Trailer (.txt version)

[Audio: old-fashioned background music]

[Video: footage of students in 1950s-era classroom]

Announcer: In a world full of boring, dusty English pedagogy, there lies a hidden history of technological innovation and multimodal production . . . you just have to know how to look for it.

[Video: futuristic text appears over laser-beam background, reading “The future has already happened.”]

[Audio: explosion]

[Video: montage of lightbulb, cassette player, film projector, camera, laptop]

[Audio: funky background music]

[Video: Jason speaking to camera, intercut with cover image of English Journal]

Jason: The truth is, English teachers have been teaching with technology for over a century—and writing about it all along the way—in NCTE’s English Journal.

[Video: montage of articles, historical images of radio production and computers, and screencaptures of animated graphs and video]

Announcer: For example, would you ever have imagined that the 1930s was a hotspot of radio production in English classes? That English teachers have been teaching movie making for more than eighty years? When we zoom out, we can see that interest in using the digital computer for educational purposes began all the way back in the 1960s.

The English classroom has consistently been a strong site of multimodal production as well as reception. A methodology combining thin description, media archaeology, and multimodal performance uncovers these secrets . . . and more.

[Video: title text reads “100 Years of New Media Pedagogy”]

[Video: Jason and Ben speaking to camera]

Jason: We read one hundred years of English Journal . . .

Ben: . . . So you don’t have to!

[Video: Jason and Ben laugh at their own joke]

Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.