The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

advise with principals and teachers ; to call attention to highly useful new material ; to study the on-going program of the church and make suggestions to those in charge. 7. Every church should begin on its level and progress from there. There is no substitute for starting where you are. Take an inventory of your collective skill and understanding. Let it indicate where you should begin in the utilization of visual materials. If you are at the level of flat pictures, and many churches are just there, don't begin with the sound motion picture. It is easy to get equipment— easier than getting understanding. Many leaders have made the mistake of following the sink-or-swim principle in beginning the use of visual aids. They buy a film projector, and perhaps a slide projector, and tell the teachers to go ahead. After a few false starts and abortive eflforts, these same leaders come to pessimistic conclusions about the wisdom of "visual education." 8. Every church should provide some facilities which are suitable and easy to use. Trying to get along with makeshift screens, with hard-to-operate blackouts, with low-voltage power sources, with impossible acoustics, with unattractive surroundings, and with interferences of one kind or another puts a handicap upon leaders which discourages and defeats them. For the time being, most visual materials will be beamed at the larger (departmental) unit and not the individual class. Therefore, provide accordingly. 9. Begin and carry forward a continuous program of training workers in understanding the nature and use of the various visual aids, projected and non-projected. Make this program a part of your total leadership education. Realize that understanding is basic to sound utilization. Use visual methods in your leadership courses and conferences. Secure books and magazines for your teachers. Encourage them to attend local previews, institutes, conferences and courses. In conclusion, don't be misled by the term "visual education." There is no such kind of education. What the church is trying to do is give children, youth and adults the desire and ability to live a certain kind of life, and in the accomplishment of this great and noble work many kinds of materials and methods will be used. — WSH. Treating Films As Texts A CERTAIN religious director, after showing a group of junior children five of the Cathedral films, gave them a test which was composed of various types of informational questions. He was very much disappointed in the answers which he got and concluded that films have been greatly overrated as a teaching medium. Old Methods and New Materials With this list of questions before you, it is easy to see that he was making the mistake of treating films like textbooks because he did not understand the fundamental character of the film. Using such a test as a follow-up for this series of films was like dipping for minnows with a chickenwire net ! His questions were factual, and dealt with the picayune, the inconsequential, and the incidental. He did not check these children to see what kind of experience these films, each of them, had aft'orded these children. He did not seek to find out how this experience had been integrated into the total fabric of learning. (How important is it for a child to know if a certain one of the films shown was missionary or biblical in type?) He was applying old methods to new materials — a common fault of teaching in both church and school. It is safe, in view of such an inadequate follow-up, to assume that his preparation of the pupils for the experience these films were to bring had also been weak and out of focus. He probably left the whole job up to the films, neglecting the skilful enabling which would have increased their teaching power many fold. Films Are Not Textbooks His basic trouble was in thinking of films as but a variety of textbooks. He needs to ponder this incisive parapraph from Edgar Dale's October 1947 News Letter: "The motion picture, properly conceived, is not another textbook. It is not a compendium of facts, a tightly-knit summary. If it deals with 'Colonial Life in Williamsburg' it does not present a century and a half in a page and a half. On the contrary it presents a realistic, dramatic story. The explanatory materials are full-bodied, concrete, artful. The film has a beginning and an ending. It does not trail off into the ne,xt chapter. "You can't study a film bit by bit, page by page. You take all or you take nothing. It does not lend itself to drill, repetition, or memorization. Rich understanding comes with a single viewing. A film may be re-run with profit, but you get the big idea the first time and look again only for the points that have been missed." Too many ministers, directors, and classroom teachers are preoccupied with text materials. The lesson must be taught. They leave too little time for the film. Why? Because they put it secondary to the quarterly. The quarterly will teach about St. Paul. The film can make him real to the pupils. Too many teachers are failing to see this. Hence, we have poor filins and the best films hurriedly used before and after "lessons", with little or no preparation of the pupils for the experience which the film can afiford, and with faultily contrived follow-ups. Pictures are more than words, and basically unlike them. Films are unlike textbooks, and should be utilized by a inethodology consistent with their fundamental character. The essential power of the film is that it can give a psychologically efifective representation of reality. Neither textbooks nor any other visual media can do this. Because of this unique power, the film can put educative experience within the reach of the teacher. He is not obliged to teach about this and that. He can bring his pupils via the screen in experience with the world of persons and things ; ideas and values ; visions and purposes. To get the most from films they should be treated like films and not like textbooks. — WSH. 82 Educational Screen