The Decoy Duck

by Anna Ryan

from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1997, 17-20

Abstract

The process of transforming English 273-274, Woman Writers I and II, from print-based to distance learning courses was time-consuming, creative, and productive.

“Fifteen dollars a second!” I shrieked incredulously. “Fifteen dollars a second? You can’t be serious, can you? Even for an educational institution?” I asked in a softer voice. I was talking with the archivist at the NBC News Video Archives in New York. I had called requesting the fee for use of a six-minute segment of an interview with a writer for an instructional video I was making for my course, Women Writers II, offered through the Extended Learning Institute of Northern Virginia Community College. The interview with Anne Perry, a popular Scottish writer of English Victorian mysteries, had occurred on the Today Show on one of her recent book tours to America. I was stunned to realize that the segment I wished to use would cost $4,500. My VCCS Professional Development Grant to do twelve hours of video instruction for my two courses, Women Writers I and II, included six hours of released time and a $750 budget for production costs. I certainly did not have enough to secure news footage from a major network, I soon concluded, once I followed up this call to NBC with one to ABC. Perry had also been interviewed on ABC’s 20/20, and I was quoted a similar price. This lesson was but the first of many in my taking the leap into video production for these courses which I had taught for some time with only print materials.

Of course, I was at first loathe to see myself on television since none of us on television looks like what we conceive ourselves to look like; but putting vanity aside, I knew that video instruction would very probably improve retention and increase students’ learning and appreciation of the literary works chosen. I did not want my presentations, however, to be merely talking heads, which some of our early ELI course video presentations were. Nor did I want my presentations to be limited by the restrictive time blocks on local cable television stations— roughly 29 minutes. Such arbitrary time constraints did not suit my material. For discussion of some writers, I knew I would need only 20 minutes to give students some meaningful direction and comment on their reading. With other writers, however, I would need longer blocks of time. I did not wish to have to make my comments fit a prescribed time. I also did not like the idea of distance learners being tied to a cable television schedule since one great advantage of distance learning is time flexibility. So I talked to my ELI director about the possibility of my making for each course a six-hour video cassette that would be reproduced by an outside company and sold to the students in the bookstores with their textbooks. He agreed to what has become a most successful experiment.

Once I applied for and received a professional development grant, I undertook the project with great enthusiasm, having absolutely no idea how time-consuming the process would eventually become. The first task was to write the scripts that both the TV production staff and I had to have in order to time the presentations. We could work only with one-hour tapes in shooting, so if a presentation were to be more than an hour long, there had to be a logical place in the material to pause to insert a new tape. I could not meander in any way as I sometimes do in a classroom presentation. I also had to submit copy for the graphics to be done for presentations on the various writers—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte among others¾in the first semester course to twentieth century writers such as Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, May Sarton, and Nadine Gordimer in the second. Since I did not wish to be merely a talking head, I also had to secure some interesting visuals. First on the list were pictures of the sixteen writers. Some hours of research led me to picture agencies such as Brown Brothers in Pennsylvania and the Betteman Collection in New York, which has one of the most extensive catalogues of pictures, news photos, and reproductions of paintings or drawings of famous figures in history. The process of negotiating fees for using, getting, and returning the slides or actual photos, and making sure that the proper credit was given to the lending agency at the end of each segment was a laborious process. Indeed, in the course of making the twelve hours of video instruction I needed a full-time secretary to handle the immense number of details involved. I often wondered what kind of staff Ken Burns has for the making of his documentaries!

Besides photos of a scowling Sarah Orne Jewett and a facsimile copy of the only daguerreotype of a dour Emily Dickinson, for example, I needed other visuals. For Frankenstein, I scoured shops in D.C., Baltimore, and New York looking for posters of old Frankenstein movies (even the bad ones) to use as a collage of recurring images while I talked about the novel. Of course, the Kenneth Branagh film version was in current release then, so I was able to find several very eerily-lit, creepy scenes depicted on posters that nicely dramatized my discussion of the Shelley novel.

The search for fascinating imagery was not the only time-consuming matter in preparation for taping; I also had to do some review of recent scholarly research published on many of the writers. For example, I went back to the original newspaper reviews of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening when it was published in 1899 since some biographers credit the devastating reviews with inducing in her a depression that led to ill health that resulted in her death five years later. In my research, I realized that she was very powerfully affected by the searing reviews, but that they led directly to her death is not substantiated by the medical facts.

My review of commentary and scholarship by and on May Sarton led to going on location to tape. Many of her journals record her love of nature and flower gardening, which are often with specific symbolic subtexts in her poetry and novels. I did my presentation of some of her poetry and her novel Anger in Green Spring Garden Park in Fairfax , Virginia, on a breezy early spring day with my hair “blowing in the wind.” The segment on Nadine Gordimer’s short story collection of South African life, Six Feet of Earth, was also shot on location in July heat in the small Charlottesville apartment of a South African woman who was joined by a country woman. Their experiences in growing up in South Africa were immensely different since one is white and privileged and the other “colored.” The Gordimer stories so powerfully detailing apartheid became much more meaningful as these two women told of their lives in countries they both will return to soon. Of course, arranging this discussion took innumerable phone calls and letters and preparation of questions in advance. Another of the segments, on Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, is a panel discussion of student views which I arranged by selecting appropriate students—a white young female, a British woman, a black female, and a Hispanic male—from my campus’s classes at the time. Working around students’ schedules to find a convenient time to go into the studio to shoot the hour-long discussion was quite a feat, though well worth the effort since they simply amazed me. I had in no way suggested to the students what direction the discussion should take, nor had they talked to each other in advance of taping. Being impressed with the fact that they were doing this discussion for future students, they each had done thoughtful and careful preparation and were eager to talk on camera.

Not all writers the students read were included on the videos. For English 273 seven lessons were taped on the following authors: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Anne Perry, Edith Wharton, and Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The taped segments in the English 274 are on Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, May Sarton, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Margaret Atwood.

The two segments that are most frequently cited in evaluations of the courses are the interview with the South African women and the student presentation on Morrison’s Sula. A student recently said that the panel discussion on Sula made her feel part of a “real” class. Another wrote, “I knew nothing of apartheid in South Africa before this course. I’ve learned so much.” Another, less involved with the serious issues of the Gordimer reading, wrote,”I didn’t know South Africa didn’t have television until 1972.”

The retention and completion rates for Women Writers I and II are very high, in part, I’m sure, since they draw a selective clientele. Generally, the students are older, returning students, many of whom already have college degrees and are seeking personal growth or teacher recertification. I have had a number of men take the courses, some for better understanding of women, they tell me. One wrote that as a single parent of two young girls he wants to know as much as he can to help them grow into their full potential.

The last and most time-consuming part of doing these video lessons was editing. Thanks to the great skill of our ELI producer and editor David Ahrens, who is a veteran of “big time” television work, the presentations are highly professional. He was able to edit out my numerous errors, particularly audio glitches such as when I called Edith Wharton Emily Wharton, having just a few days before taped the Emily Dickinson segment. He covered the numerous film edits with ingenious titles and liners and chose music that complements the entire presentation. (I chose the music entitled The Death of Art for the second cassette. Can you guess how I was feeling at this point?) We spent over 30 hours together in the editing of the taped material. It was a slow, agonizing process, but one that resulted in a product of which I am very proud.The only thing he could not change was my performance. In the first series of lessons shot, I never found the eye of the camera. I was always “looking askant.” For this second series, the director, Theresa Donnel, taped a white decoy duck, usually decoration in the bookcase of the set, right above the eye of the camera. In these lessons I am finally looking straight into the eye of the camera and the eyes of my students.

I will go back into the studio soon to make video lessons for another distance education course I teach. I am going to do it again even though the process of making these twelve hours of instructional video was the most time-consuming, detailed work I have done in the last thirty years of college teaching (since that first year of teaching, the one we all still remember vividly). But I’ve got to find the decoy duck in the prop room before we start taping!

Dr. Anna G. Ryan, Professor of English, has taught at the Woodbridge Campus and the Extended Learning Institute of Northern Virginia Community College for 22 years. She holds degrees from Texas Tech University, Rice University, and the State of NY at Stony Brook. She has published literary articles and short stories, 3 of which have appeared in the Northern Virginia Review.