 We will be having a session that is exclusively virtual with Nick Thurston from UK who will be speaking on the title of the stuff of document that says the art of propagating access. So for you all to get excited about that. For today, we have Victoria Kate who teaches in the department of history at Northeastern University. She's the author of schools and screens of watchful history from MIT Press 2021, as well as numerous articles and chapters on media technology and education. She's the co-author of life on display revolutionizing US museums of science and natural history from the University of Chicago Press 2014. And her newest project explores the history and politics of adolescent privacy and I believe is under consideration with MIT Press as of like three days ago. So, yes. Onward. That's great. So I bring you Victoria Kate. All right. Well, Heather, thank you so much. Thank you so much for coordinating all the logistical details. And thank you guys for showing up at 5pm on a Thursday. As Heather mentioned, I'm here today to talk about this new book project or I guess new book. It's left the project stage, schools and screens, which is a history of efforts to reform elementary and secondary education in US through educational screen media. So it's funny that we're sitting right across from Justin Wright's office because in some ways I feel like I have done prehistory to a lot of what he talks about and thinks about. Tonight I'm going to share some of the findings from the research I did for this book, describe two case studies, and conclude with a reflection on how the book relates to our current moment. So I started thinking about the history of educational technology in US schools a few years ago because the gap between rhetoric and reality seemed so enormous to me. As soon as common schools were established in the United States in the early 19th century, people started talking about ways to improve them through technology. And that kind of talk only grew louder and more persistent in the 20th century. And yet, despite all of this emphasis and effort on introducing new technologies to make schools better, it actually took a really long time for schools to embrace and integrate the same screen media technologies that had long permeated the rest of society. So the question of why were they so slow, that keeps my interest. And I was very lucky to start this project just as a whole wave of historians of media and technology are beginning to wrestle with different aspects of this history. I also benefited enormously from new digital access to publications on non theatrical media. And this is my little plug for the media history digital library if people haven't used it yet, you need to. So the internet archive was the other sort of wonderful repository that you guys should all check out particularly if you are interested in the early history of personal computing. So I started calling through these online resources. But I also started going into school board records and education journals and all kinds of archival materials from the early 1930s when schools first started using film on a more regular basis. And then I kept going all the way up through the early 2000s, when nearly every school in the United States was fully if, you know, connected with some fragility, but fully connected to the internet. I also read, as a starting point, a lot of Larry Cuban. Larry Cuban is a terrific historian of education, who wrote several books about classroom technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. And he's really the guy who created the master narrative of the history of educational technology. And according to Cuban, the story of ed tech is really cyclical. Efficiency obsessed school administrators, hoisted new technological tools on teachers. The technology was poorly designed for existing classroom norms. Teachers have little incentive to change those norms. Teachers refuse to use the technology. The technology gets relegated to storage shelves to die, rinse and repeat. And he makes this argument that this happens to a whole bunch of different kinds of machines. And in fact, those of us who have either been students or teachers may have seen that cycle play out ourselves, where the shiny new tool comes in and that it kind of works, but kind of doesn't. And then eventually it goes away to some library shelf and nobody ever sees it again. So the human state is actually very persuasive. But his scholarly interests were very much located in the specifics of classroom teaching and in school infrastructure. He's a historian of magic. He's really interested in classroom culture. And when he was writing these books, his archival base was very limited. So I started thinking, you know what, there got to be other ways to answer this question of why schools are so slow to adopt and make effective use of screen media. And I kept thinking, you know, expanding the frame of this research and really digging into different sets of archival materials might help shed the light on this situation. And that is, I'm hoping, the contribution that I'm making here. What I found was that there were four really pivotal debates over school screen media. And these debates, the tensions that people got all heated up over often slowed schools embrace of these tools. I mean, sometimes they actually hastened schools integration of new screen media technologies. But either way, it was these four tensions that were pivotal in shaping when and how and why schools adopted screen media technologies. So here are the research findings and I'm just going to go over them one by one. But first, I would argue that tensions over race and racism were pivotal in shaping the history of screenings in schools. People like to talk about technology as race blind, even though as scholars media, you know it's a thing, but and yet school screens were also anything but progressive educational performers often looked to school screens to help loosen the gory and knots of racism and the multitude of ills that it caused. At the same time, particularly in the 50s and 60s, as well as later on, conservative white politicians and school administrators also made heavy use of screen media technology to justify and often reinforce school segregation. Despite performers hopes that school media technologies would help to overcome the quandary of race, school screens usually exacerbated race based educational inequities instead of eliminated them. I'm happy to talk a little bit more deeply about that in the Q&A. Another theme that came up repeatedly is that the history of school screens is a history of the ongoing distrust of educators. Skepticism about educators' abilities was a major impetus for the introduction of classroom tech. At the same time, when classroom technology did make its way into American schools, Americans often wondered whether teachers were even competent enough to handle these tools. So debates over school screens were usually debates over exactly what teachers in schools could or should do and also whether visual media technologies could better accomplish those tasks than actual human beings. A third finding was that the history of school screens is a history of the growing influence of private funding in public schools. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, other major philanthropic institutions, they initiated and they propped up experiments in educational media development and use. And you'll certainly see this in some of the case studies that I offer later on. As a result, these foundations wielded outside influence over the politics and practices surrounding school screens. But it was really in the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s that four-profit corporations became really powerful players in promoting the school use of media technology. And the lobbying, donation, and marketing efforts of these corporations truly expanded the use of screens in schools but also helped to shape the way that education was implemented in public institutions in this country. A final discovery was the way and importance of tensions over the appropriate role of screens in citizenship education. Schools have long been charged in the United States with preparing youngsters for engaged responsible participation in an overlapping set of political, economic, and social communities. But what exactly made students grow to citizens and what exactly they required from schools to get there? That was hardly a matter of consensus. Screens just raised the temperature on already heated discussions about citizenship education, especially given Americans long-standing anxieties about what screens did to kids. Right? People were worried back in the 1930s just as they are today that screens are going to unleash unpredictable desires or reduce youngsters to unquestioning passivity. So experiments with and debates about media technology for schools often revolved around not only how they would influence youth, and there's a lot of moral panic that gets associated with this, but it's really thinking about the ways that they influence youth as part of the broader calling, thinking about how they influence future citizens. So those were four major tensions that came up in every decade I study over and over and over again. And those were, as you can see, I'll show you my little table of contents. I end up organizing the book around the debates chronologically, and you'll see those four tensions in each chapter. But in addition to considering what shaped the project of screen media technology in school, I also began to think about who was engaging in these debates. Cuban had talked a lot about school administrators, those were the anxious, well-meaning villains in his narrative, but who were the reformers that were like pushing screen media arms schools? Did teachers embrace them? Were parents excited about them? What about industry writ large? And what I found is that these reformers could generally be sorted into three groups. First you had advocates for what I call civic spectatorship, and I'm going to talk about that group today. They were one of the earliest coalitions pushing screen media into schools. Progressive, politically liberal educators who believed that schools had a responsibility to promote civic engagement, and what we might now describe as social justice. They saw schools as the engines for reconstructive society in a better form. And from the 1930s on, this group of reformers argued that we need screens in schools in order to give students the opportunity to practice skills that will help them navigate a civic realm increasingly organized around screen media. A second group pushing screens into schools was made up of men and women, but mostly men, who believed that technology provided and managed by experts was the key to improving educational quality. These technocrats promised that schools would modernize outdated educational practice, scale high quality teaching, and ease long-standing educational inequities, and that they would do so at little to no cost to taxpayers. So a lot of the rhetoric you hear coming up Silicon Valley now, that is pre-saged by like our gentlemen of the board foundation in the 1950s making grandiose promises about educational television and its powers. And the last set of cheerleaders and advocates for reforming schools through screens are people who are actually in the business of producing and selling media and technology to schools, as well as their allies in journalism and government. These are the people who directly stand to profit from screens, whether it's financially or professionally. And these three groups coexisted. They often overlapped. Each one was involved in major experiments with school screens over the course of the 20th century. And all of them seized moments of perceived educational and social crisis, which is pretty easy because American schools, if you listen to the media, are always in crisis. There is always a crisis going on in education, whether it's moral panic or economic depression or domestic unrest or international conflict or declining SAT scores. There's always a crisis somewhere. And always technology is going to be the thing that escapes us. So the books chapters are, as I mentioned, organized chronologically. And in them, I analyze what I see as several of the most notable experiments that are initiated by these performers. And I have to examine and analyze the debates that result from their work. Okay. So today, what I want to do is I want to go over two case studies, two curriculum experiments that illustrate some of the tensions that I just watched you through. One is a success story. And it takes place in the 1930s. And the other is a cautionary tale from this late 60s, early 70s. But both focus on progressive reformers, progressive politically and progressive pedagogically, interested in using screen media as a way to promote civic engagement that is very much of the movement that they are operating in. So my first story takes place in the 1930s as a very loose coalition of educators and psychologists and documentarians, filmmakers who see, you know, activism through the realm of film as their so they began to push schools to embrace popular cinema as a tool for citizenship training and political engagement. These reformers include film appreciation advocates like Edgar Dale, William Lewin, educators like NYU education professor, Alex the leader, social activists like Mary Losey, who basically got kicked off the march of time because everybody thought she was a communist and her house to her. And they were all interested in promoting a constellation of visual analytical and social skills that I described in the book as civic spectatorship. Now the term is a borrowed one. It's coined by photography theorist Ariella Azulay to describe the way that spectatorship of visual imagery can actually create new social, political and ethical relationships among the viewers and the view. And communication scholars Robert Karaman and John Lewis and Katie's elaborated on Azulay's ideas in the American context, suggesting that in the United States, in the 20th century United States, civic spectatorship is the equivalent of literacy when it comes to civic engagement. It contributes just as much to share political discourse. And to me, the term bearing neatly sums up what this kind of motley crew of reformers hopes to accomplish. They believed that schools were in the business of preparing students for citizenship in this wild, wooly, liberal, increasingly media saturated democracy. And so they argued that schools have responsibility to prepare students for this new world. They had to help students reverse the skills that would be necessary to parse through visual propaganda, cinematic arguments, the visual media that was beginning to splash itself across every movie screen, every newsstand, every billboard. And they wanted them to not only have these skills, but to be able to apply them in a way that would help them engage constructively with civic life. So these reformers, that's their idea, that's their ultimate ambition and their focus. But actually how that translates into a cave through 12 classroom, that's a whole different deal. So they consistently and somewhat radically for the time, argue that the best way for schools to accomplish this lofty goal is to show popular films in class, often paired with news articles and short social science readings. And they want kids to watch these films or shorts based on these films, do these readings and then discuss the sociological and psychological and political dilemmas that the film creates. It sounds very contemporary and therefore very natural to us. But let me tell you during the 1930s, this is like, you know, people were a little shocked with this idea. And the films they suggested using were wide ranging. They included dramas like Cavalcade or Alice Adams or Captain's Courageous, documentaries like George Ivan's Spanish Earth and lots of newsreels like The March of Time. Now, reformers, they were ambitious but they were also extremely practical and many of them politically savvy. And they recognized just how large films we need in the lives of the students they hoped to reach, especially during the Depression. And everybody's saving their niggles to go to the movies during the Depression. And as one of former Alice Kaliger wrote in 1936, quote, the life of the American adolescent is colored markedly by his movie experiences. So schools have an obligation to acknowledge the inherent power of the photo play and turn it to good use. So part of it is practical, but part of it is deeply psychological. They believe they have this conviction that films one to punch of visual information and then in motion, prepare students to engage more openly with the world that surrounds them. As Edgar Dale put it, a book dealing with the scientific mechanics of soil erosion may leave us cold, but a film like the plow that broke the Great Plains stirs us. So through the practice of civic spectatorship of films, reformers hoped students would begin to deliberate empathetically and collectively about issues ranging from, as Dale put it in 1938, quote, the abolition of war to a new point of view regarding crime and punishment to the more satisfactory distribution of wealth, to a deeper insight into the problems of democratic government, to an understanding of the need for a problem. End quote. Educators were actually quite enthusiastic about the idea of using popular film in school. Teachers were into this idea. They actually stood in line. There's this amazing petition that someone gathers in 1930 about teachers who want to use popular film in school. And 100 to 1200 people signed their name to this one local New Haven petition. I mean, teachers are all there. But district administrators originally, they initially resist on financial backs. It's a big depression. They can barely cover teacher salaries, you know, much less electrify their rural schools and deal with, you know, rental fees for dramas and documentaries and the projector purchases. And other cultural obstacles to older principles often forbade screening modern motion pictures at school on moral grounds, even when, you know, they pass must or popular films tended to be too long, only peripherally relevant and quite expensive. Film exhibitors had zero interest in having films exhibited in schools because they saw schools vary legitimately as a threat to their business model, which a movie is a noon in the cafeteria. Why would you go to a film and actually pay money to see it? So Dale and her leader and all of these other reformers, they're determined, though, to push this notion of civic spectatorship. So they go hand in hand to the Rockefeller Foundation and to a few other foundations. And then you can negotiate with studios for the right to excerpt and use films in the classroom. They help districts develop relationships for local theaters to allow students to see second run films in the middle of the day. They generate lots and lots of curriculum, sometimes standalone units for like history or English classes, sometimes full courses that use film excerpts and associated texts to prompt student discussion of social and political values and relationships in modern American culture. And here actually, there we are. So scholars like Craig Freidel and Eric Smootin and Lisa Rubin and Katie D. Good have also done a little bit of work touching on these curriculum in various places. And we all agree it's really obvious when you look at the actual stuff. I mean, these curricula are extraordinarily progressive. They would give a lot of Republican members of Congress due on Utah today, both pedagogically and politically. You know, they're talking about uncomfortable civic issues, economic inequality, racial discrimination, violence. So for instance, Dale and Willie were both developed curriculums that respectively used the film Fury, 1936 Spencer Tracy film featuring the near lynching of a falsely accused prisoner and they use it as an entree into the discussion of the injustice of the political and the justice system and the epidemic of racial terror lynchings in the American South. Now these kinds of curricular units were a big hit with urban educators whose politics seemed left. And by the mid 1930s, some 10,000 classes and groups relied on Dale's guides to promote civic spectatorship in and out of school. Colleaders, human relations film series curriculum or enjoyed similar popularity by the end of the decade and was used in several thousand schools. Those are just a couple of examples. So this is, you know, increasingly adopted. And yet the tensions that I mentioned at the beginning of the talk frequently slows schools adoption and use of such curricula and film more generally. Industry advocates and administrators objected to the political undertones of these curricula. Conservatives express reservation over the Rockefeller support for the curricula, reservations that would eventually take fuller form in the investigations of the release committee launched in the late 1940s and coming back to bear fruit in the early 1950s. There was widespread skepticism about teachers abilities to handle these bills. Many school wars looked a scans at the pedagogy that was promoted on which training and civic spectatorship ended and proclaimed that students were never going to be able to control students or teachers were never going to be able to control student discussion about such fraught topics like Oh, it's too risky. It's too politically dangerous. What happens if the students get out of control after they've been adored by films? Educators themselves were sometimes a little bit wary as well they should have been. They knew that controversial films or juvenile sort of experiments and posing and discussion could skid off course and that held real peril for them. Resulting in scolding, official inquiries, even job loss. Edward Dale himself, this leading classroom film advocate, he's a professor at Ohio State University. He got swept up in the wake of a 1939 red hunting investigation by the trustees at his own university and he was required to testify as to whether or not his approach to movie viewing had resulted in student support for strivers in Columbus. Now we can also see the way that contests over citizenship hampered the adoption of films in many schools. As global politics darkened at the end of the 1930s, films used in schoolrooms assumed newly threatening civic dimensions. Radio was propagandist's preferred instrument in the 1930s, but Europe's rising dictators made extensive use of films political potential, commissioning hundreds of film films to prop up their regimes. And American parents, educators and politicians were really worried that these films are going to leak into American classrooms one way or another and that the practices of civic citizenship would just be no match for the power of this insidious imagery. And such fears really tempered enthusiasm for the kind of emotionally driven discussion-oriented pedagogy that these reformers were promoting. Rather than encourage open-ended discussion declared main high school principal Robert Rocheford White, educators should take a firm hand and use school films to, quote, inspire a democratic philosophy in the personal creative American youth and assist in the formation of a patriotic spirit of the national community. In other words, Rocheford White explained, they need to provide students with clear and explicit instruction in how to act, think and be American. And to him, open-ended discussion, you know, that was not part of that. Once the war began, explicit and widespread desire to promote the war effort further dampened schools' enthusiasm for exploratory discussions of sometimes ambiguous film messages. But once the war wound down, civic spectatorship really rebounded. New film-based curricula drew very heavily on the work that had been generated in the thirties by these media reformers, the practices and the principles that had been espoused by Dale and Belieher and all of these other kind of interwar education advocates. And both American educators and the newly organized educational film industry adopted critical analysis and open-ended group discussion as standard viewing practice in the 1940s. Because to many Americans, cultivating these practices really stood in stark contrast to the education that had resulted in totalitarian regimes, the oppression they associated with German and Russian schooling. So critical viewing and group discussions seemed to embody and reach toward the kind of post-war democratic ideals of free expression and tolerance and rational compromise and consensus building. So the work of these interwar reformers that I write about actually offers something as a prelude to the Cold War and grace of televised and post-fuelling discussions that Anna McCarthy writes about in The Citizen Machine. That's not a fifties phenomenon. That gets established earlier. Indeed, by the end of the 1940s, there's broad agreement among teachers, parents, and policymakers that civic spectatorship represents a powerful social technology capable of producing new and constructive modes of citizenship. So that's my success story. Yet it progressives. But educators' commitment to this kind of viewing and pedagogical practice really ebbs and flows quite a bit over the next several decades. But it remains this sort of undercurrent in discussions as tools spring among champions of progressive pedagogical ideals and really sort of everybody just like on people's radar. And in the mid 1960s and early 1970s, this kind of pedagogy again fluoresces. It becomes enormously popular once again as educators and activists seek to meet the era's challenges by teaching future citizens to analyze and discuss new visual narratives critically. Again, in experimental multimedia curricula that is sponsored by foundations and universities. And it's this that brings me to the second case study. In this era, the mid 60s to early 70s, the single best known curricular experiment was a curriculum called Man a Course of Study. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that. Not really like, you know, ping at your generation, but I remember when I was a kid actually. And I'm old, but I'm not that. So Man a Course of Study, which was nicknamed MAKOS, was conceived in 1962 and launched in 1969. And MAKOS was a fifth grade social studies curriculum that was created by psychologists and social scientists and educators over at Harvard University. And it was one of an alphabet soup of curriculum reform projects that flooded American schools after Sputnik's 1957 launch. Americans got completely freaked out and we were behind the Russians and we were like, oh, we have to reinvent education. I know it's thousand different curricular shifts. And this was one of those shifts. It was created with money from the National Science Foundation and also a series of private foundations. And this curriculum was intended like the others of this era to provide students with disciplinary grounding and critical thinking skills that would equip them for more advanced study of subjects considered essential to the United States or war against the Soviets. Now, like other federal responsive curricula produced in this era, MAKOS made extensive use of screen media. By the 1960s, educators all strikes from, you know, the top dog superintendent to the crustiest in class educator or principal. Everybody was embracing screen media. It was new. It was essential. It was how you prove you were sort of a modern school. And the designers of MAKOS believed that film would enable fifth graders to do things that they otherwise might not be capable of doing to grapple with sophisticated evidence through close observation and thoughtful interpretation. They might not have been able to read or understand a really difficult premise or document, but surely everybody can look. Everybody can observe. Everybody could analyze. That's the thinking behind this. So they created a curriculum around 16 short documentaries that depicted different animal and human communities. And the idea behind these documentaries were students to act as sociobiologists and anthropologists. They watched footage, then they would ask questions and develop and test hypotheses based on this footage. And then they would draw conclusions based on their hypotheses and a lot of back and forth discussion. And in this way, declared one MAKOS designer, students would learn what he called, quote, a methodology of least thinking in a social science way. But as the story of science, Erica Malan has pointed out, the MAKOS team believed these films actually offered far more than disciplinary training. The MAKOS team hoped that guided viewing and discussion, so sort of civic spectatorship but 30 years later, of these films would shape students' self-concept and social character and would ultimately alter their way of being in the community and the quality and the world. There was a visual side of it. They hoped that observing and analyzing visual evidence would give students practice in the kind of critical measure reasoning upon which they believed democracy depended. But they also, again, and here's that emotional piece, they also really hoped that these big, great American students would identify deeply with the indigenous subsistence cultures that were depicted in these films and by identifying with the kids they saw on the screens, who with radically different lives of their own, that students would develop empathy and appreciation for human commonalities. MAKOS team member and psychologist Richard Jones neatly summed up the team's ambitions, quote, if these objectives can be realized then both the future scholar and the future citizen are served. Think of the contemporary social ills that could not exist if a generation of Americans could be taught to identify in heart, mind, and stomach with the human species. Cold war confrontations abroad and civil rights battles at home led to these endeavors, a terrible urgency. Raising students' consciousness about their shared humanity seemed to these curriculum designers the only antidote to atomic peril and the only solution to racial violence. Swayed by Marshall McLuhan's pretentious intonations, MAKOS planners believed that their films would help students to stretch their senses and glimpse the global village of which they were a part. So the ambitions of MAKOS designers were very similar to those of our progressive educational reformers in the 30s, but the films, the actual material they rely on to awaken this kind of feeling and to help people practice the visual and analytical skills radically different. Rather than rely on excerpts from Hollywood ethics or the March of Time, MAKOS course designers, they're using hardcore anthropological and biological footage. They rely on ethnologists to create films of salmon and herring bulls and baboons, as well as the culture and lifestyle of the sun people of the Kalahari desert and the net select people based in Nunavut, Canada. And the shorts that they produced looked and sounded radically different from most classroom films. They were shot in color, for one thing, and they offer almost no on-screen narration. So if you go to YouTube and you look at like many mid-century films from this period where they're telling you, like, don't smoke on or whatnot, you know, it's like these stentorian overtones, the narrator is going on, that's not what's happening here. You hear waves, you hear birds, you hear wind, you hear people talking to each other in languages that you don't understand. And the reason for that is that that malefic was commentary, the curriculum designers, they thought the kids to sleep, they thought kids would just sort of check out and accept whatever the narrator said as right. They wanted students to really listen and focus and engage. And so students really, they could lean forward as they tried to decipher what was happening on these screens. It was actually a very elegant solution to anxieties about passive spectatorship. These films challenged viewers with little exposure to subsistence cultures. Students watched children their own age, hunt birds by stoning them to death. They would watch men harpooning seals in a fishing hole. They watched, and this is something I remember great, I don't know any of the older people in this room saw that there was a scene where kids ate the seal eye, it was like a delicacy. And so you got to watch little kids like delightedly chopping away on this seal eye and wrapping your head around that as a 10-year-old. It was a big act. Students have learned about net-silent culture before they encountered these films with readings and games and projects so that they could contextualize the act, that the images did retain their emotional intensity. And this was quite intentional. Curriculum designers were committed to what they believed as honest presentation of culture. And they hope these scenes would plunge students and teachers into deep conversation about the foundations of human culture, behavior, and morality. Such scenes wrote the Curriculum Lead Developmental Psychologist Jerome Bruner. They forced students to quote, rethink or reorganize the moral judgments and the role-taking in which they themselves were engaged. So when the course was finally launched in 1969, educators and psychologists healed it as a triumph. I mean, it's not often that a fifth grade social science curriculum course makes the New York Times, but this one did. It was like all over the mainstream media as well as the educational press. People praised its innovative design, its multimedia strategy, its unflinching examination of topics that certainly have not been addressed in elementary school social studies prior to. And course evaluators had special praise for the film reporting that they quote, worked a magic all their own and quote, drew students into a shared experience with the people's show. But as the course began to filter into American schools, critics also emerged. Evangelicals, John Berger, social conservatives, began to stage aggressive protests against this curriculum at school board and community meetings. So all of the hubbub over CRT right now, you can think about that, but you 45 years earlier, protesters regularly cited the films as the course's single most objectionable element. Like I said, Naco's designers had seen these films as like honest, biological, and cultural records that would prompt critical thinking and thoughtful discussion. Conservative protesters, on the other hand, denounced these films as forms of x-rated decadence that would lead to psychological damage and classroom anarchy. A mounting scene in one of the Haringville films provoked almost a riot at a community meeting in the suburb west of Denver, because parents believed that showing sexual behavior, even if that behavior were occurring in the bird world, ran close to sodomy and was downright immoral. Much of the criticism centered on students' physical and psychic reaction to the film's more intense scenes, which critics described as nauseating, violating, and shucking. Is there any gain in giving young children pictures in which they see animals being skinned alive? Asked one opponent. Protesters definitely did not trust teachers to guide students through this content. Conservatives argued that the average teacher either bungled discussion of children's reactions or refused to address the reactions altogether, leaving students unclear about what to think and heavily traumatized to boot. Critics also opposed the film's quiet message of cultural relativism and what they called one worldism, as California-based Mako's critic John Steinbacher called it. By presenting net select culture in straightforward terms, the film suggested that the behaviors that deviated from middle-class American Christian norms were possible, tolerable, and sometimes even admirable. And two conservatives confronting the chaotic culture of the early 1970s. Presenting these alternatives as valid seemed treacherous, unpatriotic even. They rejected the ecstatic humanist vision that Mako's designers had articulated and that they hoped this media would help students realize. And they scorned the ideologies and skills that Mako's films were intended to promote. This was not the kind of spectatorship that classrooms should engender, these opponents argued, and this was not the kind of citizenship that schools should seek to inculcate. So to beat over the curriculum became so heated, and again let me remind you this is a fifth grade social studies curricula, right? It becomes so heated that this guy, Republican Congressman John Conlon, took the matter to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives where he demanded that Congress itself ban the curriculum from American schools. According to Conlon Mako's and its films functioned as quote, cultural shock techniques, and that they were designed to persuade children to reject the values, beliefs, religions, and national loyalties of their parents and American society. The films, he argued, had no place in the public schools of America. So the most severest reaction to this course permanently crippled not only Mako's sales, but also federal funding for classroom media production for several years thereafter. After Conlon brought the attention or this curriculum to Congress's attention, NSF director, National Science Foundation director Guy Steeber, he backed off. I mean, he promised to withhold funds from any pre-college science course curriculum development or implementation until a special panel could review all NSF efforts. And what this meant in practice was that these kinds of bold multimedia experiments simply became unaffordable. Private publishers had zero interest in sinking the money and to create elaborate films and multimedia, at least until gaming came about and computer software made it profitable again. And without federal funds to prop up this kind of sophisticated multimedia curriculum development, it simply fell into disuse. So what can we take away from these two very different moments in the history of school screens? Well, in both instances, the curriculums were animated by educators concerned about racism in the 1930s about anxieties of the lynching in the 1960s, an effort to sort of support civil rights in an arms-length way, an effort to really get students to think of themselves as members of a larger human community. And they motivated the use of screen media in particular. Educators believed that the emotional and experiential elements of visual screen media would enable students to tap into a kind of immediate empathy that other forms of media simply would not elicit. And as a result, they hoped that this kind of film or film strips or other kinds of visual media would really help a generation of students relate to one another in new ways. In both instances, the question of who was funding school screens was a major point of concern and attention. As I mentioned, the production and purchase of high-quality screen media and technology often required resources far beyond what an individual district could muster. And so, if spare minutes with school screens, both getting them into the schools and then generating the curriculum that was used, this really required either philanthropic or federal funding. But the American education system is intensely local. And over the course of the 20th century, communities vacillated between a commitment to run local schools without intervention from outsiders, and a desire to be modern and to adopt media products, technologies, and curricula that was produced and sponsored by, say, the Rockefeller Foundation or the National Science Foundation, often in conjunction with broader industry. But at that screens became political writing rights. And so, questions over the appropriate role of both philanthropy and government in media production that just amplified these controversies. In both of these case studies, reformers attempted to use film in classrooms to teach students new ways of relating to screen media for the purposes of citizenship, to help them cultivate both the skills and the selves that they thought was important for American citizenship in an age of screen. But again, in both eras, almost immediately questions arose as to what kind of skills and selves schools should actually be trying to construct and whether or not educational media that was being used for that purpose could actually accomplish it. As the anxious debates over these two sets of very different classroom films make clear, pictorial screen media pressed hard on the tangles boundaries between emotion and reason, body and mind, self and society. Blurring these boundaries within the carefully guarded confines of the classroom, unnerved parents, administrators, and even educators. And as a result, in the 1930s, educators, even those who embraced the idea of using popular films in their classrooms often backed away from films that had ambiguity about where national royalties lay. In the instance of MAKA, the perception that these films were blurring these same boundaries resulted in a political firestorm that was too hot for any curriculum to survive. The history of school screens is ultimately a history of changing ideas about screen media's impact on students. It's an history of evolving arguments about who should control classrooms. And most of all the eight decades struggle to determine the proper relationship between schools and screens is a history of ongoing disagreement about schools' profits in U.S. society. Now, as they've done for nearly a century, educators today still debate how and if schools can use screens to minimize rather than reinforce existing inequities. They ask themselves to what extent disrespect for teachers is driving or shaping future school plans for screens, and whether or not money invested in technology might be better spent elsewhere, like on the teaching staff. And everybody still wants to know how screens can be used to promote positive civic engagement and how to compare students for citizenship in an even more complex digital age. Preparing students for citizenship in a media-mad, media-made democracy remains an urgent task today. In an era of media convergence, this is enormously challenging. You know that yourselves, right? Educators, they're struggling with data breaches and questions of digital surveillance. Pundits and parents argue about schools' ethical and legal responsibilities when it comes to things like racist memes or screen addiction or cyber-bullying, rather troubling aspects of school life in the digital age. And the problem of how to confront misinformation sovers even the most optimistic educator. In 2016, for instance, the Stanford History Education Group released a report announcing that, quote, young people's ability to reason about the information on the computer screen can be summarized in one word, belief. Without more attention to civic reasoning skills, the group predicted, American societies shipped to screens would deeply damage democracy. And this report was completed two months before Trump was elected. So in this contemporary moment of profound fragmentation, much of it taking place over media, part of me wonders whether we should be going the same route, encouraging the same kind of classroom pedagogy that our depression era advocates have said expect leadership. And to make those folks encouraged, slow down, carefully analyze and discuss all manner of media in small diverse groups with an eye towards considering how to use this media for productive civic ends. As we all know, there are considerable risks to doing this. It requires trust in educators, skill in guiding discussion, and discussion can seem real challenging right now, perilous even. And yet classrooms freeing still guarantee a physical place in which people of varying backgrounds can gather to practice civic behavior and discussion in a country that is badly in need of common ground. So that's my talk. I'm wondering if I can pass off the two questions. One is, wow, like a lot of things you said really resonated with a lot of material we've been reading in our graduate class, right? They don't want media transition. We just wrote an excerpt from the pain fun studies of movies, the legacy of crime, which is from that. Is that the Bloomer? Bloomer? Yeah, the other one in 1933. And I was stuck by a fury, I believe, was from 36. And I was wondering if the first case study was specifically of a puts pain fun studies moment where there's a kind of like, oh, we see how movies are bad and how these studies were popularized in our movie, Children, as if they had shown the other movies. But here's a flip side. I'm wondering if that discourse is sort of happening or that dialogue. And also to what extent the film industry is like on board with this is like great PR for them, right? As opposed to some of the earlier publicity for the production code administration stuff in 1934, which we're also talking about. So that's my first question. And my second question is just about sort of cost efficiency and economic issues with the Make Us Project. I'd like to know if, you know, if these films were rented, for example, as opposed to being purchased. And it seems like there's a way, this is a little unequal here, but I'm stuck with film strips. Okay. And there are a lot of film strips in the Make Us Project. But like with film strips, once you buy them, and so they're not, they're, I don't know if everyone knows, but they go through a project in one frame at a time. And there's a cassette or a phonograph album to go with it that plays along with audio, right? And once you buy it as a teacher in a public school classroom, you can just put it in the closet and whip it out whenever you want. And the school board doesn't have to keep track of it in the way they would like rental materials or, you know, getting a new curriculum every year. And so it means that you can have your, say, creationist film strip in the closet or your evolution radical, like Black Panther comes, right? And some of the co-exist. Exactly. I mean, a sex education was a huge thing. Which actually the Make Us curriculum was often used, need-focused for. Oh, right. We can talk about that in birds, that's great. With that herringbone. So, but anyway, if you sell your materials, you have initial controversial perhaps, and then you don't because it just sort of goes subterranean. So I'm wondering, like, are they sustaining controversy because they keep, you know, publicizing it so that more people buy it and or thrive or what, you know, whatever. So two sort of very different questions. So we start with the first question, and it's a terrific question, because you're right. The 19th or is this like watershed moment where people, I mean, because the movies are becoming so enormously popular and such a critical sort of economic engine, they're transforming the environment and education and American life. And people are just wondering what does, what does this all mean? You know, in particular the pain. What does this mean for our kids? Ezra Dale actually is one of the authors on the pain fund studies. And he, his little like very accessible readers guide, like, I don't watch the movies. You know, this helps to kick off the film appreciation movement, which is an effort to use movies, sort of analyze them again for constructive purposes. And a lot of the people that I was talking about were very much affiliated with this film appreciation moment. Now film appreciation had, it was like a big specter. Some people were like, we're just going to want to go to some child's tickets and use this as a way to explore the novel. And some people were a little bit more politically radical, like Dale himself, who starts out a little bit more conservative. But by the end of the 30s, he's like, burn it all down. He is much more committed to the idea of using films to engage students in what sometimes in the educational world gets called social deconstruction. So the idea that schools are going to reconstruct society in a better image of itself. And he is often involved in meaningful debate and pressure on Hollywood. There's a famous debate he gets into with Martin Luther King, who is the editor of the motion picture. Yeah, and I actually almost threw one of the headlines up where it's like, they're having this debate. And actually, maybe I can even I think I might have included one. Yes, now come educators with plea for films of social insight. So in some ways, industry is embracing this when it is convenient for them, like they love themselves from Alice Collider, because they see her as acceptable. She depersonalizes and depoliticizes a lot of issues really interested in the psychological angle and the idea of introducing students to film in order to help them psychologically adjust to the challenges of modernity. She's got this very forward thinking way of helping students tangle with their own identities and think about their own position in society and how that could be changed over time. But other reformers, Dale among them, Mary Losi, who edits and creates a whole film curriculum that goes with the March of Time, which is crazy time wrap. I mean, like it's really funny to hire William Lillian at the March of Time to create one film curriculum, and then they hire Mary Losi. And if you read them in context, it's they don't match politically or pedagogically. But those folks are pushing industry to create classroom films and to create films that are what one might think of as more socially engaged to promote and push issues of what we would not call social justice and what they then call social insight. So industry saw this kind of group of reformers in a couple of different ways. In some ways, they were like, you annoying, Socratic horse fly, get out of here, stop talking at us. We're going to make the films we want to make. You know, our profit is ultimately productive for America. What's going on in the classroom is not our problem. On the other hand, they were delighted to seize credit when they saw a film based curriculum as fundamentally unobjectionable and when it was getting praised in the press. So again, let me go up here. So this is actually part of the MGM House of Publications, like every year MGM we put out a yearbook of what it had done for the community. And this was featured large, you know, in terms of the shorts that it had created, you know, one of the things that it did was like most of all of the shorts that it provided to the leader and the Rockefeller Foundation for the purposes of educating future citizens. So industry is really playing both sides. So that is question one, question two, thinking about the economics of makers. So maybe this is a really funny thing. And this is what happens when you get a whole bunch of experts in a room who are not talking to anyone else. Because as these harbor guys who are, you know, again, brilliant social scientists and psychologists and educators, they're starting to workshop the film in schools actually in Newton and Cambridge and Brookline throughout the 60s. And every time they go in, the teachers, you know, these nicely in grade teaching ladies are like, guys, this is great, but you really need to worry about two things. This seems really complicated and expensive. Number one and number two, we this might raise some eyebrows among parents, we're not really sure how we're going to explain it. And, you know, the people who are designing the curriculum are like, no, no, it's going to be great. It's not going to be any issues, pay no attention to the court. And of course, both things explode simultaneously. And one big issue is cost when it comes when they finish the curriculum, it is the most expensive, most complicated social studies curriculum ever designed. Because when I say it's multimedia, I mean, like truly multimedia, there are gains, there's like a life size seal puzzle. There are, you know, like, there are, there are 54 booklets that go along with this each kid has, you know, seven or eight booklets, the teacher material alone requires separate training films, plus the curriculum development team wants in order because they know this is going to be hard, they know that films are weird and disturbing and ambiguous. And so they want to make sure that teachers are going to be trained to use them properly. So they try to require like 40 hours of teacher training in order to make this happen. They can't find a publisher, nobody's going to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole. Because what does fifth grade traditionally teach in the United States this time? That's American history. So you're really going to oust American history for like weird films about the nuts luck and like baboons, you know, like people don't know what to make so they end up going at the end of the day with this tiny little fledgling kind of curriculum development shop, educational development publishers. And they simply don't have enough money to sink into it. So this is sort of, it reminds me of one of these films that is, you know, gets glowing reviews and nobody actually goes to see Makos creates this enormous splash and it lingers for a long time in American schools but it really is an amazing curriculum, but it's incredibly expensive. And so most of the users of it quite honestly are private schools where you have, you know, enough investment in materials to get it or liberal leaning public school districts within well-field suburbs. And then there's also some penetration into inner city in terms of sort of gifts or grants in order to purchase this very forward thinking curriculum. In terms of the actual films themselves, they were largely purchased and that becomes again a really big issue at this time. It was possible to rent them, but because the curriculum was so expensive, it was limited to certain communities. And that's another sort of interesting thing about the activist backlash because in a lot of the schools, the activists were not actually people with children in the schools themselves. They were coming from the outside as part of a sort of more generalized frustration about the direction American education was going. Because remember, this is the same era where busing is taking place. So all of a sudden there's a lot of discussion about who schools are for and what schools are for. This is the same time that we're starting to have new conversations about sex and curricula entering schools. We're starting to have new conversations about bilingualism in schools. And the Supreme Court has just banned prayer in schools no longer is there like a 10 commandments left on the wall and every kid taking a minute to pray after saying pledge allegiance. So this is a time of enormous sort of moral and ethical turmoil in terms of thinking through schools. And a lot of times these activists kind of jump on the train of objecting to makers because they see it as part of a larger declension in American education that there's something about the makers films that they really object to. And it's interesting that you say this because it's really descriptions of the films that they object to because they actually watch the film they can't actually see the film. So one exception to that is in Washington C where there is a reporter who wants to make a name for herself. So she creates a kind of like a two piece show about how one of the kids watching in schools and she manages to get shorts from the actual curriculum producers. So no it's interesting because a lot of the shorts she ends up showing as clips in this new story are actually shorts that ended up getting cut. So for instance they had this whole unit on the son of people of the Calhari that they end up getting cut that they end up cutting because they're like whoa it's 1969 do we really want to have a short of black men who are you know effectively undressed and hunting with spears you know in like going out into American schools in 1969 we think this is a terrible idea like we don't want to perpetuate negative stereotypes we think this is going way too hot to handle so they kill him and yet it winds up in the news report as something that is seen. So so visual media provides a particularly explosive and yet weirdly under like it has an all power of gossip but no very few adults who are activists have actually seen the movies in Washington. Okay well I have two questions um one is very quick is it possible to see the MGM shorts and the Makos films and it's so rare but I also wondering if you think that these kinds of practices these kinds of curricula um fluoresce uh as you would say during moments of kind of pronounced media transition and social transformation you know this kind of 1930 moment and this late 1950s moment and um if so you know is that something that could be kind of plotted? That's a really interesting question and I would say you know yes perhaps even as a founder model to the cyclical story exactly I mean as a short answer yes I think it's much easier to embrace this kind of multimedia curricula at moments where progressive pedagogy resurfaces and becomes enormously popular and a lot of times that is that takes place in times of deep social change um I think when you see curriculum and pedagogy particularly become more conservative and ratchet back are moments of kind of unified fear um you see that in the 50s for instance where there's sort of a reaction against progressive pedagogy it's associated with communism it's a you know people get very nervous and we need to have more top-down content oriented teaching in order to compete and film is a tricky media in the classroom in certain ways because it is rich with information and in some ways it delivers information very efficiently but it's very hard to assess and often students don't need as much from a film content wise as they do from a textbook page and so in moments where there's a lot of emphasis on quantitative assessment um so here I'm thinking about the standardized testing regimes of you know the 21st century which you guys all grew up in and experienced and everybody like went through that um if you're watching movies and interpreting them and talking like how do you evaluate that like how does it become some much trickier proposition so at times when America is feeling particularly anxious whether it's about its own participation in a global economy whether it is about um you know some kind of international threat um or internal or domestic threat like sometimes people ratchet back and it's not that they run away from screens but they use screens in a very different way the kind of there's a lot less there's a lot less comfort with the ambivalence that visual images like the ones I show draw and I don't remember the first part of your question I'm just where can we see these films yeah you can see them absolutely they're they're sort of around on youtube a lot of libraries still have make those films that you can see and then there are there are some odd collectors websites like this there's a makers online um where you can watch some of the movies and that's fun and weird um yeah and then the mgm shorts I there are a little harder to track down um I believe um maybe the rock apart foundation has most of the materials that the guy to talk to would be cry cry elf who's at the university of south carolina and he runs um their educational film kind of archive but he is really the specialist on the human relations film series so if anybody has a collection of the shorts he does so let's do one stupid question and I saw what we have on here yeah um thank you apologies for a kind of half-formulating question no need to apologize my name is carriella azure and her idea is about this civil contract of photography did expect leadership is that she really differentiates between kind of the the pieces of subjects of the photographs those who are just developed marginalized on the periphery right and then basically kind of those of us in the west who um and my understanding is that she's actually quite against this kind of um formulation that photography can be used to stir empathy with kind of western feminist like argument for the power of photography but that instead you know it should um make clear to us the ways that we are to put it in on perpetuating dominant structure so I guess I'm curious like you mentioned that he's greatly the makers curriculum was sometimes donated to any school um just kind of like the particulars of where this was being utilized whether it was being utilized differently perhaps in predominantly black you know yeah you know like what was going on and how was it being used how were teachers being trained um because it does um seem that the kind of empathy model is quite not yeah not very much what she's talking about and it's anything and I'm really glad you bring that up there is a big range and it's something these performers both in the 60s and then in the 30s were highly conscious of um and I'll give you an example of the makers performers themselves so they were very worried that um the empathy that would be evoked would be like a kind of weirdly colonialist and they spent a lot of time they're like oh my god you know we had one workshop and the teacher was like let's send them care packages I'm like we have to figure out how to like present this in a way that they don't feel sorry for you to that there's me how do you encourage a kind of cultural cultural relativism that also like engagement on the terms of the people involved and they actually end up making a short um um so the net select people who are filmed for this series they are re-enacting to like complicated get really meta and weird they are re-enacting many of the traditions of their but this is common in documentaries yes very common and this is something that comes up also in the documentaries in the 30s that get used in a lot of these classrooms um and you can see it like in one um the kids like wearing modern underwear there's like a yellow band aid and like one scene and the fifth graders are like oh oh I see you know they're like noticing everything so the makers designers realize that they've got personal they don't want to play into exactly what you're talking about um so they actually make a film about making the making of kind of film the the net select here today and then the net select in the past um and one of the other sort of interesting elements there is the net select end up loving and being extraordinarily grateful for the makers films because they see them as part of the legacy and embrace of their own tradition they see this as sort of an act of preservation of their own culture rather than an exploitative gesture um so there end up being a series of films about not just the making of the film but the use of the film and how to navigate these complicated discussions about race and pathology um and I guess even maybe othering is I mean that's not the word that's have a language they use in the 60s um and part of the teacher training is showing these films to and anticipating student comments and students tendencies to pity or distance uh the subjects on screen rather than engaging with them on their own terms of how do teachers how should teachers handle it and they show a range of possible questions that students might ask in a range of possible responses um there's also I mean anthropologists themselves are generating these films and they too have a lot of takes on how the films get edited in order to ensure that they are as respectful as possible to the people and capture the proper vision of the people who are you wouldn't really say starring but the people who are whose lives are being represented so these are issues that people have in mind and they are wrangling with them in real time um they're very explicit about that in the 60s and 70s in part because I mean it's a moment in anthropology where people are wrestling with that in new ways um in the 30s there's sort of a wider range um in part because many of the films they're using are not documentaries um you know they're they're fictional films and so the kind of empathy that is being unleashed is slightly different than what Azalea is talking about um but the documentaries that they're talking about and that they're making use of um they are trying to again engineer not not the distance that comes with pity but more um an equivalency and a sort of sense of engage connection um to reorient that relationship between subject and other so that it is I mean again it's more usual contract I guess yeah so thank you that answered your question um you have a question from Justin right so he actually he noticed that we're running short on time so he said uh another student asked the question if you have and uh so another question for your entire work now about the case studies but I'm interested in what you're telling you to solve the ideas of screen replacing features sort of like robotic teaching and if this was seen as the dystopia or something dystopia right um I know at some point this kind of coincided taking the ideas with ideas like new public management and seeing public service that has provided a service that's modern or whatever I'm interesting if if this kind of translates into teacher suit to see the very last bit again so I'm interested in this if screens can operate in in some way of this discourse as homogenizing kind of public works in one way um so I mean in terms of screens replacing teachers this has long been an undercurrent of discussion um and it is not in the best interest of any producer immediate to be like yeah we're putting people out of business and definitely buy our winners um so usually they are sort of putting a foot in both camps like oh it will enhance it will complement under no circumstances will it replace teachers and yet if you actually read margin notes a marginalia of letters or memos if you um you know over if you read through the transcripts of these conversations where teachers are not present um that is very much part of the mix um there's a lot of disregard and disrespect for what teachers do particularly among technocrats um who will often say you know the media is going to do an infinitely better job you know or the programmers will do a far better job of handling these issues whether it's content and dance or skills practice um than teachers will so why are we wasting money on these human beings um so you see that prominently in the 1950s with educational television where people especially the Ford Foundation which is what I talk about in the book they start touting this idea of oh well why why would we rely on Mrs. Humford-Ankel to teach fourth grade music when we could get like the best of the best let's get Leonard Bernstein to teach the fourth grade um sounds like master's class it totally is absolutely like that um but you know as anybody who had a fourth grade or last year during covid knows um sometimes you don't want Leonard Bernstein on the screen sometimes you want Mrs. Humford-Ankel with like the symbols and you know the instruments um there's a difference in terms of live classroom communication um it's really easy to say that there is it um but I think that's where sort of educators you know emphasize over and over again and and it's interesting because the development and the age groups um the conversation changes with age groups people get more excited about the possibilities of screens replacing actual teachers in the later stages um of education I mean nobody's suggesting that that is a good idea in kindergarten like everybody's like us currently but um you know it's something that gets floated over and over again well you know a school might not have the the the resources to hire a Mandarin teacher or like an advanced capitalist teacher so why wouldn't we use technology as a replacement um and you know within the like I am I'm not a sort of contemporary ed tech person I feel like I should defer to Justin Wright who is currently in the audience um you know there's a lot of discussion about whether or not media can replace or can sort of supplement um but you know even though every single media producer who'll absolutely disavow replacement um in public if you go into the archives in private at least historically there is far more discussion about the possibility of techno utopia and replacement than you anticipate that you will find thank you um well I guess we have our enough to get the time so we will stop here thank you again uh for one full talk and a great discussion thank you to everyone at room and online staff