Instructions: Click legend below the graph to turn lines on and
off. Double click or pinch graph to zoom in. Drag graph to move
through time. Hover over the dots to make hyperlinked
citations to the articles appear; hover over a new dot to make
citation info boxes go away. Click link at top of graph to reset.
Instances of television-oriented pedagogy began in 1951, shortly after
broadcasting networks were established in the United States.
(Incidentally, interest in radio-centered pedagogy among English
teachers waned just as television emerged, a point in time we jokingly
refer to as the moment when TV killed the radio star.) A closer look at
the role of television in English education shows a slightly different
pattern compared to film or radio, where production-focused articles
appear early in the timeline. With television, reception is the
predominant focus of articles from the outset in 1951, and it is not
until 1967, with Robert Meadows’ “Get Smart: Let TV Work for You,” that
we see the first indication of interest in production (and even here,
Meadows described a multi-part assignment that involved script writing
and live, in-class performance). In fact, most of the
production-oriented articles in this corpus center around alphabetic
script writing of television dramas, press conferences, and other
televisual genres.
As the 1970s ushered in the era of teaching with television
(exemplified by the emergence of the Children’s Television Workshop and
programs such as Sesame Street), we had expected to see an
explosion of television-based publications erupting from the pages of English
Journal, but alas, this was not the case. With respect to
educational television in particular, we found one representative: John
A. Wiegand’s (1965) “Teaching English on TV in Samoa,” which addressed
oral English language instruction transmitted from a local television
station in American Samoa. The establishment of public access cable
channels in the early 1980s also did not have the kind of impact we
initially anticipated when we began this project, even given the
democratic or egalitarian promise of the format. This was perhaps due to
the highly specialized nature of television production, the availability
of public access stations in a given area, or other access impediments.
The largest (though still modest) spikes in television production
occurred in 1994. This year included three articles, actually part of a
special symposium section in the January issue: Travis E. Jackson,
Anthony Bencivenga, and Lestra Litchfield’s “Writing for Television:
Purpose and Audience Already Defined”; Richard Kosier and Candace
Morgan’s “A Show with Class”; and Diana Mitchell’s “Scripting for
Involvement and Understanding.” Two of the three dealt with production
in terms of writing for television, whereas Kosier and Morgan actually
described a kind of public access station internship program where
students were involved in production, performance, and editing in
addition to writing.
Aside from the aforementioned Meadows article, production-oriented
publications were concentrated in the twenty-year span from 1978–1998,
with several gaps occurring therein. Articles on television reception,
by contrast, appeared much more regularly and with more frequency up
through 2009, save for a noticeable drought from 1968–1974. A cursory
glance at article titles during that period suggests a renewed emphasis
on teaching with and about literature that may have led teachers away
from considering uses of television in the classroom.
Topoi for Teaching with Television
X = number of articles; Y = topoi
Click to view graph data in table format
Topoi for Teaching with TV
TV Topos
Production
Reception
Changing the Nature of Literacy
13
46
Engaging for Students
13
36
Harming Alphabetic Literacy
2
35
Requiring Teacher Judgment
4
31
Enhancing Alphabetic Literacy
6
22
Expanding Audience Beyond Teacher
7
5
When we look at the bar graph of topoi associated with
televisual English pedagogy, we immediately notice that “harming
alphabetic literacy” makes it into the top three, a viewpoint reflected
in thirty-seven total articles (two production centered, thirty-five
reception centered). This is something of an outlier compared to other
media, where attitudes were generally favorable, and the willingness to
experiment was apparent. A strong sense of television as an uncouth
threat to print literacy wafts through this part of the corpus in a way
that it doesn’t in other areas. In fact, the most represented topos,
“changing the nature of literacy,” is not uniformly depicted as a good
thing—this, despite the frequent invocation of Marshall McLuhan in
articles and columns of the period.
Whether this dismissive attitude towards television stemmed from the
sheer ubiquity of television sets in the American home, a growing
preoccupation with what many have deemed a literacy crisis during this
time period, or a combination of related factors remains unclear. In chapter
6, we’ll look closer at the language of the “TV” articles in the
archive in order to begin to offer more robust—though still
speculative—answers to the intriguing question: Why did English teachers
seem to detest TV so much more than other media? In addition to
critiquing the ideological topoi and material constraints that
limited teachers’ imagination of the possibilities of TV production in
English pedagogy, we’ll also revisit some of the more prescient and
timely critiques that teachers made about corporate influence in TV
programming.
