[Skip to content]

100 YEARS OF NEW MEDIA PEDAGOGY

Jason Palmeri / Ben McCorkle

Re-Seeing Film and Video Pedagogies

Silent Film Devils

Below we offer a parodic silent film, which dramatizes the tempestuous competition between film and literature as they each sought the affection of English teachers in the silent film era. This silent film has, of course, been inspired by our reading of the English Journal archives—but in this case we use the archive as a source for queerly fanciful fiction rather than documentary realism. Those readers seeking a more true-to-life recounting of English teachers’ reactions to silent film should consult the case study that follows below.

In 1913, only the second year of English Journal’s publication, film burst on the scene in a big way with the publication of Robert Neal’s article, “Making the Devil Useful.” Neal clearly recognized that the topic of film in the English class would be a controversial one so he began his text by assuring his readers that film was not, in fact, satanic:

We are familiar with the principle of fighting the devil with fire. There is a better strategy than that so far as the moving-picture devil is concerned. Mind, the moving picture is not an invention of the devil. There is a great deal in it, at the present stage of its development, that we have to think of with all the optimistic faith summonable in order not to regard it as excessively satanic. (658)

Although Neal clearly was quite skeptical of the moral turpitude of the emerging medium of silent film, he ultimately conceded that the movies were “here to stay, and we shall have to make the best of them” (658). In imagining more useful (and less satanic!) uses for film in the English classroom, Neal suggested that teachers harness the youth’s enthusiasm for cinema in order to increase their engagement in learning traditional writing and reading. Asserting that students’ extracurricular film viewing could provide useful fodder for descriptive writing, Neal advised that teachers assign students to write detailed journalistic reports about recently viewed films as a way to hone their close observation skills. Furthermore, Neal suggested that teachers engage students in writing “scenarios” or scripts for silent film adaptations based on works of print literature they had been reading. Confronting the challenge that students often struggled to visualize the action of print books in their minds, Neal asserted that the activity of transforming a scene from a print book into a scenario for a visual film could be an excellent strategy to develop the student’s “habit of picturing in his mind what he reads” (659). Writing film scenarios based on print literature could additionally enable students to reflect about how cinematic and print media differed from one another. Notably, Neal did not suggest that students might actually try to produce the film scenarios they wrote—likely because access to expensive film production equipment was out of reach for schools in this time period.

In another article about film and writing instruction in 1915, Carolyn Gerrish asserted that the “moving picture has become an integral part of the experience of practically every boy and girl of high-school age” (226) and given this, it was incumbent on English teachers to figure out how to harness this popular medium for educational ends. Gerrish made the case that motion pictures could be “the source of material for the content of a composition,” providing valuable opportunities in practicing the modes of “narration, description, and exposition” (226). When students had the chance to write about films they viewed, Gerrish found that they became more enthusiastic about writing and that they produced higher quality work than usual. Although Gerrish made a strong case for the value of film in writing classes, she also problematically suggested that film-based approaches to composition would be most appropriate for working-class students who, in her estimation, had less life experience to draw on in their writing than their wealthier peers. In Gerrish’s classist view, children from wealthier backgrounds did not need to garner content for their writing from films because they:

come from homes pervaded by the atmosphere of culture and the doing of things that count in community life. Such children have about them the environment for initiative and so are in no measure dependent for material upon the world artificially created by the cinematograph. To children of opposite circumstance, however, whose horizon is bounded by the city street, whose experience of life is narrowed to the maintenance of a sordid existence in a squalid tenement district, the moving picture presents a vision of fact and fancy that enriches thought and stimulates imagination. (226)

To further illustrate her point about the supposedly limited experiences of working-class youth, Gerrish related the story of a “little son of the slums who wrote, in response to a request for a theme developing some incident in connection with berry-picking, ‘I never picked any berries, but I think it would be like this’” (227). Instead of rethinking the classist assumptions of narrow writing assignments that predetermined what life experiences were worthy for writing, Gerrish suggested that watching and writing about movies could provide the solution to enable poor urban youth to write about experiences such as “berry picking” that weren’t part of their world. Insisting that working class students would benefit most by writing about scenes in films rather than scenes from their own lives, Gerrish failed to recognize that the experience of living in an urban tenement could provide much fertile experience for personal writing, as well as much insight into economic inequality that could enable students to write critically about the classist biases of representation in the mainstream films they were watching.

In addition to being limited by classist bias, Gerrish’s pedagogy was also constrained by her adherence to the “objective” epistemology characteristic of current-traditional writing pedagogy in this period (Berlin 1987). In making the case for the value of writing about movies, Gerrish asserted that “the advantage of this medium over photograph or printed page lies in its verisimilitude” (228). Because Gerrish viewed the film camera as a kind of objective recorder of reality, it’s not surprising that she focused on how studying film could help students develop skills in objective description rather than in critiquing how films rhetorically and ideologically constructed reality. When we look back at the ways in which Gerrish positioned the new medium of film as simply a way to make classist, current-traditional writing pedagogy more exciting for students, we can be reminded that simply adding a new medium to a curriculum is not by itself enough to challenge entrenched pedagogical orthodoxies.

Although both Gerrish and Neal made arguments for the usefulness of film for English classes, it appears that fellow English teachers of the 1910s and 1920s were largely unconvinced. In the end, this period of English Journal featured only four articles dedicated primarily to film, and even these articles were often quite critical of the pernicious influence of the cinematic medium upon impressionable youth. For example, in 1915, Alfred M. Hitchcock (no, not that Hitchcock) penned a damning screed about how the movies were poisoning the minds of youth. In comparison to the morally uplifting and intellectually complex narratives offered by print novels, Hitchcock asserted that popular silent films presented morally questionable, overly simplistic, melodramatic spectacles (much like the silent film the two of us produced). Seeking to metaphorically demonstrate the seductive and yet dangerous power of silent film, Hitchcock personified film as a “veritable Circe” (292) that beguiled the youth with its seductive charms. Although Hitchcock conceded that a few films rose beyond spectacle to offer more virtuous entertainment, he ultimately contended that the overabundance of poor quality films necessitated that English teachers caution the youth to avoid the Circean call of the cinematic medium entirely. Dramatically comparing film to an infectious disease that must be fought at all costs, Hitchcock wrote:

One case of measles is enough to infect a school room. If merely the youngest of the little Joneses has whooping cough, it is time to placard the house. And there are maladies more serious than measles and whooping cough. Whether the picture I have painted is an exaggeration or not, I am constrained to cry out that there are still such things as temperance and reticence. There are better ways of stocking the mind than by flashing before the eye a kaleidoscopic jumble of unrelated information. There is danger in any form of amusement which merely gluts the mind. (297–298)

For Hitchcock, films were dangerous because they seduced students with such a compelling “kaleidoscopic jumble” of melodramatic images that they were unable to critically reflect about what they viewed (this stands in comparison to the slower, more deliberate process of reading print text). For Hitchcock, the film presented an existential threat to the tradition of literary reading and the values that canonical works upheld. Given the extreme danger Hitchcock thought that film posed, it’s not surprising that he ultimately saw no role for movies in English instruction, except perhaps as a topic of derision.

Although Hitchcock (and many other teachers) saw silent film as a dangerous threat to the teaching of literary reading, we did find one article in 1923 that advocated for using silent film adaptations of classic literature to engage students in reading canonical works. In 1923, Adelaide Cunningham recounted the time she taught a unit in which students both read Silas Marner and watched a silent film version of the book. Teaching a class of students who mostly “had failed once, twice, or even three times in English” (488), Cunningham was eager to try new methods to help students find success in studying literature. When Cunningham introduced the Silas Marner unit by announcing that students would view the movie version after finishing reading the book, she found that student motivation increased greatly: “The promise of a ‘movie’ stimulated the class like an electric current. The idea that a school book was actually suitable material for a movie gave it a charm never before associated with the textbook, which had ever been the symbol of ‘all work and no play’” (422). Cunningham cited positive results on two exams she gave about the book as evidence that pairing reading and film watching could enhance student learning. Despite the encouraging exam scores of students overall, Cunningham nevertheless reported that, in a class of thirty, there were nine students who failed at least one of the exams (and three who failed both). Although Cunningham was certainly innovative in her pairing of film and literature, she did not in any way rethink her valuing of canonical texts or her traditional “objective” measures of assessment. We are left wondering if those nine failing students might have been more successful if Cunningham had chosen to teach books and films more relevant to their lives, or if she had offered multiple means of assessment. In other words, we can see in Cunningham’s case that film was positioned primarily as a way to make traditional pedagogy more engaging, rather than as an occasion to radically rethink the assumptions of traditional, test-centered literary pedagogy—assumptions that continued to result in failure for at least some students.

Surprisingly, Cunningham’s work stood alone as the only article in the entire 1920s that focused on the use of film in the English classroom—although film would finally take off in the journal in a big way in the thirties, as the sound film grew in popularity. That said, the 1910s and 1920s did witness a growing interest in visual education more broadly, as teachers employed a range of more accessible visual technologies—magic lanterns, postcards, photographs, maps, stereoscopes, and even 3D models—in order to enliven their teaching of literature and writing (Crawford 1915). In many cases, teachers focused on the use of illustrations as a way to enhance their lectures on literature by showing students images of actual historical locations, such as Westminster Abbey, that were referenced in canonical literary works (Coulter 1912; Howard 1916). By 1922, the visual approach to teaching literature had become so popular that English Journal published a recurring series of five columns reviewing sources for “Illustrative Material for High-School Literature” (Hilson and Wheeling 1922abc; 1923ab). Each multi-page column featured extensive lists of published illustrations and lantern slides related to canonical literary works. While the columns occasionally included references to film adaptations of literature (twelve in total), the number of films mentioned pales in comparison to the many hundreds of potential sources for still images they referenced. We surmise that Hilson and Wheeling’s implicit privileging of still images over film likely resulted from concerns of access; illustrated books, postcards, and slides were much more inexpensive than films to purchase outright; teachers were also more likely to have access to a magic lantern slide projector than a film projector.

In addition to employing visual images to enliven their literary lectures, some teachers also engaged students in composing their own visual texts to accompany the literature they were reading. For example, we identified several articles describing whole-class projects in which students composed exhibits about famous literary authors and periods, featuring a mix of already published illustrations along with original student drawings (Rider 1916; Southwell 1925; Snyder 1922). In 1922, Flora Snyder divided her class into teams and had each group collaborate to design a visual exhibit about one of the literary periods they were studying. One ambitious group of students in Snyder’s class collaborated to create an exhibit on the “Anglo-Norman” literary age that featured “diagrams showing the sources of the English language, pictures (freehand) of Norman castles, and of the wonders seen by Sir John Mandeville; and mounted pictures of Robin Hood, King Arthur, and typical Norman scenes” (Snyder, 112). In addition to learning about their chosen literary period by composing and remixing visual texts about it, Snyder’s students also contributed to the learning of the rest of the class by sharing and discussing their exhibits with their fellow students.

Further pushing the envelope of student media making, some teachers even enlivened their teaching of literary drama by having students create elaborate 3D models of historical theaters (Marble 1922; Pitts 1922). Seeking to help students understand the diverse contexts in which Elizabethan drama was performed, Nellie Pitts assigned teams of students in her eleventh grade class to compose models of different kinds of Renaissance-era theaters using a range of materials that included “wood, wall board, cardboard, colored paper, india ink, and colored crayons” (429). Pitts noted that students were deeply engaged by the model-building project—conducting substantial independent research into Renaissance theatrical history in order to make sure their models were accurate. Extolling the deep learning that resulted from this model-making project, Pitts wrote: “I can say that no class in my experience ever learned more drama or had any more interest, or received greater pleasure in English work. The interest extended beyond the class. Twelfth-year pupils came to review the work, and I am sure they learned new facts also” (429). As today’s English teachers increasingly contemplate ways to make use of 3D printing and other digital tools for spatial composing, we could be wise to review the innovative collaborative model-making pedagogies of teachers such as Pitts and Marble.

In many ways, the 1910s and 1920s were decades during which English teachers came to see the visual image as part of their purview. The use of still images became increasingly common in English classrooms, and English teachers also felt compelled to take a position about the emerging medium of film (even if, at times, that position was a contrarian one). Furthermore, the growing emphasis on teaching visual literacy in 1920s English classes—including illustration and 3D models— helped lay the groundwork for the burst of enthusiasm in film production pedagogies that we found in English Journal starting in the 1930s. Here we see the importance of situating a new medium such as film within the broader media ecologies that necessarily influence the evolution of its uptake over time. As we revisit the early days of film and other forms of visual instruction, we can also pause to reflect on how new media were too often incorporated in ways that largely reinforced traditional (and at times problematic) pedagogical values—a reminder that, even today, we should critically interrogate how we incorporate supposedly transformative and empowering new technologies into teaching practice, as they can often be employed for classist, conservative ends.


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