I Pledge Allegiance: The Politics of Reading and Using Educational Films

Abstract

This article focuses on the aesthetic and rhetorical techniques employed by classical educational documentaries (1930–1965) and identifies the ideological positions such techniques offered to student viewers. By comparing classical educational documentaries to propaganda and social issue documentaries from the same period, it defines the norms of visual representation and language characteristic of this particular educational media form. It then applies contemporary approaches to cultural studies, specifically the concepts of audience positioning and the politics of reading, to a textual analysis of the films. The author argues that educational documentaries encourage students to enter into a particular type of allegiance to the authority of the Academic Expert as constructed in these films. Specifically, they offer a viewing experience that attempts to make pleasurable the position of subject of paternalism. Finally, the author introduces the implications that this analysis raises for classroom use of contemporary educational documentaries, and she calls for research that addresses how fear and desire are used in educational media for the purpose of encouraging child-like allegiances to the ideological projects of curriculums.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.