1.4 EDUCATIONAL TRENDS: LATE 20s AND EARLY 30s

When the National Academy of Visual Instruction (NAVI) merged with the Department of Visual Instruction (DVI) under the auspices of the National Education Association (NEA), the year was 1932, and the country was in the midst of a recession. Opposing national voices in the ongoing struggle for educational reform were surprised by the hybridized nature of local school reform. A bipolar debate for dominance of the U.S. curriculum had been mounted in the early years of the century and had reached a fevered pitch in the mid-20s. Kliebard (1987) characterizes these factions as social efficiency theorists and child study or developmental theorists. The manner in which these camps articulated their beliefs in curriculum theory and educational practice in the 1930s is important here, because their opposing discourses underpin the writings of audiovisual educators and researchers in the decade. Also, it is important to remember that the audiovisual movement was school based.

1.4.1 Social Efficiency

The powerful social efficiency movement, which borrowed ideas of social control and stability from Edward Ross and notions of efficiency from Frederick Winslow Taylor (Kliebard, 1987), spawned an interest in the comparable studies of behavioral psychology and mental measurement. "It was social efficiency that, for most people, held out the promise of social stability in the face of cries for massive social change" (Kliebard, 1987, 1989).

Early in the century, we hear John Franklin Bobbitt talking about the "scientific management" of education, the "elimination of inefficiency," the "platoon system," school superintendents as "educational engineers," and the school as a "plant" (Kliebard, 1987, pp. 97-99). While it was Taylor (1911) who actually introduced the business world to the twin gods of efficiency and effectiveness, it was Bobbitt and other early educational researchers and administrators such as Ellwood and Ayers (Kliebard, 1987, pp. 103-104) who graced the national educational discourse with that indelible metaphor of the school as a "factory."

1.4.2 Child Development

In opposition to the social efficiency movement, interest in child study or development grew in the early part of the century and had vocal proponents in the 1920s. Hall, Kilpatrick, Dewey, and others believed "that somewhere in the child lay the key to a revitalized curriculum" (Kliebard, 1987, p. 160). While generating varied child development theories, these scholars opposed the reformations suggested by the social efficiency movement. They felt that "education should be considered as life itself and not as a mere preparation for later living" (Kliebard, 1987, p. 162). (Although both movements claimed John Dewey, his experiential theories are more aligned with the child study group. He did, however, disagree with both groups on many points.) Like the social efficiency educators, child developmentalists believed that public school curriculum needed reform; students needed to participate in purposeful activity. To this end, Kilpatrick, diverging from his teacher Dewey, introduced the Project Method of education, which was to address, in an integrated manner, the problems of living. Child interests and their life activities were used as curriculum guides:

By the 1930s, the Project Method movement had grown to such proportions that it outgrew its original identification with the project per se and carne to be more grandly advertised as the activity curriculum or the experience curriculum (Kliebard,1987, p. 168).

These utilitarian and pragmatic curricula were-not the sole domain of elementary or secondary schools but were influential in determining experimental education at colleges such as Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and a general college at the University of Minnesota (Brubacher & Rudy, 1968). We see the humanistic and pragmatic influence of this movement in the late 30s and 40s in the work of Dale and others.

1.4.3 Mental Measurement

At the same time, influential metaphors were being generated by another arm of the social efficiency movement: the mental measurement proponents. Thorndike's contribution of the mind as a machine with multitudinous, discrete, and nonconnected parts remains with us today. Indeed, Thorndike, along with Goodard, Terman, Yerkes, and others, was responsible for the application of the IQ scale as a vehicle of social control, not just a diagnostic test (Kliebard, 1987).

Child development proponents were not the only educators who highlighted student needs. The social aspects of the efficiency movement also stressed education according to student needs; mental measurements allowed educators to ascertain those needs; and activity or job analysis became the means by which new curriculum was developed. W. W. Charters, who later figures prominently in the audiovisual movement, was one of the first educators to compile activity analyses for the tasks of such occupations as librarian and veterinarian (Kliebard, 1987). He transferred his model of task analysis to the curriculum for Stephens College in Missouri (Brubacher & Rudy, 1968).

Speaking of Charters and his early influence on curriculum theory and the emerging audiovisual field, Edgar Dale says:

(Charters) had this whole idea of analysis of activities.... Now we'd call it, I suppose, behavioral analysis.... A very concrete approach to curricular processes (Dale,1977).

But as Dale was learning Charters' activity analysis in the 30s and applying this curriculum technique to an articulation of Carleton Washburne's Winnetka plan, he was critiquing it:

. . . And the individualized instruction involved analyzing a subject like arithmetic, loading the key steps, then preparing a set of almost textbook experience. So you would do a step at a time, take a test on it, take another test on it, and so on. And I thought it was very fruitful in terms of applying some of the Charters' approach. [There was] the old weakness of any kind of individualized instruction where you take it step by step, and you don't have the chance to de the material together, to integrate it, and so on. That, that difficulty I thought of right along (Dale, 1977).

1.4.4 Learning Theory

One aspect of the curricular debate at this time influenced the research practices in our field, early and late. Aspects of early behaviorism need our attention (see 2.21.3). Educational psychology was dominated by Edward Thorndike in the early decades of this century (Guthrie & Powers, 1950; Hilgard, 1948; Kliebard, 1987), perhaps because he straddled the disciplines of psychology and education. Before the turn of the century, he had described his basic tenets of learning in Animal Intelligence (1898), and even though he applied his theory of connectionism to human beings in The Psychology of Learning (1913), it was not until the 30s that he elaborated his premises (Thorndike, 1935). Prior to that time, he applied his theory to education and mental measurements. Basically, he believed that the association between sense impressions (stimuli) and impulses to action (response) was the arena in which learning took place. His connectionism was an associative theory that peaked the interest of later (30s and 40s) psychologists concerned with the issues of learning and education. Guthrie, Skinner, and Hilgard, publishing in the 30s and beyond, and Hull in the 40s and beyond, each contributed their own behavioral theory to the scholarly and practical area of learning in the United States. Embracing the ideas of congruity and association as a basis for learning, these men left an indelible mark on the rhetoric, discourses, and practices of the fields of educational psychology and educational technology. (For many decades educational technology research projects appeared to be simply limitations of educational psychology projects.)

Educational psychologists were not only influencing technology research but also publishing in the field. Hilgard, a popularizer and synthesizer of behavioral theory, contributed an important chapter in an influential audiovisual text, New Teaching Aids for the American Classroom, and is often cited in World War II research. Thorndike's name and, consequently, his brand of behaviorism, connectionism, appears in 30s audiovisual research reports. Hull's systematic behavioral theory appears in the 40s and 50s research of Neal Miller (1941, 1957). Another disciple of Hull whose work influenced educational technology scholarship was Albert Bandura, upon whose human modeling theory Gagne and Briggs (1965) based their Conditions of Learning.

A general definition of learning to which most of these behaviorists subscribed is offered by Hilgard:

Learning is the process by which activity originates or is changed through training procedures (whether in the laboratory or in the natural environment) as distinguished from changes by factors not attributable to training (Hilgard, 1948, p.4).

Neobehavioral theories, especially operant conditioning, provided a rigorous scaffolding for research in educational psychology from roughly the late 30s to the 70s and garnered for this field a reputation of serious scholarship in the academy. While educational technology was never accorded the same academic respect, most researchers in this field did imitate the learning theories and research methods practiced by educational psychologists. Educational psychologists gained the respect of arts and science colleagues by attempting to make the study of student learning as scientific as had the academic psychologists the study of animal learning. Although educational technology researchers adopted the behavioral posture of their colleagues, their reputations were tainted by their connection with audiovisual machines-not considered by many academics to be worthy of scholarship -before the advent of computers. If any one value was articulated in most academic discourses we examined, it was the valorization of words, especially words in print. (Such a value, in fact, may have led one leading researcher [Clark, 1986] to conduct a meta-analysis of educational technology research and conclude in 1986 that machines do not affect learning, and that media are dead when considered as variables in a learning experiment.)

The stature that educational technology scholars gained by adopting neobehavioral theories and practices was mitigated by other losses. If a discourse is a system of thought that produces knowledge, examination of the concepts included and excluded from the neobehavioral discourse will provide a partial understanding of the intellectual underpinning of educational technology. Within this discourse, the mind was considered a tabula rasa that could be modified by training. Key concepts of continuity and association were borrowed intact from animal psychology and transferred to human beings. The paradigm excluded notions of culture, context, language production, internal action, and thinking (Becker, 1977). While current cognitive theories have gone a long way toward addressing some of these early exclusions, no one psychological theory of learning can account for learning that occurs because of one's membership in a group. When the research focus is on a unit of one, the brain and social and cultural factors elude scholarly efforts.

1.4.5 Behaviorism and Humanism

Educational practice and research in the United States ultimately fell under the sway of behaviorism and subsequent psychological theories of learning. Yet Western European curriculum and educational research emerged in a predominantly humanistic vein. National debates and their resolutions in the academy during the 30s and the 40s can partially account for this difference. During the 30s, U.S. philosophers began to adopt theories proposed by certain analytic European philosophers, particularly those logical positivists in the Vienna Circle and, secondarily, British analytic linguists. Quine, who had studied briefly with these philosophers in Vienna, paved the way for the migration of Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Neurath, and Feigle to Ivy League universities where they remained to escape Naziism. In opposition to the European humanist philosophical traditions that these men believed accommodated fascism, they called themselves "scientists," not humanists (Borradori, 1994). Their project set the trajectory for U.S. philosophy for decades to come and contributed to the valorization of those academic disciplines based on positivism, i.e., science and mathematics. Even the pragmatists James and Dewey were convinced by some logical positivist arguments and incorporated them in their later works. And Quine's analytic work was strongly influenced by Skinner, a close Harvard colleague of his (Borradori,1994). Ultimately the postwar culture in the U.S. academy was mainly positivist and in certain disciplines behaviorist, while the Western European academy remained predominantly humanist. While not the sole influence on curriculum development, this U.S. culture shaped educational practices and, finally, the development of the educational technology field.

Although scholarly audiovisual texts in the late 20s and early 30s were exclusively behavioral, applied books of that period were not. Also in the late 30s, scholarly audiovisual books began to reflect the child-centered notions of Dewey and others. For a brief time (approximately the late 30s and 40s), humanist, child-centered discourses were ascendant in departments of education, in curricular practices, and in the emergent audiovisual field. This was not the case in the 20s or early 30s, nor later when the AV field acquired the title of "educational technology." But membership in DVI in the 30s was eclectic (artists, commercial and educational filmmakers, librarians, school administrators, government officials, teachers, etc.), which suggests that the discourse that dominated the practice of audiovisual instruction during this period was multivocal. Many late 30s and 40s texts merged theory and pedagogy because of the pragmatic nature of the dominant Deweyesque discourse.

But the fact that child-centered theories dominated the audiovisual and general educational discourses from the mid30s was a short aberration, both in U.S. curricular practice and audiovisual scholarship. Each of the neobehaviorists writing in the 20s and 30s contributed to educational technology scholarship in the 40s and 50s. And each theorist trained World War II researchers. This means that World War II film researchers, most often selected from educational psychology departments that had been established on university campuses approximately in the mid20s, were steeped in a specific neobehavioral theory with its language, which included and excluded certain concepts. During World War II, they designed and executed experiments within a narrow psychological discourse, which was often well suited to the training taking place. The rigor we associate with the post-WW II period of educational technology research most likely came from the sophistication of measurements, and statistics for experimental and quasiexperimental designs, rather than from further articulation of behaviorism.