Reframing the Subject: Postwar Instructional Film and Class-Conscious Literacies by Kelly Ritter (review)

In Reframing the Subject, Kelly Ritter offers a rigorous and incisive account of the use of instructional films, a subset of "mental hygiene" films, in literacy education following World War II. This book will appeal to an array of scholars and teachers, including those interested in histories of literacy education, the role of social class in US education, and the use of technology in writing instruction. In an era of rapid material and economic growth, instructional films capitalized on an emerging medium to train students in foundational principles of speaking and writing, social conduct, and democratic citizenship. Ritter argues that the narratives and lessons presented in these films nurtured the myth of literacy as a path to social mobility, while simultaneously instructing students to retain the attitudes and behaviors of their socioeconomic classes. The book includes chapters on cultural and curricular developments that set the foundation for instructional film's use in secondary and postsecondary schools, analyses of the pedagogical and class-based values implicit in specific films, and connections between the instructional film's legacy and current iterations of online literacy instruction in higher education. While these films may be dismissed as remnants of a bygone era, Ritter makes a compelling case that the attitudes that established their appeal remain an intrinsic part of our pedagogies today. In that sense, the book issues a timely call for educators to reconsider the connections between our methods of classroom instruction and the material realities of students' lives.

Ritter observes that the promise of higher education, as a pathway to the comfort and security of a middle-class lifestyle, emerged at the end of World War II. At this time, economic and material advances, along with government measures like the GI Bill, made it possible for increasing numbers of Americans to attend college. In the decades that followed, Ritter argues, the myth of social uplift through education was inculcated through literacy instruction at the secondary and postsecondary levels, with harmful consequences for students. One prominent vehicle of this myth was the instructional film, which offered streamlined instruction in literacy-based values and practices that students would need for academic and professional success. At the same time, the films employed visual, verbal, and narrative cues to situate this instruction in the wider context of lessons in social etiquette, morality, and other behaviors representative of an idealized middle class. Consequently, only those students who had acquired prior knowledge of these behaviors, usually in their home communities, benefitted from such lessons. Students who lacked such knowledge were unable to identify with the characters and scenarios presented on screen, reinforcing their status as outsiders to middle-class culture and discouraging their economic mobility. "The films are thus a paradox," writes Ritter, "wherein lessons are presented as universal 'truths' but only to those who already know and believe those truths as part of their existing socioeconomic identities" (33). Through this paradox, the postwar instructional film upheld—superficially—the ideal of education as a leveler of class distinctions, while still emphasizing socio-economic hierarchy as a precondition of literacy.

Reframing does not concern the postwar era only, however, but the present moment in higher education, when colleges and universities are turning to digital technologies to address problems of increasing enrollments, larger class sizes, and other obstacles to access. Ritter argues that the mythological ideal of a one-size-fits-all education that was used to justify the use of instructional films in the 1940s and 50s persists today in the embrace of mass-delivered online literacy instruction, in particular with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). In her analysis, online versions of literacy instruction replicate the postwar instructional film's promise of efficiency and aspiration to erase socioeconomic differences by providing prepackaged, identical instruction to all students, regardless of class or knowledge-based diversity. In doing so these mass-delivered systems, like the instructional film before them, sidestep the agency of teachers to inculcate students in class-based...