Reframing the Subject: Postwar Instructional Film and Class-Conscious Literacies

by Kelly Ritter

Overview

"Mental hygiene" films developed for classroom use touted vigilance, correct behavior, morality, and model citizenship. They also became powerful tools for teaching literacy skills and literacy-based behaviors to young people following the Second World War. In this study, Kelly Ritter offers an extensive theoretical analysis of the alliance of the value systems inherent in mental hygiene films (class-based ideals, democracy, patriotism) with writing education—an alliance that continues today by way of the mass digital technologies used in teaching online. She further details the larger material and cultural forces at work in the production of these films behind the scenes and their effects on education trends. Through her examination of literacy theory, instructional films, policy documents, and textbooks of the late 1940s to mid-1950s, Ritter demonstrates a reliance on pedagogies that emphasize institutional ideologies and correctness over epistemic complexity and de-emphasize the role of the student in his or her own learning process. To Ritter, these practices are sustained in today's pedagogies and media that create a false promise of social uplift through formalized education, instead often resulting in negative material consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822981176
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/29/2016
Series:	Composition, Literacy, and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Kelly Ritter is professor of English and director of undergraduate rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of To Know Her Own History: Writing at the Woman's College, 1943Ð1963; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920Ð1960; and Who Owns School? Authority, Students, and Online Discourse. Ritter also is editor of the journal College English.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Sometimes We Expect Great Things 1. Social Inequalities and the Enterprise of Schooling 2. Wartime Literacies and the Curricular Tensions of Democracy 3. Mediating Literacies: The Postwar Literacy Sponsorship of Composition Textbooks and Instructional Films 4. Modeling Social Literacies on Film: Coronet Instructional Films and Class Maintenance 5. Enacting Literacies: Current-Traditionalism via Coronet’s Role-Play 6. The Rhetorical Economies of Mass Literacy Instruction in the Twenty-First Century: A Critical Observation Notes Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

. . . a rigorous and incisive account of the use of instructional films. . . . Ritter makes a compelling case that the attitudes that established their appeal remain an intrinsic part of our pedagogies today. In that sense, the book issues a timely call for educators to reconsider the connections between our methods of classroom instruction and the material realities of students' lives.”
—Community Literacy Journal 

“I was especially taken with Ritter’s account of postwar current-traditionalism in U.S. composition pedagogy, that includes (for the first time, to my knowledge) instructional films in the educational effort to inculcate and discipline student behavior, including literate behavior, and the longer view of the role of technology in modern schooling, an ever-ready (but problematic) solution to mass proportions, teacher fatigue, and diverse student populations.”
—David Fleming, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

From the Publisher