Seeing Through the Screen: Historicizing the Politics of Visual Technology in Cold War Teacher Education

• In Event: Temporal Geographies of the Teacher Education Curriculum: Interrogating Past-Future Curricular Worlds

Abstract

Today, visual technology is at the center of the “new normal” in education reform. This paper challenges the unquestioned good of technology by historicizing the post-sputnik teacher education reforms in the United States. Interdisciplinary theoretical framework (visual cultural studies, Cold War histories of systems theory and cognitive psychology, and sociology of science and technology) directs this study to explore the cultural politics of media technology in constructing teachers’ self-governing vision. Examining the assumptions and rationales that guided the inventions of closed-circuit television, one-way mirror, and microteaching in teacher education, the study informs how the autonomous teacher (who can see their own teaching practice on the screen) is made through the visualizing technological systems that are open but also enclosed.

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University