Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

Assignment: DAVI Personnel: 1970 by James D. Finn Professor of Education University of Southern California and President Department of AudioVisual Instruction National Education Association (The Board of Directors of DAVI will meet in closed session during the National Audiovisual Convention and Exhibit in Chicago. In further observance of one of the major AV events of the year. Dr. Finn presents this view of DAVl's responsibilities during the coming decade.) The disease in all professions is stagnation, a failure to grow in professional wisdom and competence. (Edgar Dale, 1960) X O begin with a cliche, the Department of Audio-Visual Instruction is people. As I have said elsewhere, these people are a wonderful conglomerate; there are teachers of the first grade who are audiovisual building coordinators in small schools; there are communication theorists working on the campuses of large universities; there are audiovisual directors in school systems and colleges with operations so vast that all bookings are handled by IBM, and others so small that slide production is carried on in the director's kitchen on week-ends; there are producers, librarians, misplaced curriculum specialists, military officers with a training aids specification number, religious audiovisual workers, broadcasters, government information specialists, applied psychologists and at least one college president. And this is but part of the list. DAVI, since it began to grow up about 1952, lias provided a home for these many different i people who have a common interest in audiovisual communication. Looked at another way, of course, DAVI is an organization; it is a national office of growing importance in the NEA; it is a host of committees working on projects ranging from cooperative Hbraries to educational networks; it is a publishing house and it is the national posture for the educational profession on matters of instructional technology. Fundamentally, however, as old and tired as the concept seems, DAVI is people— the people that make up the organization and the committees and who write for the publications and who develop the national posture. When assessing the "challenge of the si.xties," as this symposium is attempting to do for the audiovisual movement as a whole, it is fitting, I think, that the DAVI contribution should concern itself with the people involved, with the future requirements of the audiovisual profession, whatever they may be. The future of any movement depends on the quality of the people who support and develop it. Actually, even when confining the discussion to the educational (as opposed to the commercial) personnel needs for audiovisual specialists in the next decade, it is obvious that we will need, first of all, a much larger number than during the past ten years. Second, we need all the talent and quality in this larger number that we can get. Our first problems, then, not at all new to the educational scene, are the twin problems of quantity and quality of personnel. The need for large numbers of highly qualified people is a function of a technological society as a whole and is not limited to a small segment such as that portion of the educational profession represented in the audiovisual specialist. C. P. Snow has recently pointed out that, "There is one curious result (of technology and industrialization ) in all major industrialized societies. The amount of talent one requires for the primary tasks is greater than any country can comfortably produce, and this will become increasingly obvious. The consequence is that there are no people left, clever, competent and resigned to a humble job, to keep the wheels of social amenities going smoothly round. Postal .services, railway services, are likely slowly to deteriorate just because the people who once ran them are now being educated for different things. This is already clear in the United States, and is becoming clear in England."' The talent needed for the primary audiovisual tasks is very great indeed. A professional organization must address itself to the work of developing the competence of its members. This, then, is one of the big jobs for DAVI in the decade ahead. A start has already been made with the first Invitational Seminar on Professional Education which was held in conjunction with the 1960 DAVI Convention in * C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959, p. 58. 430 Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — August, 1960