex ones not to be settled in a day. Community delays were reflected in the school. The class graduated before the community attitude was clarified and, although the motion picture was carried almost to completion, it will remain for another class to finish. (6)

Brooker and Herrington presented the story of the unfinished housing film as a kind of cautionary tale about a class that failed to sufficiently narrow its topic in contrast to the highly focused team of students behind the more successful Food the Modern Way. Yet we would argue that the housing class’s failure to finish the film according to chrono-normative deadlines of the semester might actually be seen as a kind of resistant queer failure (in Halberstam’s sense). In failing to produce a neatly packaged, complete film project, the students in the film class may have failed to meet normative models and timelines of educational assessment, but they also subversively claimed crucial space and time to engage complexly with kind of difficult social changes needed to truly address inequalities in housing.

While we are critical of some of the normativity of the approach to student filmmaking advocated by Brooker and Herrington in Denver, we also see much to admire in their work. As best we can determine, the filmmaking equipment for the Denver school program was not funded by club fees, but rather by a range of governmental and non-profit sponsors. Furthermore, students were engaged in a robust process of collaborative, person-based research in their own communities, and they produced films that were such high quality that they were regularly shown to future classes throughout the school system. There is much to commend in how the Denver schools positioned filmmaking not as an elective supplement, but as central curricular approach for experiential learning within interdisciplinary core courses. We also have much respect for Brooker and Herrington’s resistant move of engaging students in making instructional films for their peers rather than positioning students simply as consumers of instructional media made by corporate entities. At the same time, Brooker and Herrington’s emphasis on teaching students to produce “high-quality” instructional film also appears to have limited students’ imagination about how filmmaking could be used in more critical ways to challenge rather than reinforce dominant ideological narratives.

As we review the rhetoric surrounding the Denver school experiment, we can begin to uncover a turn as we enter the 1940s from emphasis on the process of student filmmaking to an emphasis on product. Brooker and Herrington specifically critiqued other teachers who focused primarily on what students could learn from filmmaking rather than on the quality of the films produced. Writing disparagingly of school film projects that involved adapting literary classics (such as those advocated by Hodge and Whitehead), Brooker and Herrington noted:

In such production, if the class producing the film ended with a living appreciation of these classics, the project was considered successful, regardless of the quality of the finished motion picture. On the contrary, the Denver production began with a determination to explore the possibilities of producing motion pictures useful in the general curriculum of the school. (11)

Brooker and Herrington’s value of product over process in many ways arose from economic considerations: “If the school motion picture production program is to be justified in terms of demands on school time and funds, then the criterion must be the results of the program to the students, the school, and the community” (138). For the pair, student filmmaking could not be justified simply based on the learning outcomes for the student filmmakers themselves—the expense was only justifiable if the students produced films that could be used in other educational and community settings.

Although Brooker and Herrington offered a potentially useful, student-centered alternative to the nascent instructional film industry, it appears that their call for students and teachers to make their own instructional films did not gain much long-term traction, at least among English teachers. Instead of turning to instructional films produced by amateur students, English teachers were increasingly convinced to turn towards professional instructional films promoted and produced by corporate entities—films which promoted product-centered, current-traditional models of writing instruction (Ritter 2015). Once again, we see that when teachers come to adopt professional production values for evaluating media work, they often move away from the messy process of engaging students in media production, as they find it’s just too difficult to keep up with ever-increasing standards for professional media.

When we look back at some of the reasons that the late thirties boom in student film production was not sustained, we can learn several lessons. First, we can be reminded that we must embrace and celebrate the messy and complicated process of making student media—clearly articulating to all stakeholders that the value of student media production lies first and foremost in the reflective learning process, and not in technical quality of the end product. Second, we must argue collectively for access to media production equipment to be equitably distributed to all schools—remembering that pedagogical models relying on having students bring their own equipment further reproduce access inequalities. Third, we must continually engage students in critically analyzing the limitations of dominant media texts, otherwise students may simply reinscribe dominant narratives in their own media productions. Finally, we need to be cognizant of gender stereotypes of technical proficiency and interest that may influence how students “choose” to take on roles in collaborative media production. We need to work with students to design models of collaboration than enable students of all gender identities to take on diverse roles in making media (and we also need to highlight the technical contributions of women and nonbinary people in the examples of media we share with students). The late 1930s presented a (nearly lost) moment of possibility—a moment when collaborative student filmmaking had the potential to radically refigure traditional models of education. Today, we inhabit a similar moment, when the proliferation of online video presents new opportunities for teachers and students to collaborate in remaking education and advocating for social changes in their communities. If we are to sustain this moment, however, we would be wise to heed the lessons of these past experiments in student film production.

Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0  published by the university of michigan press as part of the  sweetland digital rhetoric collaborative book series.