PDF Film And Television In Education Download
- Author: Robert Watson
- Publisher: Routledge
- ISBN: 1135387400
- Category : Education
- Languages : en
- Pages : 193
First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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"Film and media studies now attract large numbers of students in schools, colleges and universities. However the setting up of these courses came after many decades of pioneering work at the educational margins in the post-war period. Bolas' account focuses particularly on the voluntary efforts of activists in the Society for Education in Film and Television and on that Society's interchanging relationship with the British Film Institute's Education Department. It draws on recent interviews with many of the individuals who contributed to the raising of the status of film, TV and media study. Through detailed examination of the scattered but surviving documentary record, the author seeks to challenge versions of the received history."--Publisher's website.
Why screens in schools—from film screenings to instructional television to personal computers—did not bring about the educational revolution promised by reformers. Long before Chromebook giveaways and remote learning, screen media technologies were enthusiastically promoted by American education reformers. Again and again, as schools deployed film screenings, television programs, and computer games, screen-based learning was touted as a cure for all educational ills. But the transformation promised by advocates for screens in schools never happened. In this book, Victoria Cain chronicles important episodes in the history of educational technology, as reformers, technocrats, public television producers, and computer scientists tried to harness the power of screen-based media to shape successive generations of students. Cain describes how, beginning in the 1930s, champions of educational technology saw screens in schools as essential tools for training citizens, and presented films to that end. (Among the films screened for educational purposes was the notoriously racist Birth of a Nation.) In the 1950s and 1960s, both technocrats and leftist educators turned to screens to prepare young Americans for Cold War citizenship, and from the 1970s through the 1990s, as commercial television and personal computers arrived in classrooms, screens in schools represented an increasingly privatized vision of schooling and civic engagement. Cain argues that the story of screens in schools is not simply about efforts to develop the right technological tools; rather, it reflects ongoing tensions over citizenship, racial politics, private funding, and distrust of teachers. Ultimately, she shows that the technologies that reformers had envisioned as improving education and training students in civic participation in fact deepened educational inequities.
The Flickering Mind, by National Magazine Award winner Todd Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really works. American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement. All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing. At this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering. Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this way. Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be: “enlightened basics.” Broad in scope and investigative in treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it will define the debate.