Dismantling the Dispositif: Social Science Experiments in the Classroom

The following is a case study of a series of pioneering tests with visual teaching aids in elementary and secondary schools in the United States, conducted between 1920 and 1923. As it happened, these tests coincided with similar experiments in the Netherlands. Although unbeknown to each other, the innovative aspect of both studies consisted in taking their research into the classroom. With this measure experimenters in both countries hoped to collect well-founded evidence to refute what appeared to them as unfounded or overstated claims about photography-based, visual teaching aids, film in particular. While the experimenters forwent a controlled lab situation, by entering the classroom they nonetheless introduced adjustments into everyday educational practice, whether it concerned the activities required of pupils, staff, the interactions between them, and/or the composition of test groups. Thus, they changed what today one would call the educational dispostif: the arrangement of a presentation (a lesson by staff) in a designated space (a classroom with its equipment) before an assemblage of attendees (a class of pupils). Although the term educational dispositif was not current at the time, the experimenters did comment on the elements that constitute it. And given elementary and secondary education’s time-honoured routines, they were bound to stumble upon these elements’ interdependence and reconsider, albeit not in so many words, their conception of what goes on in a class. I largely focus on the American experiments
because they are more numerous, more invasive, and more extensively discussed in the 1924 book Visual education. The Dutch experiments, on which I published elsewhere, consisted of two, less invasive series, conducted in one secondary school, and were reported on in two articles, in 1923, and one English translation, in 1924.