The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

336 National Academy of Visual Instruction The Educational Screen any type of training in the field of visual instruction, while of the thirty-six colleges and universities reporting, only four are attempting to meet this need. However, several institutions stated that they were using various types of visual material, mainly charts, slides and a few films for instructional purposes in certain courses, especially in science and geography. Others were frank to say they had made no attempt nor had they felt the need of offering such a course. One teachers' college report outlined its art course in reply to the inquiry showing that they had no conception of the richness or extent of the field under investigation. Two serious questions arise from the foregoing. First, in view of the welfare of the pupils, is it justifiable to allow teachers already in service to go on in the old traditional way — slaves to formal text books — using long, dry, uninteresting methods of teaching without making a serious effort to awaken and inspire them to use newer, more economic and more efiicient methods of procedure? Second, many progressive school systems in different sections of the country are now equipping^. their schools with exhibits, stereographs, stereopticon lanterns and moving picture projectors. Shall no provision be made by training institutions whereby teachers may have the opportunity to learn how to use such valuable tools in order to get the greatest educational results with the least expenditure of time and energy? At the present time, as all of us well know, much of this valuable equipment is used haphazardly and unpedagogically or for entertainment purposes only. In order that we might begin to meet these problems raised by the above questions, the San Francisco State Teachers' College introduced a full credit visual instruction course last fall, primarily to meet the needs of the teachers about the bay region. We began with these guiding objectives, namely, to provide guidance as to good practical methods of using such materials and to encourage and aid schools and school systems in equipping for the larger and more systematic use of visual instruction. The appreciative response from the teachers about the bay proved to us that there was a great need for such a course. In the Saturday course thirty-five teachers and principals enrolled the first day. This group was composed of five principals, one supervisor, two high school teachers, fifteen junior high school teachers and twelve elementary school teachers. To the original group there were many additions during the semester. In the complete enrollment were represented six different school systems and twenty-seven different school buildings. Our courses offered two types of work. In the first place, the main course, given at the Teachers' College, consisted of lectures, concrete demonstrations of the uses of alt visual materials, reports of progress on individual problems and laboratory work. In the lectures such topics were taken up as the need of improving and enriching our teaching, fundamental reasons underlying the uses of visual instruction, practical pedagogical methods of procedure in the class room, special uses and sources of supply of all visual aids such as flat pictures, charts, maps, globes, graphs, stereographs, slides and films, how to start a distributing center, how to equip schools for visual instruction and ways and means of earning money for equipment. In the demonstration feature of the course, type lessons were presented either by the instructor or by members of the group. The aim was to illustrate how class work was developed and enriched through the use of visual aids, by the children as needs arose. The illustrative lessons were drawn from geography, history, current events, nature study, health, safety and the like. This was probably the most helpful part of the course since it demonstrated concretely just what the members in the class were actually accomplishing in their regular class rooms under the influence of the course offered. The second type of service rendered by the courses consisted of field work. Upon request the instructor visited principals and individual teachers in their schools and endeavored to give concrete help in solving their daily problems in the field of visual instruction. As a result of the field work twenty-one different schools about the bay region were visited from one to four times. Twelve out of the twentyone schools were fairly well equipped at the end of the year to carry on visual instruction work and three started school libraries with a small visual center. Every teacher upon finishing her course had accumulated a personal collection of well mounted pictures, exhibits, charts and graphs to enrich her own class room teaching. The improvement in the atmosphere i