Potent Pictures

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Cinema, that still most magic medium--portable, cheap, displayable in any place at any hour, infinitely capable of recording knowledge, vastly surpassing TV in screen size, picture quality and color--theoretically ought to be a universal teaching tool. Currently, four U.S. schools are saturating themselves in film in an attempt to make the ideal a reality.

Film has not been shunned because it is scarce. Some 250 companies have churned out 28,000 educational films--a rich, if spotty, lode of material largely unworked by U.S. teachers. The trouble with films, says Dr. Wayne Howell, director of educational development for Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Inc., has been their "impossible logistics." Teachers have had to request films far in advance from distant distribution centers, use them upon arrival even if their class was not ready, ship them back immediately. Heavy, complex projectors have had to be hauled from storage, set up in the classrooms, operated skillfully. Films have been "an intrusion in the classroom rather than a help," says Howell.

Smash Success. To beat the logistics problem and find out just how effective film can be when teachers can integrate it naturally into their instruction, E.B.F. and Bell & Howell Co. have sent $650,600 worth of films and new, automatic-threading sound projectors to schools in wealthy Shaker Heights, Ohio, a slum area of Washington, D.C., suburban Daly City, Calif., and rural Terrell, Texas. Researchers from Ohio State University are evaluating the three-to four-year experiment under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. Although the researchers' verdicts are months away, teachers and students already consider Project Discovery a smash success.

In Shaker Heights, each of Mercer School's 28 classrooms has a 16-mm. projector and a screen in a corner, which often pulls down in front of the room's television receiver. The firstfloor film center contains 600 wellcatalogued movies and 1,100 filmstrips (movie film to be projected one frame at a time, like slides).

Messing with Creation. Mercer's teachers are free to use the movies any way they see fit; the fifth grade's Mrs. Blanche Brack says film producers have been "horrified" at the way teachers have been "messing about with their creation." She prefers to show fragments of many films, repeatedly stopping the action to quiz the kids on what they just saw, what they expect next. She had her pupils draw up their own narration to a filmstrip on the "Causes of the Revolution" to replace the high-school level commentary that came with it. Her fifth-grade colleague, Eleanor Cohen, normally turns off movie sound tracks, delivers her own explanations, repeats film segments so that she "can control the speed of the learning progress." She finds this far preferable to the fixed programming of educational television, which she considers "too much of a dictator."

Kindergarten Teacher Irene Patterson asks her children about spring, gets murmured answers about birds and flowers, finds that the topic becomes vivid and exciting to the kids after they view a film showing buds bursting into leaves through speeded-up film. A similar movie, also speeded up, shows how a caterpillar spins a cocoon, emerges as a splendid monarch butterfly--an experience no textbook or teacher or even nature can otherwise convey.

Mercer School's bright students (average IQ is 118) jam the tiny film center after school to view films on their own. They have also been permitted to take projectors and films home on weekends, leading entire families--even neighborhoods--to turn off Gunsmoke and watch movies on the operation of jet aircraft, modern life of Eskimos, human anatomy, basic principles of electricity. Despite all the accent on viewing, students are not bored when they turn to books. The films arouse the children's interests, say the teachers, and broaden their vocabulary. Circulation in the school's 12,000-volume library has grown steadily since Project Discovery started.

Sensory Impact. Enthusiasm is just as high at Washington's all-Negro Scott Montgomery School, where three-fourths of the students' families earn less than $3,000 a year, and half have only one parent at home. The films, say's Negro Principal Nathaniel Dixon, let the school "take these children to places where they have never been--to distant lands, to the outer limits of space, to the world beneath the sea, to farm and factories." He finds that "the sensory impact of motion, sound and color" stimulates slow learners. Besides that, first-graders are proud that even they can operate the projectors, and Fourth Grade Teacher Irvin Gordy says that the films also eliminate disciplinary problems, which usually arise "because students are uninterested--and once discipline is controlled, teaching and learning are easy."

Project Discovery teachers generally like the variety of films available, although they would prefer more short films, each on a narrowly specific topic, and more biographical films. Teachers at Scott Montgomery would like to see more films that do not portray "white middle-class suburban America." It would now cost other schools about $16 per pupil per year to duplicate the project's facilities, but this cost will decline as demand increases. Despite the advantages, no one expects films to become more than just another of a teacher's many tools. The teacher, says E.B.F.'s Howell, "must always remain in control--and remain indispensable."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.