Weak Humanism and the Economic Mission of English Education

This article examines a theory of ‘weak humanism’ that says (1) secondary English classes should focus on personal development and culture and (2) English classes should deliver economic benefits indirectly, i.e. as knock-on effects of studying the personal and the cultural. Economic benefits are defined here as knowledge/skills students may use to improve their economic positions. This theory of weak humanism emerged as a popular idea among 140 professors of English education surveyed by the author and a colleague. Building out from previous analyses of the survey results, the present article reads weak humanism against a backdrop of shifting economic systems. Weak humanism is shown to take some of its current form in opposition to a regime of high-stakes standardised testing that integrates English education into a system of surveillance capitalism. The article concludes with a call for English teachers to resist surveillance capitalism by taking a revolutionary humanist tack to the work of English education.     

Television and education: A review of research

Summary The existing research on television of interest to educators was analyzed and found to be grouped into four general categories: (a) studies of the general social effects of television, (b) content analyses, (c) studies of the educational effects of television, and (d) technical studies. Studies in each of these four categories were reviewed and generalizations drawn from them. No attempt was made to review related research that is, no doubt, applicable to the problems of television. For example, the vast amount of research information developed in the audio-visual field during the past 30 years was not touched. Future investigators will find that the existing television research and the existing audio-visual research provide only a sketch map of the field of audio-visual communication. To use these important instruments wisely, and this is particularly true of television, it is necessary that we know and understand much more. This is the challenge for future research. To the knowledge of the editor, this is the first comprebensive review of educational television research to be published. The organizing of the research into four categories—general social effects, content analyses, educational effects, and technical problems—the rather detailed reviewing of the results, and the drawing of general conclusions should greatly aid the educator in understanding the unique contributions of educational television. An attempt will be made in future issues of Audio-Visual Communication Review to supplement this review of research by regularly publishing, in “Research Abstracts,” reviews of the most recent television studies. Dr. James D. Finn is Associate Professor of Education and Chairman of the Audio-Visual Education Department, University of Southern California. This paper was originally prepared at the request of the California State Department of Education for inclusion in theBrochure of Background Materials: Educational Television for the Governor’s Conference on Educational Television, held in Sacramento, California, December 15–16, 1952. It was necessary to develop the material in a very short time, and the writer wishes to express his indebtedness to F. Dean McClusky and May V. Seagoe of the University of California, Los Angeles, and to Lester F. Beck and Nicholas Rose, his colleagues at the University of Southern California, as well as to several of his graduate students for helping in locating copies of the studies reviewed.     

Research incentives and research output

This paper first briefly reviews the worldwide development of the size of the university sector, its research merits and authorities’ use of incentive systems for its academic staff. Then, the paper develops a static model of a researcher’s behaviour, aiming to discuss how different salary reward schemes and teaching obligations influence his or her research merits. Moreover, special focus is placed on discussing the importance of the researcher’s skills and of working in solid academic environments for quality research. The main findings are as follows: First, research achievements will improve irrespective of the relative impact quantity and quality of research have on researchers’ salaries. Second, small changes in fixed salary and teaching duties will not influence the amount of time academics spend on research and, as such, their research merits. Third, because research productivity, i.e. the number of pages written and research quality increase with the researcher’s skills and effort, both these figures signal a researcher’s potential when adjusting for his or her age and the kind of research carried out. Finally, because researchers’ utility depends on factors beyond salary and leisure time, employers have a number of instruments to use in order to attract skilled researchers in a globalised market.     

Explaining parental coviewing: The role of social facilitation and arousal

This study explores the relationship between parental coviewing and children’s psychophysiological responses to television exposure within a framework of social facilitation. A total of 88 children aged 6–13 years and one of each of their parents participated in a 2 (presence or absence of the parent)?×?2 (exciting or non-exciting TV content) between-subjects experiment. Results indicated that the presence of a coviewing parent was associated with an increase in children’s arousal (higher skin conductance levels) and cognitive resource allocation (lower heart rate), especially for younger children who came from homes where parental coviewing was a relatively frequent activity. These findings suggest that the mere presence of a coviewing parent is sufficient to alter children’s processing of television messages.     

Automation and education

Summary An attempt has been made in this paper to describe automation, both as an industrial process involving flow and control and as an intellectual system involving planning and decision-making. General effects on education in the areas of curriculum and program of studies, administration, general education, organization for instruction, the necessity for teaching new patterns of thinking, vocational and technical education were discussed. The concept of the possibility of automatizing the instructional process itself was introduced, and the outlines of a new content for education as a discipline were suggested. The following paper will deal with the problem of automatizing instruction through audio-visual means, and the third and last paper in the series will consider the dangers and difficulties involved in such a process. This is the first in a series of three articles that will discuss one of the most important and timely problems that educators face today-the effects of automation upon education.     

Automation and education: II. Automatizing the classroom-background of the effort

This paper has attempted to deal with two aspects of the problem of automatizing the classroom through audio-visual means. These aspects were: (a) the institutional background in which the earlier foundation support of the audio-visual movement by the Payne Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation was compared to the present, much more extensive support of the mass audio-visual approach to teaching supported by the Ford Foundation, its several Funds and the organizations which it underwrites; and (b) the theoretical position requiring audio-visual automation which was shown to be based on the teacher and plant shortage facing this country in the next two decades of swelling school and college enrollments and, therefore, necessitating technological solutions to problems of class size and building space. For a complete picture, some case histories and research results, as well as a technical analysis of the entire position, would prove useful. It is hoped to supply these three aspects of the study in the next paper, to be followed, if thought desirable, by a fourth discussion which would subject the whole idea to critical scrutiny. This is the second in a series of articles dealing with various aspects of the relationship between automation and education. The first, which appeared in the Winter, 1957, issue of the Review, dealt with the general relationships between the two. This article reviews the specific proposals for automatizing the classroom through audio-visual devices in terms of the organizations leading the movement and the theoretical justification for these proposed changes in educational procedure.     

Genre and activism: Schools, social movements, and genres as discourse conduits

This article examines the literacy practices of three school-based student activist groups: a Gay-Straight Alliance, a high school chapter of Amnesty International, and a human rights club unaffiliated with Amnesty. Specifically, this article investigates how members of the different groups advanced their projects by repurposing school genres such as hallway bulletin boards and office memos. By articulating movement messages in school genres, it is argued, activists tightened their schools’ connections to social movements and circulated movement discourses through school space. After findings on each group are presented, the concept “genre as discourse conduit” is induced from the data and is used to reevaluate the nuances and implications of students’ efforts to articulate movement discourses in school genres. Equipped with this new concept, researchers may better analyze activist groups’ efforts to perform movement work in schools.