Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America

Teaching Reading with Television: Constructing Closed Captioning Using the Rhetoric of Literacy

T   Silent Worker proclaimed in 1910 that “every one who knows the deaf child knows how dear the moving picture is to its heart, and, if properly selected, how full of educational value it is.”1 Through the 1910s and 1920s, film—silent, but with printed dialogue intertitles—was a unique and special tool for deaf education, on par with musical education for the blind.2 And although deaf educators sometimes feared the negative effects of film on their students—worrying that “the motion pictures become to [them] teachers whose attraction and potency are in direct proportion to [their] isolation”3— most agreed that taking control of the new medium in residential schools was the best strategy for deaf education, especially if one could find films that were both “educational in character and yet attractive-fairy stories.”4 Calls for “visual education” of the deaf continued through the 1930s and 1940s, but as silent, intertitled films became increasingly scarce, educators grew increasingly aware that film was “the most expensive of all visual aids.”5 Moreover , without printed translations, the use of commercial films in the deaf classroom was frustrating. In one case from 1935, instructors resorted to starting and stopping the film so that students could lip-read what their teachers might have to say about a particular scene. These same deaf educators noted that if one or another film production center could “be designated as a distributor for 191 Teaching Reading with Television Constructing Closed Captioning Using the Rhetoric of Literacy   a group of the outstanding industrial films and have them retitled, if possible at the expense of the industries which they represent, a great service would be rendered.”6 In the immediate postwar period, many educators of the deaf shared this idea. Shunned by Hollywood ever since the end of the silents fifteen years earlier, deaf educators began to subtitle their own films—a process they referred to as “captioning.” Their experimentation with captioned film in the 1940s and 1950s later translated into advocacy for a state-sanctioned system of captioned television in the 1960s and 1970s. These efforts paid off in the 1980s, when a public-private partnership under the oversight of the federal government brought captioned television into the living room of any deaf household willing to buy a $300 set-top “decoder.” But supply and demand under this partnership had trouble connecting, and it took new regulations in the 1990s to make the text-on-television system universal and sustainable. In the end, constructing closed captioning relied on the same early educational framework—teaching literacy through the association of sound, image, and text—but in a way that broadened the audience for captioning beyond the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. This chapter considers the historical connection between print culture and visual culture in the decades-long effort to provide a form of “media justice” to deaf and hard-of-hearing film and television viewers through synchronized text captioning. This was a project pitting the activists and educators of a minority language community—those who communicate with eyes, hands, and signs rather than ears, voices, and utterances—against a mainstream film and television industry intent on minimizing its risks and costs by selling news and entertainment only to its most profitable audience of hearing consumers. Thus it became a familiar question of the role of state subsidy and regulation versus the actions of private capital in serving a minority interest over the public airwaves. Yet the construction of closed captioning was also an example of the way that a new feature of an old media system, provided through a combination of digital technology and information labor, was carefully framed as a standard service for the majority of consumers rather than a remedial benefit for only a minority . What tied both of these processes together was an evolving notion of multimedia literacy that, though applied to different audiences at different points in the story, remained firmly tied to the notion that the ability to read was a crucially important skill for society to provide to all its members, minority and majority alike, in a multicultural, media-saturated society.7 Deaf Education and Captioned Films The decades-long collective captioning effort began around 1947 when Edmund Boatner, superintendent of the American School for the Deaf in West 192   Hartford, Connecticut, charged his vocational education teacher, J. Pierre Rakow, with the task of “studying and learning...