ABSTRACT
During the mid-twentieth century, the Ohio State University’s Bureau of Educational Research was an influential venue for the development of ideas about new media in classrooms, advancing forms of audiovisual pedagogy and influencing today’s teaching methods. One of the ways its views and findings circulated was through the production of instructional films about audiovisual pedagogy, largely directed toward the training of teachers. Through an examination of the production and distribution circumstances of such Robert W. Wagner-produced films, this chapter reveals the dominant ideological frames for the advancement of new technological conditions. These frames show the way audiovisual advocates and experts sought to establish “schools for tomorrow” as a flexible media environment that featured media making. Doing so, they fortified conditions and discourses about the new technological society and the technocratic citizenry appropriate to those conditions.
