Multi-Media Literacy

The paperback, because it is relatively cheap and expendable, makes it easy for us to experiment with multi-media literacy. To take a specific example, "The American West as Symbol and Myth" could become a focal point for considering every possible kind of medium, popular and elite. Indeed it can show us how to work from the adolescent's absorption in popular culture back to a respect for the more demanding elite traditions.

One way to begin such a unit would be to take the paperback edition of a very fine novel, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Oxbow Incident, and compare it with the film translation available in uncut form from Films, Inc. (Wilmette, Ill.) or in truncated form from Teaching Films Custodian. This "adult western" provides a first-rate perspective on television's sagebrush saga. Why is "Gunsmoke" superior to many of the syndicated western series? What happens to "Gunsmoke" on radio? What do Hollywood producers (80% of nighttime TV is on film now) mean by needing a gimmick for a new western series? How many gimmicks can you name? How closely do western heroes such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Brett Maverick jibe with historical reality?

A good place to start students on a mission to distinguish fact from myth is This Is the West (Mentor), a paperback created by a group of western buffs. The teacher on the other hand can find invaluable perspective on the West as symbol and myth from Professor Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Vintage).

Why has the West dominated our consciousness? How has it affected writers as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper and Ned Buntline? When did the western catch on as a popular form of entertainment? Here are scores of term paper topics on dime novels, Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, the first movie heroes such as Wm. S. Hart and later sentimentalized cowboys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, and of course the plethora of TV westerns. Such a unit begins with the teenager's interest in entertainment and ends with philosophical enquiry: What fantasies does the wild and woolly West satisfy in today's organization man in office, factory, and salesroom? Who are the real pioneers today, these paper dolls with chaps or Jonas Salk and the astronauts? Does fixation on adolescent westerns (where uninhibited violence acts out the child's reveries of aggression) tell us of a failure of nerve on our part?

Another advantage of approaching a theme which permits the inclusion of a great deal of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry is that it enables the teacher to capitalize on the art forms that have only recently begun to profit from advances in the technology of mass communication. Students can give reports and do study papers on the artists who have fixed for our national imagination the great Westering: Frederick Remington, George Catlin, George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Russell, some of the painters treated in the indispensable 300 Years of American Painting. And the everyday beauty-Conestoga Wagons, rifles, saddles-are handsomely mounted in Life's America's Arts and Skills.

Folk singing can destroy the image of stuffy solemnity that makes the English classroom so often a place of detention. The Schwann LP catalog will give innumerable examples, but Folkways Records should be singled out because of Moses Asch's conscious creation of study materials for the schools. And there has been a great deal of serious American music composed on Western themes: Leo Sowerby's Prairie, Ferde Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite, Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid. There are good histories of American music with discographies to aid the unfamiliar teacher.

What is true of the West as a teaching unit is true of the entire curriculum; recent developments in mass communication (especially cheap four-color printing and long-playing vinyl recordings) now make it possible to instruct our students in the totality of their intellectual heritage and esthetic culture. We must guard against our prejudice of thinking of print as the only medium that the English teacher has a real stake in. We are humanities and language teachers, and what we teach is naturally enlarged when technology makes many more art forms accessible to the great mass of people.

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Feb., 1961), pp. 132-133
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English