Remembering the "perils" of
Television
Pedagogical Inspirations.
Despite some real misgivings held by many English teachers toward the
growing, attention-hogging menace of television, there were also some
innovative attempts to bring the small screen into the classroom in ways
that attempted to harness the medium’s popularity among students. A look
back at these attempts can offer us reinvigorated approaches to using
the TV—as well as its technological descendants—in pedagogically
mindful ways. Here’s a sample of assignment and activity descriptions
based on ideas from English Journal authors.
- The Nielsen Classroom. The first TV-focused article
in our corpus, Lieber Anker’s "Television, Here I Come!" (1951),
presented a fascinating early account of an English teacher coming to
terms with the new medium. In part, Anker measured television’s
influence on students by administering a questionnaire that asked
students as well as their parents for information on viewing habits
and patterns (duration, type of shows, etc.), as well as opinions
concerning recently read literary works. Using online survey tools
such as SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Google Forms, or the built-in survey
function of your LMS, design an updated survey to gauge
students’ media consumption habits/preferences (you might choose to
focus on television and streaming video, or make it a more
comprehensive survey of media consumption across the spectrum).
Include qualitative and quantitative questions (how long/often? What
shows? Why do you watch?). Based on survey results, generate
visualizations of the various answers and discuss them with the class:
what strong concentrations or patterns do they notice in terms of what
they watch, how much, and why? Where do there seem to be areas of
disagreement or lack of cohesion? What might these findings suggest
about the role of media to influence attitudes, beliefs, tastes, and
so on?
- The Motherlode. One early advocate of creative TV
pedagogy was James Brunstein. In fact, his 1958 article "Ten Uses for
Commercial Television in the English Classroom" offered a stockpile of
assignments and activities—many of which could, with some updating,
still be useful today. In this article, Brunstein suggested having
students view and discuss television adaptations of dramatic works,
with a specific emphasis on having students explore the
medium-specific effects of that adaptation (pp. 568-569). Elsewhere,
he discussed creative writing activities that had students draw upon
their favorite television programs for inspiration or backstory—a kind
of proto-fan-fiction (p. 567). Perhaps most novel, he described a
talk-show-like activity where students produced a mock TV program
addressing common writing problems, and then shared audio-taped
performances with other class sections (p. 566). While this article
was certainly a reflection of its day (it heavily emphasized the
promotion of canonical Western culture), we appreciate the
collaborative spirit in which Brunstein frames his central theme:
“[T]eachers and students must study TV cooperatively in an effort to
define standards for what is good and what is poor” (p. 569).
- Network Executive Simulator. Marshall McLuhan,
along with Katryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan (1978), made an appearance
in the pages of English Journal to discuss their recently published
media-centric textbook City as Classroom. The following
prompt from that source lends itself nicely to current
reinterpretation:
Pretend you have to set up the weekly program schedule
for a local TV station or for an entirely imaginary one. First,
estimate the size and nature of the audience: who will be watching?
When? Then, calculate the number of on-air hours per day, the effect
you want to create, the sort of program offerings that will best
achieve this effect, the number and placement of ads, and the
probability of keeping the audience’s attention. In what ways is
your schedule different from the schedules of existing stations
serving the same audience? (p. 72)
You might refine this prompt to reflect the current state of
television—for example, having students develop concepts and
programming schedules for an imaginary cable network or streaming
service that’s hyper-focused on a particular subject, demographic, or
lifestyle. Nevertheless, the rhetorical emphasis on audience analysis
combined with creative play still makes for a solid activity. Taking
this idea a step further, you might also consider having students
produce a short promotional or preview video using some combination of
found and original footage.
- Facebook Archaelogy. In their article “The
Laws of Media,” McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan (1978) made a case for
the need for students and teachers to think more broadly and
comprehensively about the dynamic contexts in which media exist and
evolve. One key concept they promoted was to have students consider
the figure/ground relationship when studying a particular
medium, where “figure” represented the discrete performance or text at
the forefront of a media event, and “ground” comprised the underlying
information, prior media, and technical infrastructure that serves as
a backdrop for the figure. As an example, they write, “Thus the figure
of the printed page now exists in a ground of TV news and programming”
(p. 92). You might ask students to likewise adopt the figure/ground
heuristic in an analysis of their current media ecosystem: what
earlier media forms serve as the backdrop of our current social media
platforms? How does the introduction of new technologies (e.g.,
laptops, smartphones, tablets) help support changes in how content is
delivered in terms of format, audience, purpose, interactivity, and
related factors? Working in small teams, students could prepare media
archaeology presentations in which they trace the historical
influences on current media forms.
- Public Access 2.0. While Dennis Kraynak (1987)
offered us an impressively ambitious vision of how students can be
engaged soup-to-nuts in the production of television programming, many
of us will not find it easy or feasible to partner with public access
stations in order to take to the airwaves. Fortunately, the rise of
the Web—and video hosting/streaming solutions such as YouTube, Vimeo,
Sprout, and others—has helped displace that particular obstacle. You
might consider a similar project where students write, perform, and
produce a class-wide video series for the web. Students could assume
specific roles (e.g., writer, video editor, producer, on-air
personality) based on their own interests and skills; digital video
content could be determined according to student or community
interests, topics otherwise covered in class, or live feedback from
the web (comments, tweets, etc.); in lieu of studio-grade equipment,
students could even use technologies they already have some
familiarity with and access to (e.g., smartphones,
tablets).
- #FakeAds. Margo Sorenson (1989) demonstrated how
television commercials—a genre full of common language-based and
visual tropes, not to mention occasionally disingenuous rhetorical
appeals—were ripe for rhetorical critique… and parody. In one sense,
Sorenson's parody commercial assignment could easily be lifted
wholesale into today’s classroom with little to no modification.
However, in the world of streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and
YouTube, you might also consider having students study the genre
conventions of newer forms commercial advertisement in streaming video
(many of them much shorter in duration, or involving conspicuous
product placement or mentions within the main content). As with the
original assignment, students would be expected to produce their own
parodic version of such ads to demonstrate their awareness of such
elements.
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Manuscript prepared for Digital
Rhetoric Collaborative, an imprint of Michigan
Publishing. 