The Ipad Is the New Cinema “It Allows Us to Extend the Classroom Beyond
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1 Introduction: the iPad is the New Cinema “It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” said an English teacher in Roslyn Heights, N.Y. about the Apple iPad2 tablet. 1 Less than a year after Apple unveiled the first iPad to great fanfare in April 2010, the New York Times reported that many American school districts were purchasing them en masse for their classes. Already by January 2011, the New York Public School system had ordered over 2,000 of the devices while the Chicago schools had already financed $450,000 in grants for their acquisition. Teachers and school administrators exuded a palpable enthusiasm for the new device that they claimed was “not just a cool new toy but rather a powerful and versatile tool with a multitude of applications, including thousands of educational uses.”2 During the 2011-12 academic year, a series of online articles claimed that the iPad boosted test scores in math and literacy while Apple’s website boasted that the device was “changing the classroom” through inspiring students’ creativity and promoting hand’s-on learning.3 Such enthusiasm for the iPad may appear almost natural given the historically long connection that Americans have made between their civilization and their sense of 1 Winnie Hu. “Math That Moves: Schools Embrace The iPad.” New York Times, January 4, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/education/05tablets.html?pagewanted=all 2 Hu, “Math that Moves.” 3 Courtney Subramanian. “New Study Finds iPads in the Classroom Boost Test Scores.” Time Techland (22 February 2012). URL: http://techland.time.com/2012/02/22/new-study-finds-ipads-in-the-classroom-boost- test-scores/. Jim Dalrymple. “iPads in the Classroom Raise Math Scores 49%.” www.loopinsight.com (13 August 2012). URL: http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/08/13/ipads-in-the-classroom-raise-math-scores- 49/. Apple’s iPad education page can be found at: http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/ [Accessed 14 September 2012]. 2 technological progress.4 Yet, historians of modernity, like Bernhard Rieger, have shown that reception of new technologies in Europe and America has oscillated between fascination and anxiety over their super-human powers for good and ill.5 As much as many teachers embraced the iPad right out the box, literally, others worried that tablets risked augmenting childhood developmental problems like attention deficit disorder, media addiction and eyestrain.6 News columnists referenced the large volume of studies done on the influence of television and video games over the psychology and behavior of children. A divide persists between techno-enthusiasts who believe that visual learning through video games will prepare children to function in a mediatized twenty-first century work environment and specialists in media studies and child psychology who argue that excessive consumption of such games leads to violent and anti-social behavior.7 For supporters, like teachers in a school district in Maine who purchased iPads for their classes in 2011-2012, students’ ability to interact with screens, capture images, and manipulate icons “engage with what they’re learning, and promote the skills needed to effectively present 4 David E. Nye. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, and Thomas Parke Hughes. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. New York: Viking, 1989. 5 Bernhard Rieger. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 6 “Are iPads and other tablets bad for children?” New York Daily News (2 April 2012). URL: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-02/news/31276908_1_electronic-tablets-ipad-electronic- babysitter. David Pogue. “A Parent’s Struggle with a Child’s iPad Addiction.” The New York Times (24 February 2011). URL: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/a-parents-struggle-with-a-childs-ipad- addiction/. [Accessed 15 September 2012] 7 The pro-video game position has been articulated by Marc Prensky. “Don’t Bother Me, Mom, I’m Learning! How computer and video games are preparing your kids for 21st century success and how you can help.” UOC Papers (2006). URL: http://www.uoc.edu/uocpapers/5/dt/eng/prensky.html and James Paul Gee. “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” Computers in Entertainment 1, no. 1 (October 2003). URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=950595&CFID=116435762&CFTOKEN=87431606. A summary of the extensive research linking video games with aggression and anti-social behavior can be found in Craig A. Anderson, Douglas A. Gentile, and Katherine A. Buckley. Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents: Theory, Research, and Public Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 3 information to a room of colleagues – something that’s bound to come in handy in college or a career.”8 Skeptics have, by contrast, countered that there is “very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines.”9 Discourses over iPads and video games reveal the crucial role that education has played in negotiating the meanings about and the implementation of media technologies within the broader society. Teachers, techno-enthusiasts and computer companies have constructed networks between themselves to stimulate the market in and to promote the use of technologies, especially the iPad, as a revolutionary teaching device. Because these are visual technologies, a key focus of these discourses has been on their effects on, and even influence over, the cognitive faculties and behavior of children. For proponents, these technologies offer a more efficient or even different kind of learning experience, especially skills and capacities overlooked in traditional pedagogical methods whether it be hand-and-eye coordination, object manipulation or even just a more engaging means of involving students with course materials.10 Yet, neither the role that debates concerning the effects of visual media on children, nor that of educators in integrating media into social and institutional life has been examined by visual studies scholars. In a 2005 survey of the field, for example, some scholars identified the role that visual technologies played in their own pedagogy, but not how the field of education itself has historically served as a sphere for the construction of meaning and use of media.11 Yet, researchers in visual studies have done 8 Florence Ion. “iPads in the Classroom are Changing the Face of Education.” Maclife (18 April 2012). URL: http://www.maclife.com/article/features/ipads_classroom_are_changing_face_education 9 Hu, “Math That Moves.” 10 Alice Mitchell and Carol Savill-Smith. The Use of Computers and Video Games for Learning. London: Learning and Skills Development Agency, 2004. URL: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5270/1/041529.pdf 11 Margaret Dikovitskaya. Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 85-118. 4 path-breaking work in showing how the emergence of a globalized image-based culture – which has now become digitalized – has reconfigured our understandings of the past, national and transnational identity, the body, and even the faculty of vision itself.12 Indeed, these scholars have drawn from art history and the history of technology to show vision itself has been historically constructed and that our current mediatized age is ultimately a “scopic regime” distinct from earlier epochs.13 If such distinct “scopic regimes” exist, then, the role of public debates about the impacts of visual media on children bring to light the networks of advocates and skeptics that help to shape the broader institutional and social integration of these technologies and thus “concretize” these new ways of seeing. This, however, begs the question as to whether other media technologies within other national contexts experience similar processes of enthusiasm, contestation, negotiation and adoption and whether these ultimately promote new ways of seeing and of understanding images. This dissertation argues that in the France of the 1920s and the 1930s, the cinema played the same role for educators and advocates as iPads do for their contemporary counterparts. Supporters of educational cinema argued that films were a means to enhance and improve the learning experience of children and revitalize hidebound pedagogical practices. They endorsed not only the dissemination of films but also the creation of institutional support structures that embedded cinema within the social life of students and their surrounding communities. Yet, my choice of France for this study is 12 See Jonathan Crary. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2002, and Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannne M. Pryblyski. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. 13 Martin Jay. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality. H. Foster, ed. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988. 5 not merely to draw a parallel between the interwar period and contemporary times. Educational cinema movements existed in many nations, especially the major industrial countries of the United States, Britain, and Germany.14 The movement in France took a distinct trajectory based on that nation’s historical experiences in the interwar period. In so doing, the French produced particular meanings about the cinematic image and its applicability in educational settings that differed