Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and Video

Abstract

For as long as television has been a darling of the commercial entertainment industries, it has been an object of interest for educators and businesses. The same can’t be said for media studies, which has long focused on the former mode—the domestic medium and the popular art—at the expense of the latter. This article corrals sources written in the 2010s from within the field, as well as research from scholars in education, sociology, management, and training. It begins with analyses of nontheatrical film used to train workers, educate students, promote capitalism, complete work processes, and other applications that television would take up beginning in the 1940s. It then addresses resources that would be equally helpful to scholars of educational and industrial television: useful television theory, archives, and trade publications. The remainder divides industrial and educational television into their own sections to allow for a more granular look at the key debates and practices articulated to each. Industrial television (ITV) comprises a wide range of uses. In the postwar era, goods producers used closed-circuit television (CCTV) to extend workers’ oversight of expanding manufacturing operations. Around the same time, larger corporations began experimenting with theater television for shareholder meetings and special training events. Videotape (1956) made television financially accessible for more companies that used the open-reel format for taped self-observation. The watershed moment for ITV was the introduction of the videocassette (the U-matic became available in 1971), which dramatically expanded both users and uses of the medium and supported an ITV-programming publishing industry. Eventually ITV—in the form of business satellite television (BTV, mid-1980s–1990s)—would provide national and international employers the capability to beam morale-boosting and informational messages to its employees in a period of globalization and worsening working conditions. Educators took advantage of many of these same televisual affordances, although to different ends. Resources here focus on educators’ experiments with novel modes of audiovisual pedagogy, as well as their attempts to bend CCTV, videotape, and broadcast to fulfill instructional needs and address crises in American public education, from teacher shortages to racialized inequalities. One of the major narrative arcs of educational television (ETV) is the battle for dedicated broadcast frequencies and the founding of American public broadcasting. Not only did these victories establish a foothold for educators within broadcasting (who continued to use the medium for direct instruction, though these applications were overwhelmed in the turn to broad cultural-uplift programming and funding shortages), they provoked debates over the capacity of commercial television to inform and educate. While PBS is well covered elsewhere, included here are sources that illustrate the contours of discussions that sought to define the meaning of “educational” television.