Our work builds on a rich tradition of historical scholarship within the field of computers and writing that has demonstrated the importance of situating contemporary digital writing pedagogies in relation to past teachers’ experiments with diverse analog, mechanical, and electronic composing technologies. In their foundational history of computers and writing, Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, & Selfe (1996) paid substantial attention to how the field was formed through dialogue among composition and rhetoric specialists and K-12 English educators; yet, because they focused their attention on pedagogies of the personal computer, they began their history in 1979 and thus didn’t attend to the longer history of English teachers' engagement with diverse media technologies throughout the twentieth century. Extending the historical vision of the field to the pre-PC era, James Inman’s Computers and Writing: The Cyborg Era (2004) demonstrated the important influence that 1960s and 1970s educational technologies and social movements had on the development of the field; however, Inman focused mostly on recovering the work of educational technologists and activists who weren’t directly involved in the teaching of literacy and thus he didn’t explore the technological pedagogies of the English Journal archive.

In a persuasive argument for the value of recovering the pre-history of computers and writing, James Kalmbach (1996) reviewed the many ways that elementary teachers in the early twentieth century sought to engage students in using typewriters for collaborative learning activities and for composing texts for audiences beyond the teacher. Exploring both the humanist and scientific management ideologies that ultimately caused this “typewriters in the classroom” movement to wane, Kalmbach sounded a cautionary warning that “our current uses of computer-supported classrooms are both predated by the typewriter-supported classrooms in the 1930s and framed by similar pedagogical arguments about the role of technology in education” (p. 66). Further demonstrating how the field of “computers and writing” has been haunted by the legacy of the typewriter, Liz Rohan (2003) and Janine Solberg (2007) have demonstrated how gendered constructions of typewriting continue to problematically influence how contemporary students and teachers engage with the gendered computer technologies.

Turning from typewriters to chalkboards, Steven Krause (2000) related the fascinating story of how the chalkboard moved from a supposedly transformative innovation in 19th century pedagogies to a “natural,” taken-for-granted piece of equipment in nearly all classrooms, arguing that the naturalization of the chalkboard occurred largely because it supported pedagogical approaches that were already dominant at the time. In detailing the ideological forces that caused the chalkboard to become a pervasive, naturalized technology, Krause argued that computers may eventually come to reach the same level of “natural” status but only if they work to reinforce existing pedagogies. Similarly, Dennis Baron (1999) has recovered the complex ways in which the pencil and the eraser moved from contested new technologies to naturalized classroom writing devices—drawing connections between past arguments about the pedagogical uses of the pencil and contemporary debates about the use of computers in the classroom. Collectively, this body of scholarship has demonstrated that computers and writing scholars have much to learn from critically exploring the history of how literacy teachers engaged with pre-digital technologies.

While most scholarship on the pre-history of computers and writing has focused on alphabetic technologies, scholars have recently begun to explore the complex histories of how English teachers have engaged with non-alphabetic technologies before the rise for computer (Jones, 2012; Palmeri 2012; Ritter 2015). For example, Palmeri’s own Remixing Composition (2012) made the case that contemporary digital, multimodal pedagogies can be productively informed by revisiting 1960 and 1970s teachers’ experiments with a range of analog technologies—super 8 cameras, tape recorders, and Xerox machines to name but a few. Although Palmeri engaged the work of scholars such as Berthoff, Emig, and Smitherman who worked at the intersections of composition and English Education, he largely passed over the extensive archive of media pedagogy in English Journal. (Indeed, Palmeri first encountered English Journal’s rich archive of media pedagogies while conducting research for Remixing Composition, but he soon found that the archive was too large and complex to fit within the narrative case study frame of that project.)

Recovering the pre-digital history of instructional film in the field, Kelly Ritter’s recent Reframing the Subject (2015) recounted the problematic ways in which 1940s and 1950s K-12 English educators and university-based compositionists employed instructional films to promote “current-traditional” models of correctness in both writing and social behavior, which reinforced classist hierarchies. In her work, Ritter showed how this classist legacy of instructional film implicitly informs contemporary uses of digital instructional video in MOOCs and other online learning spaces, noting that “in my study of postwar instructional films and the overall cultural conditions that made their production, exhibition, and mass reception possible, I see many parallels to our current desire to proliferate mass delivery systems for literacy instruction, ones that also inculcate our students in principles of class and learning that stagnate rather than advance students’ mobility” (p. 244). While we largely agree with Ritter’s critique of the ongoing classist legacies of “current traditional” instructional films in the field, we worry that her work risks leaving the impression that historically speaking the field has viewed film narrowly as a kind of authoritarian lecture aid. By recovering a more expansive, century-long history of how English teachers have engaged students in both producing and analyzing films for a wide range of both progressive and conservative ends, we seek to offer a more multivalent and ultimately more hopeful vision of what contemporary English teachers can learn from our field’s past engagements with moving image production and reception.

In addition to Ritter’s analysis of English Journal articles about film in the 40s and 50s, a few other scholars (Jones, 2012; Hicks, Young, Kajder & Hunt, 2012) have begun to explore how English Journal’s archive of multimodal pedagogy can inform the work of contemporary digital writing teachers. In “”Making the Devil Useful’: Audio-Visual Aids in the Teaching of Writing,” Joseph Jones (2012) offered a look back at discussions of multimedia tools in English Journal from 1912 to around World War II—highlighting such diverse technologies as film projectors, stereopticons, phonographs, and radios. Engaging a relatively small number of articles, Jones argued that “secondary school English teachers often claimed audio-visual equipment to indicate a new professionalism, yet descriptions of its uses reveal that innovative technology was often used in retrograde ways” (p. 95). Providing a similar historical critique of how English teachers have approached new technologies, Hicks, Young, Kajder & Hunt (2012) offered a selective review of English Journal articles about media technology over the past century, which ultimately concluded that “despite all the cultural and technological changes in the types of texts we are able to produce and consume, and the revolutionary predictions we have made, not much has really changed in the teaching of English over the past 100 years” (p. 68). While we concur in part with the critiques of Jones and Hicks et al. regarding the limiting ways English teachers have sometimes employed media technologies over time, we seek to complicate their case study approaches by systematically coding and visualizing a much larger collection of media-related English Journal articles—offering a more complex and multivalent vision of both innovative and “retrograde” uses of technology in English studies over a longer period of observation.