Teaching with the Screen

Drawing upon my doctoral research and 25 years of experience as a video and media teacher at colleges and high schools, Teaching with the Screen explores the ways in which education is transformed by the media. It looks at cinema, television, and digital media (AI and video games in particular) as these media come into contact with classroom teachers and students in a variety of educational settings. From the Blackboard Jungle to military simulations for DARPA. Includes a chapter on my own experience teaching television production to high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and a handy guide to teaching with the media. Published by Routledge.

Introduction: Mr. Tamberlin, My Art Teacher

An introduction to what I believe is exemplary teaching. Mr. Tamberlin, my high school art teacher, in all his glory. Thrift store band outfits, wild mane of Beethoven hair, and ubiquitous black light posters and rock and soul music blaring in his classroom. I’m sure he had no idea how much he set the course for my creative and professional life.

Blackboard Jungle: Teachers in the Movies

Blackboard Jungle (1955) as the template for movies that feature teachers and their unruly students. Hysteria around juvenile delinquency, the teacher as savior, and lessons learned inside and outside the classroom. Includes the Grand Guignol pleasures of the genre of the Hollywood high school film – student thugs threatening teachers, teachers killing students, teachers killing themselves and their careers, and for some, redemption. Many lessons indeed.

Trauber TV: Teaching Television in High School

My experience as a television and video production teacher at a large high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Students produced and aired an eight minute news and entertainment television show nearly every morning throughout the school year. And I trained students and supervised production for 6 years. A snapshot of technology use in public education during the 1990s.

Steve and the ICT: Military Simulations, Virtual Humans, and Videogames

Artificial Intelligence and its discontents as it stood in the early 2000s. Focuses on simulation modeling created for the US Army at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Their work leans heavily on cognitive science, cinema and television, video gaming, and the discourses of science fiction.

How to Teach with the Teaching Screens: Sentences on Media Education

My teaching philosophy formatted as a riff on Sol Lewitt’s 1969 Art-Language text “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” If I have any wisdom to give to others based on my research and experience teaching, here it is in a concise 2-pages.

Buy a copy or recommend to your local library or book club: