Teaching with the Screen

Pedagogy, Agency, and Media Culture

Dan Leopard

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136180255
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Didattica generale

Teaching with the Screen explores the forms that pedagogy takes as teachers and students engage with the screens of popular culture. By necessity, these forms of instruction challenge traditional notions of what constitutes education. Spotlighting the visual, spatial, and relational aspects of media-based pedagogy using a broad range of critical methodologies–textual analysis, interviews, and participant observation–and placing it at the intersection of education, anthropology, and cultural studies, this book traces a path across historically specific instances of media that function as pedagogy: Hollywood films that feature teachers as protagonists, a public television course on French language and culture, a daily television "news" program created by high school students, and a virtual reality training simulation funded by the US Army. These case studies focus on teachers as pedagogical agents (teacher plus screen) who unite the two figures that have polarized earlier debates regarding the use of media and technology in educational settings: the beloved teacher and the teaching machine.

1

Blackboard Jungle

Narratives of Pedagogy and Experience

Emotion and memory bring into play a category with which film theory—and cultural theory more generally—are ill equipped to deal: experience. Indeed they have been wary of making any attempt to tackle it, and quite rightly so. For experience is not infrequently played as the trump card of authenticity, the last word of personal truth, forestalling all further discussion, let alone analysis. Nevertheless, experience is undeniably a key category of everyday knowledge, structuring people’s lives in important ways.

—Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets¹

Arrival Scenes: Into a Clawing Jungle

At the opening of the film Blackboard Jungle (1955), Richard Dadier, the teacher-protagonist, exits the elevated rail platform, having ridden the train to North Manual High School in New York City. The landscape he enters is bleak. Young children play in a funnel of water splashing out of a fire hydrant, evoking myriad photographs depicting urban slum life. Dadier stands seemingly shell shocked at what he witnesses. As he walks tentatively toward the school, his figure passes through the frame, momentarily blotting out the signs of decay and delinquency. He enters the schoolyard through crumbling concrete and rusted iron gates. Students crowd the yard. Some loiter about, others cavort in characteristic teenage movie style, dancing and swaggering, they all seem to be hoodlums. One kid plays with a knife; another kid glares at Dadier as he enters their territory.

Another arrival of a different sort: I park my car in the visitor’s lot at John Trauber High School in Vista Valley, California. Although the location is suburban, the city of Vista Valley has a reputation for gangs and a history of animosity between the largely poor Latino community of former migrant farm workers and the largely middle-class Anglo community that runs the city government, police, and school district. A friend who had worked with me in a San Francisco middle school, upon hearing that I had applied for a job at Trauber High, passed along a newspaper clipping that described the stabbing death of a parent at the school. According to the news story, the parent, the father of a student in the school band, had been waiting to pick up his child after an evening concert. As he sat in his car he was confronted by two “gangbanger” boys, and an angry exchange of words followed. During the argument—witnesses said that the disagreement arose from one of the teenage boys sitting on the hood of the father’s car—a knife was pulled, and the father was stabbed. He bled to death before an ambulance could arrive. My friend asked me if I really wanted to teach in a district that had such violent students. Of course, this was coming from someone who had spent her entire career as a teacher and administrator in San Francisco Unified, a school district with a troubled reputation of its own.

Figure 1.1 Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) arrives at North Manual High School. Blackboard Jungle (Warner Brothers, 1955)

As I walked across the lot I noticed a group of Latino boys playing basketball in the courts abutting the parking area. They were muscular and tattooed. Sweat dripped from their tanned skin as they roughly jostled each other for position under the basket. Their intense physicality intimidated me, but they for the most part ignored my presence as I passed by. With their shouting and rough play, these young men evoked for me the perpetrators of the father’s stabbing no matter how much I told myself that they were totally unrelated to the incident.

Forty years separate the cinematic arrival of Richard Dadier to North Manual High School and my actual arrival at John Trauber. Though fiction, Dadier’s arrival is based on author Evan Hunter’s experience as a high school teacher in New York City during the 1950s.² Both arrival scenes mark a teacher’s entrance into a world peopled by otherness. Both arrival scenes activate a set of coded images and discourses concerning the opposition between the adult world of teachers, with conventional notions of morality and reason, and the teenage world of students, with contrary notions of wildness and rebellion (seen from the point of view of adults, but often enough from that of teenagers as well). My knowledge of Trauber and Vista Valley was inscribed with not only the detail of the father’s stabbing, but with the ubiquitous images and narratives that portray teenagers (in particular, racialized boys) as menacing and out of control. These boys (these representations of boys) would just as soon knife you as take a look at you.

This otherness, on display as it were, is central to three categories of text that exhibit structural affinities: narrative films that depict teachers and their pedagogical methods, educational ethnographies that incorporate the researcher as subject, and my experience drawn as it were, by the passage of time, into an interpretive space allowing for textual analysis. Although each of these “texts” provides the reader with variable specificities of historical, cultural, and personal “social fact”—each is embedded in that which defines the moment and place—each of these texts also provides for readings that can establish interrelations that form an object of study. Commenting on the narrative tropes that organize historical writing, and which are equally applicable to ethnography, Hayden White states: “In the poetic act which precedes the formal analysis of the field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it.”³

White’s suggestion that the object of knowledge must be constructed by the researcher in anticipation of analysis (and importantly his description of this construction as a creative act akin to literature), opens up the possibility that poetic acts (be they in the form of a painting, novel, film, or performance) can be brought to bear on research as objects of knowledge themselves situated within the larger framework of the researcher’s predetermined field of inquiry. The macro-object may be the 1950s or juvenile delinquency, but within that constituted area of investigation the film as a micro-object, a totality of events constituted as a narrative, may operate, not as evidence of the event per se, but as evidence of the “mentalities” deployed at that particular moment and as an additional object of inquiry which may help the researcher negotiate the interplay of meanings derived from more traditional sources.⁴ For example, that the teens are described as “savages” by several characters within Blackboard Jungle does not itself constitute evidence of a social coding of adolescence as menacing Other (or to use the particular theoretical construct from media studies, it does not merely “reflect” the reality of those living in the 1950s). The term savages can be read as simply an utterance by a character within a fictional narrative. However, read synchronically against the trailer for Blackboard Jungle, the institutional voice of the film, and read diachronically across a selection of teacher-protagonist films from the five decades that follow (which again and again warn of the dangers of uncontrolled or unacculturated youth), the utterances of the fictional characters, one positional expression from a range of “authors” imbricated within a given text, can be read as “in play” with the other forms of discourse on the “savagery” of teens.⁵

In the theatrical trailer for Blackboard Jungle, the voiceover breathlessly intones: “Fiction torn from big city savagery,” “Teenage terror in the schools,” and “It packs a brass knuckle punch in its startling revelation of teenage savages who turn big city schools into a clawing jungle.” This voiceover, delivered in a Walter Winchell style, is accompanied by images of robbery, fights, sexual assault, and students dancing in the schoolyard to the strutting rhythm of Bill Haley and the Comets’ song “Rock Around the Clock.”⁶

This montage of violence and youth subcultural elements is followed by a darkly lit scene in an alleyway in which Artie West (Vic Morrow as the lead teen hoodlum) speaks to Dadier (Glenn Ford as the idealistic teacher): “See, this is my classroom and you’re in it. And what I could teach you. First lesson is don’t butt in. Don’t. Because you’ll just flunk out for good.” The trailer concludes with a large cover image from the book on which the film was based. This sensational splash image of the book provides the film with authenticity of source: the author knows the truth about teenagers in schools because he spent time as a teacher. The pulpy paperback cover also provides a lurid patina for the authenticity of the source material.

Otherness and Authenticity: Tales from the Field

If otherness, organized as the incongruence between the teenage and adult cultures that operate in educational settings, is one of the tropes that defines representations of teaching, then authenticity of experience is its complement. Arrival scenes both in cinema—again here specifying films that depict teachers as protagonists—and in ethnography seek to foreground these twin attributes. I have already mentioned the approach used in Blackboard Jungle—the leering portrayal of the street toughs and the extratextual claims drawing on Evan Hunter’s time as a teacher—but these tropes reappear at the opening of many teacher-protagonist films as well as in ethnographies drawn from what sociologist John Van Maanen calls “tales from the field.”⁷ Van Maanen characterizes ethnographies written in a realist style as erasing the ethnographer from the account of what actually happened during fieldwork. Conversely, confessional ethnographies foreground the experiences of the ethnographer in the field, one of the most infamous being Malinowski’s diary written while doing fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands.⁸ Impressionist ethnographies “present the doing of fieldwork rather than simply the doer or the done. They reconstruct in dramatic form those periods the author regards as especially notable and hence reportable.”⁹ As such, cinematic narratives involving teachers often follow patterns set by Van Maanen’s category of the confessional ethnography.

For example, the British film To Sir, with Love (1968) opens with Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) riding a double-decker bus through swinging London. He arrives at North Quay Secondary School and, in a scene highly reminiscent of Blackboard Jungle, happens upon a punk kid, cigarette dangling between his lips, pissing behind a brick wall. Though the title song, sung by the remarkable Lulu, evokes nostalgia for the lost virtues of being a teenager, the film situates Thackeray’s students in opposition to him from the outset. While they are hardly savages in the sense projected by Blackboard Jungle, Thackeray’s students are portrayed as unkempt, unruly lower-class kids bent on resisting school authority and marching toward a stifling life of dead end adulthood.¹⁰ Compared to Thackeray, of the immaculate suit and dignified mannerisms, the students are radically other (interesting in light of the reversal of racial issues—being that most of his students are white and that Sidney Poitier portrayed a street smart tough in Blackboard Jungle). The film, based as it is on a novel by West Indian émigré schoolteacher E. R. Braithwaite, grounds its claim to authenticity in an extensive use of location shooting in London and in an explicitly realist style associated with the social problem film, thereby suggesting that what unfolds on screen corresponds closely to the lived experience of schoolteachers and school children in this particular moment and place.¹¹

In contrast to the urban setting of Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, with Love, Conrack (1972) takes place in the rural American south. Pat Conroy (Jon Voight) wakes up late, hitches a ride on the back of a junk dealer’s truck, and finally arrives at his first teaching assignment as the only passenger on a small boat traveling through the swamp. Although the urban motifs are replaced by those of forlorn grasslands, a one room schoolhouse, and rural poverty—embodied by the young black girl who wordlessly plays hide and seek with Conroy as he disembarks from the boat—the idea of otherness once again defines the relationship between teachers and students. This film positions Conroy’s students not as savages (or as rebellious by nature), but as primitives by way of educational underdevelopment. These students are portrayed as gentle, illiterate souls who lack not only education and culture, but also basic necessities such as food and clothing. As in the earlier films, Conroy as the teacher-protagonist must learn to speak through the cultural and social barriers that separate his world from that of his students. But rather than having to transform the tough street swagger that marks the speech of the gang kids from Blackboard Jungle and the bubble gum chewing insolence of the East Enders in To Sir, with Love, Conroy has to enable a voice for students who are effectively mute. They speak what they can, but they themselves are painfully aware that, in contrast to Conroy, they are unable to communicate in the language that dominates the world beyond their school. Their academic failure is further confirmed as they are constantly reminded of their “ignorance” by the stern African American female head teacher who refers to them as “babies” although they seem to range in age from eight to sixteen.

In the film Stand and Deliver (1987) we meet Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) as he beetles through the LA freeway system in his battered, rusted Volkswagen on his way to the first day of school at Garfield High. Having left his job in the computer industry, he has decided to teach math to inner city high school students. As he enters the parking lot, in an updated version of Richard Dadier’s experience, he putts past mobs of students loitering about the front of the sch...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Studying Media in Educational Settings
• 1. Blackboard Jungle: Narratives of Pedagogy and Experience
• 2. Agents, Screens, and Machines: The Production of Pedagogy
• 3. French in Action: The Teacher Presented
• 4. Trauber TV: The Teacher Augmented
• 5. STEVE: The Teacher Embodied
• Conclusion: Presence, Telepresence, and the Gift of Pedagogy
• Appendix: How to Teach with Teaching Screens
• Notes
• Index