Vietnam and the Media
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article.htm?id=6978
Published: 4/29/2009
The people that brought you innovative social studies curricula about
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and African-American history in
New York City are now tackling the Vietnam War and its portrayal in
the American media.
Margaret Crocco and Bill Gaudelli, both faculty members in TC's
Social Studies and Education program, are leading the design of a new
multimedia curriculum called "Vietnam Now," which is based on footage
from a 13-part documentary on Vietnam that aired on WGBH public
television in Boston during the 1980s. Crocco and Gaudelli have been
given access not only to the 20 hours of documentary segments that
were actually broadcast, but also to many additional hours of footage
that have never been publicly shown.
The course is being funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum
and Library Services awarded to the WGBH Media and Library Archives,
the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Columbia University.
Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), under
the direction of Columbia and TC faculty member Frank Moretti, is the
lead partner for Columbia with WGBH. CCNMTL is working with Teachers
College, the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Columbia
University Department of History.
"Vietnam Now"is being offered on a pilot basis to an initial group of
secondary and college educators who will gather at Teachers College
in late June. That group will not only have an opportunity to work
with the newly digitized materials but will also hear talks by guest
faculty, including noted 1960s cultural historian Todd Gitlin and
Vietnam War historian Charles Armstrong, both at Columbia, as well as
experts on the use of digital media in teaching history and Vietnam
War veterans.
The use of documentary footage is central to the whole effort, Crocco
and Gaudelli say, with the curriculum focusing as much on media
portrayal of the war as it does on the war itself.
"There is as much truthiness as truth in a documentary, at least
potentially," says Crocco, chair of TC's Arts and Humanities
Department, who two years ago led the creation of TC's "Teaching The
Levees" curriculum. That work, which was distributed to 30,000
schools, colleges, and community groups nationwide, also keyed off a
documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, by
director Spike Lee. "So it's especially interesting to consider what
we mean by truth in the context of history and representation, and to
help students understand that perspective is exceedingly important in
the teaching and learning of history."
"We did a segment in the "Teaching The Levees" curriculum that used
that famous moment of Bush in Jackson Square where the klieg lights
were set up. People thought, in fact, that electricity had come back
to downtown New Orleans. And when he was done with his presentation,
of course, the electricity vanished with him. So the power of media
to create a sense of reality is mediated by human agency, the way
that textbooks are, too.
And whether the medium is a book or a film, students need to be able
to get behind the curtain and see who's there manipulating what we
know and don't know about."
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the course offering is the
unvarnished nature of the combat footage that WGBH presented during the 1980s.
"Vietnam was really the last war in which the government did not
regulate the access of the media, and it was a time during which
television was bringing into Americans' living rooms the truly brutal
nature of war," Gaudelli says. "Since then, governments everywhere
have pretty much sanitized war coverage. So in many ways the
curriculum is a commentary on how the media presents social issues today."
Then, too, he says, aspects of the Vietnam conflict that were not at
the forefront of Americans' consciousness decades ago emerge now with
greater clarity.
"Using digital media resources makes it easier to get beyond the
dyadic representation of the War as the United States and Vietnam,"
Gaudelli says. "Vietnam was much more than thata regional war that
was also a proxy of the Cold War. The Russians were involved to some
degree. The Chinese were involved, the United States, of course, and
of course Laos, Cambodia, and the Indo-China Region as a whole. So
there really is a much broader global history here that can be told
with the documents we now have access to."
And then there are the current-day perspectives of people who were
themselves key actors in the conflict.
"We're going to have interviews of Robert McNamara, for example, who
was Secretary of Defense as the War was unfolding," Crocco says. "And
then we have the experience of The Fog of War, of Robert McNamara's
reflecting back on the decisions that were made, and the incredible
evolution of his perspective. [The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from
the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a documentary film by the director
Errol Morris.] So, to hear someone say, 'I was wrong,' or 'we were
misguided,' and to have that in someone's own words where one can
both hear as well as look at the body image, the messages that
McNamara sent as he sat on that stage in what was truly a
confessional experience, is quite amazing."
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