The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

May, 1944 Page 201 I through thf rest of her teaching career. You simply can't have an etifective teacher-education program in the audio-visual field unless you have a careful, consistent, in-service training ])rogram also. One Approach to the Problem We are developing a teaching aids laboratory at the Ohio State University. It isn't unique. Other schools have done a notable piece of work in this field. It is only through some such plan as this that we' are ever going to make any progress in this field. Compulsory courses in audio-visual education won't do it. E.xhortation won't do it. Even rich .supplies and materials alone won't do it. There must be intelligent practice, too, supervised skillfully. What should be the goals of a teaching aids laboratory? First, we must be a service agency for the college. We must understand that the failure to use audio-visual aids in college teaching has usually not been a lack of interest or any unfavorable attitude, ^lost instructors .say that it is a good thing to use audio-visual materials. There is no active opposition. But each individual instructor cannnot carry forward the practice and investigation and study necessary to determine the available aids. He needs help. We have noted again and again that the average instructor who tries to use a film or recording catalog is baffled by the complexity of the offerings. Then he orders some of these materials and is often disappointed. He goes back to textbook teaching with certain misgivings. That isn't all. Suppo.se he wants a certain film. He then has the laborious problem, not .so complicated but very annoying, of arranging for his department to pay the dollar or two necessary for the film rental. He. or some one else, must write a letter. He must see that there is a projector available, check the film when it comes in, and the like. This is an impossible situation. Even when he has the projector and the film or whatever it is that has been ordered, he must arrange the projection and see that the room is properly darkened. This again is another chore, especially in many of our old college buildings. The result is that a series of tiny annoyances, and some not so tiny, have built up in the mind of the instructor a barrier against the use of this material. The solution is simple. Instead of having every person do all this work, have one person do it. I know that you are saying, "Well, after all, that is what an audio-visual director does in a city school system." Yes, that is true, but we don't have many such persons in public school systems and we have still fewer of them in colleges and universities. What I want to see, then, and we won't be successful in teacher-education until we have it, is a rich laboratory of teaching materials and teaching suggestions available to every member of a college faculty, and similar opportunities for every teacher in a school system. The war is going to hasten this. We have learned that if you are going to wage war, you have to have soldiers who are well taught and if you teach aerial gunnery or first aid or "Why we are in the war," you can turn very quickly, simply, to a film such as "Battle of Russia," to a chart deahng with a calibre-50 machine gun. to a map put out by the Morale Services Division of the War Department. Teaching tools and teaching materials are at your fingertips. We must duplicate that in the college and university. We mu,st go still further. We must equip certain classrooms as teaching aids rooms. This is just a preliminary step, but a necessary one. These rooms which might well be double classroom size, should have equipment of all sorts available in them, playback equipment, filmstrip projectors, motion ])icture projectors, and the like. Many classes should be routed to this room and this space can be used economically. We will not have a satisfactory teacher-education program until we have produced materials specifically for teacher-education. W'e shall have to show how to use audio-visual materials by using specially prepared audio-visual material. To illustrate a demonstration we need a motion picture of that demonstration. To illustrate oral reading levels, we should have a series of recordings of such oral reading. \\"e ought to have films which show how an alert teacher uses a multiplicity of teaching material on fractions, decimals, etc. We must, of course, take our prospective teachers on excursions, but these excursions are timeconsuming. We must also photograph typical excursions, how they are prepared for and followed up. The above type materials might be described as the "how to do it." They have the advantage of specificity and the disadvantage of the fact that there are many ways of teaching. A further need in teacher education is the production of a number of teaching situations or problems. Through a film or recording, we can .sharply etch a particular problem in the teaching of reading, in guiding a high school student toward a vocational career, in meeting a special type of disciplinary problem, and the like. But the films or recording or film strip does not give the answer. It merely poses the problem. It poses the problem with the sharpness, concreteness, and dramatic quality of audio-visual materials. Discussion, reading, lecturing, demonstrations will follow as possible solutions for the problem are sought. Is this new approach in teacher-education likely to come as a wave of the future? Don't depend upon it. If you are a superintendent of schools or a principal charged with the hiring of teachers, make certain that they know their teaching materials. If that means putting pressure on us in the teachers' colleges. plea.se do that. Teachers, in turn, who are in school systems, need to put on pressure to see that they get adequate materials with which to work. No workman likes to work with dull or inadequate tools. To the reply that we cannot afford these materials, let us answer that we cannot afford ignorance either. The past twenty-five years has been a period characterized by attempts to get adeciuate materials made and to try to purchase them. W'e haven't licked this problem yet, but we are on the road to doing it. The other problem, that of effective use of these materials, is still in its infancy. One of the most effective ways of assuring this improved use is through a revolutionary change in methods of teacher-education. Part of that revolution must come through increased use of these new-type teaching materials in the teachers' college itself.