Dismantling the Dispositif: Social Science Experiments in the Classroom 1

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,­visual­teaching­aids,­film­in­particular.­While­the­experimenters­forwent­a­controlled­lab­ 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.


Introduction
Between 1920 and 1923 a research programme with visual teaching aids was conducted at the University of Chicago Elementary School, public schools in wider Illinois (Evanston, Joliet, Oak Park, Urbana) as 4 schools because of the novelty of the motion picture. In the effort to keep pace with the commercial exhibitor the schools frequently have disregarded quality. 16 OneofFreeman'sexperimentersconcurred,statingthatonlyaverysmallnumberoffilmsproduced for the classroom 'have been planned by experienced educators who have collaborated with experienced producers. Sometimes one, and sometimes the other have acted, but rarely have the two acted together'. 17 This critical stance is not surprising given that, besides dedicated establishments such as the  21 It is hard to tell, though, whether this imprecise number would tally with a survey among 1,500 schools, conducted in 1922 by the journal The Educational Screen, which showed that '55.1% of the respondent schools reported that they had no visual equipment and did not intend to purchase any in the near future'. 22 Nonetheless, a nationwide survey conducted in 1923 by McClusky did show that '[s]lides were the most widely used visual media' in schools. 23 Asmallernumberofschoolsboastedaprogrammewithfilminoperationforsometime.

Laboratories
The most salient and consequential aspect of these experiments was, of course, their location: there where education is provided. This setting featured a long-lived curriculum of educational methods that resembled, to some extent, the experiment's goal and setup: measuring the effectiveness of teaching methods by testing pupils. Still, the research had not been commissioned by staff or management to look into questions or problems concerning visual teaching aids, but was, as noted, self-initiated. The experimenters had to negotiate, therefore, with school administrations to gain entrance and secure the compliance and cooperation of staff and, implicitly, pupils for their tests.
Effectively, the research programme consisted of a number of temporary laboratories that mimicked regular activities-lessons-yet adapted them to research requirements, such as trial experiments or immediate testing. 29 Meetingtheseandotherconditionswasnotwithoutitsdifficulties.Themostimportant adaptation was that the results obtained were meant for the sake of the experiments, not the pupils.
Hence, I focus on the experiments' mode of operation rather than their outcome and discuss a number of circumstances, either contingent or systemic, that the reports evince. To the former the reader is alerted in Visual education's opening pages: Weneednotreviewherethedifficultieswhichattachtosuchscientificmeasurementsnor thesourcesoferrorwhichthrustthemselvesuponourattention.Thescientificstudentis painfullyawareofthesedifficultiesandsourcesoferror,sinceitishisbusinesstoovercome 6 them. Nor need we dwell upon the necessity of resorting to opinion-based upon careful observation and a recognition of general psychological truths-to supplement our as yet confessedlyincompletescientificstudies. 30 Sure enough, errors had been detected. In one test, for instance, 'a critical examination of the test questions showed that some of their answers could actually be found in a subsequent question'. 31 As well now and then experimenters had to deal with a recalcitrant reality. For one of the larger experimentsaschoolsystemhadfinallybeenfoundthathadsufficientexperiencewithfilm instruction and was willing to cooperate. Even so, the late moment of starting precluded follow-up memory tests, as the earliest possible opportunity was the new school year when many of the participating 'eight-graders had been promoted and scattered either in secondary schools or elsewhere'. 32 Furthermore, a few freak occurrences were mentioned: the noise of parents visiting a school,whichdisturbedastereopticonlecture,oraninfluenzaepidemicandthesubsequent vaccination campaign that broke 'the regularity of attendance of the pupils'. 33 More systemic conditions were related to methodology. Firstly, the abovementioned testing methods show what kind of answers the experimenters targeted. The memory as well as completion, multiple-answer, Yes and No or right-and-wrong tests predominantly aimed at retrieving factual information that had been presented in one way and/or another and was scored by points. These scores, in their turn, were taken as indicative of a teaching aid's effectiveness.
In other words, 'The pupil who remembers most (of whatever it is that is considered worth remembering) has performed best'. 34 Besides a few experiments that measured memory by the performance of practical skills-position and penholding in handwriting, making an object, and baking an omelette, all after verbal and/or visual demonstrations-, by and large the relative, didactic effectiveness of visual teaching aids was measured by the number of correct answers.
Rather than addressing the affordances of visually presented information this approach speculated as to the differences between the results obtained. Furthermore, pupils' thoughts or opinions, in the form of essays or drawings based on the instruction materials for instance, were hardly addressed.
The comparative measurement of a teaching aid's educational outcome, secondly, was precisely that: a comparison that had no absolute value. A contemporaneous study of teaching methods formulated such lack of relativisation most cogently: It is entirely possible, of course, to compare two methods both of which are poor. The results of such a study may indicate that one is poorer than the other, but, obviously, the reader is not warranted in assuming that the better of the two methods is necessarily good. It may still be so poor that its use is not warranted at all. On the other hand, two very good methods may be compared in which case the poorer of the two may still be much better than other methods which might be used. 35 Thirdly, the programme's focus on memory overshadowed other cognitive skills. The transient images offilmandlanternprojectionswereusuallyshownonce,eitherwithorwithoutanorallesson-under the latter condition memory was about the only thing that could be tested. For instance, in one assignment,afterhavingwatchedanindustrialfilm,pupilsweregivenapacketofrandomlymixed photographstakenfromscenesofthefilmandwereaskedtoarrangethemintheorderinwhichthey had appeared. 36 In this and similar assignments, of course, high scores did not necessarily demonstrate if testees had understood what they had seen.
Fourthly, to give their experiments an air of exactness the scientists adapted some of the procedures of school life, especially the ways in which test groups were composed. Most tests took place in classrooms, but not always among classmates. Instead, methods of block randomisation were applied: class-sized, parallel units composed not only on the basis of grade and age, but also on teachers' estimates, and intelligence, reading, and/or preliminary tests in the subject examined.
(TheDutchstudiesdifferedsignificantlyinthisrespect.Astheexperimenterswerespecifically interested in the results' distribution over age cohorts, they left the selected classes unaltered.) Regulargroupsize,however,wasoftensacrificedinordertogetcomparableunitsbydropping pupils who did not match with peers of the same age-merely one of the constituent features-in a parallel group. 37 A second method was to work with test groups that were 'so large that individual differences could be assumed to counterbalance each other' and in which 'such general characteristics as age, race, social environment, and type of education' were assumed to be similar.
In fact, Freeman stated that this method ensured similarities between parallel-in this particular case, unaltered-groups, as the participating schools were all located in urban settings 'so that a variety of communities were [sic] represented'. 38 Overall, though, the research programme was methodologically unambitious, a disposition epitomised in Freeman's account of the randomisation process: 'The organization of parallel groups (…) in this manner insures that the error which might result from a wide divergence of abilities of the children is at least reduced to a comparatively small amount'. 39 This rather cavalier attitude about the programme's methodology may be the reason for the awkwardness of some of the experiments' design.
For instance, Freeman's quoted statement that city schools ensured the representation of 'a variety of communities' clashed with one of the larger experiments, on health-related behaviours-diet and hours of sleep-, for which pupils in the city of Joliet had to complete daily, self-report questionnaires over a period of six weeks. On analysis, though, a difference in results was found 'in those schools which represented the industrial class of the city' among whom the purchase of fresh fruit after the Christmas holidayfellvictimto'thestrictesteconomy'.Clearly,withthisexperimentofmostlyfifthgradersinall of Joliet's public schools (a total of 856 pupils) the experimenters had underestimated what the assumption of pre-test group characteristics might imply. 40 In another case, of two small, parallel groups that were instructed in a topic either with or without visual materials, the results of written compositions-one of three different tests-showed a strong favour of the visual group over the nonvisual group. The puzzled experimenters wrote: Itisdifficulttoknowhowtointerprettheseresults.Intestingtheresultsofsuchaprocedure (…), it is impossible to say precisely what we are testing. Are we testing the ability of the teachertousevisualaids?Arewetestingtheindividualfilmsandslides?Theonlytestwhich shows any real difference between the two groups is the composition test. This might be due to the greater stimulation of the visual methods, or it might be due to a difference in the composition ability of the two groups. 41 Allinall,thein-classexperiments'mannerofrandomisationrevealsthefirstoftwoconsequential effects: the problem of extrapolating the test results, not just to non-participating classes elsewhere, but also to those in which they were obtained. The reason is that after an experiment was done classesrevertedtotheirusualcompositionbasedonageandproficiency.Anditwasinpreciselythese regular classes that the cooperating schools had already provided visual means of instruction. Within this 'wide divergence of abilities' all kinds of bias-the industrial class!-would blur, if not invalidate, any conclusion about visual teaching aids' didactic value. As a matter of fact, the reports provide no information about how, how often, and for what purposes a school used a visual teaching aid.
Effectively, then, the programme's results never left the laboratories.

Interaction
The rearrangements prompted by the experiments and the awkwardness they sometimes revealed also pointed to a lack of experience. For a pioneering programme this is to be expected, what with a number of relatively recent technologies and their even more recent introduction into classrooms.
AsFreemanacknowledged,'verylittleaccurateinformationconcerningthegeneralvalueoftextfilms (…) in comparison with other visual methods' was available. 43 Even tests might not have been 'well adapted to measure the results of visual education': The question has sometimes been raised in regard to these tests whether or not they measured the interest which is awakened in children by viewing motion pictures as compared with the interest they take in other modes of presentation. Various methods of measuring interest directly might be used, but none of them seem highly satisfactory. The questionnaire method is the prevailing one, but this is recognised generally as being not very reliable. It is undoubtedly true, however, that interest can be measured in a fairly satisfactory way indirectly. Even an information test is to some degree a measure of interest, because the pupil will derive more information from a subject in which he is interested or from a lesson which is presented in an interesting fashion than from one which is dull. 44 Thequotation'sfocuson'variousmethods'notwithstanding,itsfinalsubordinateclausesuggests that teacher-pupil interaction is pivotal for gauging visual teaching aids' effectiveness. This observation, however, was not followed through. Instead, Freeman advocates that pupils should be tested more reliably. Following the project's methodological reasoning this would have required even stricter adaptive measures, to the extent that teachers and pupils were turned into near-automatons who provide and respond to carefully selected stimuli. 45 Taking teacher-pupil interaction as a point of departure, I detail a number of issues the collected reports occasion.
Unlessonecaninterruptitsprojectionatwill,filmdoesnotalloweasyinterchangebetween teacher and class. But what is surprising is that the experiments' reports, irrespective of teaching aid tested, hardly mention normal, formal interactions, such as recitations or quizzes, let alone more spontaneousdialogue.Anexceptionisa'"film-talk"instruction[that]consistedofasingleprojection duringwhichteacherandpupilscarriedonarapid-firequestion-answerdiscussion(…)Thepupils were free to comment on anything they did not understand'. This method was compared with a 'slidetalk' and a 'print-talk' on identical topics. 46 Mainly, though, the reports recite instructions, oral lessons, and the reading out of purpose-made essays, all performed by experimenter or teacher alone. By the same token, the experiments' arrangements hampered teaching staff to work in their accustomed ways. The unfavourable effect of limiting teachers' repertoire to prepared texts was hinted at in the report of two experiments in which staff performed in fact a slightly less restricted role. During a series of comparative, practical assignments-making a reed mat and making a pasteboard box-staff functioned as 'demonstration instructor[s]': they showed pupils the making processwhileverballydrawing'theattentionofthegrouptothestepsintheprocess';instructionsby slides,stereographsorfilmwereaccompaniedbythesame,simultaneouslyspokentext.Ofallthese tests the combined live demonstration and oral explanation-i.e. without visual aids-scored highest.
Freeman conjectured: 'The superiority of the demonstration (…) must be in the personal relation of the instructor to the class and the ability of the instructor to adapt himself to the attitude of the pupils'. 49 As the term personal relationwasnotelaboratednorteachers'adaptivemovesspecified,it remains unclear if staff went beyond the spoken instruction proper and, for instance, addressed individual pupils who appeared to require help. The collected reports suffer overall from a lack of precision of these and other terms cited. To give another example, a report mentioned that 'even thoughtheteacher'sverbalinstructioncloselyfollowedtheoutlineofthefilm,thepresentationwas flexibleenoughtotypifythenormalclassroomsituation'.However,noinformationwasgivenasto what made it normal. Despite the account's detail, its author only mentions one formal, standard teaching method: '[t]he study period was followed by the recitation period'. 50 An important point to make here is that by generally disregarding instances of 'the normal classroom situation' the scientists' experiments missed ever so many opportunities to confront one of the industry's claims: visual aids will replace teachers. This, after all, had been a major consideration in devising the research programme. In the evaluative section of the book Freeman did not develop the point either, but stated merely that the superiority of demonstrations is 'evidence that the personal presence and activity of the teacher is an effective agency'. 51 Be that as it may, as no non-prescribedthat is, normal-activity, verbal or otherwise, was separately tested to support his statement, Freeman's words effectively remained 'opinion', too.
The opening paragraph of one experiment's report intimated the limits of the programme's approach: It is well-nigh impossible to control the complexity of elements in an educational experiment.
Hence the critical experimenter must constantly strive to reduce this intricacy to a point where more perfect control of all factors can be obtained. This restriction of the problem has one limitation. The results of the experiments will have a correspondingly narrow application. 52

Nico de Klerk
The measure to gain 'more perfect control', however, focused on the 'narrow application' precisely: theteachingaid(inthisparticularexperimenttwopurpose-madefilmsfromwhichsubsequently 'sections' for slide projections and stereographs were made. 53 ) The reasoning appears to be that withtherestrictionsimposedonpupils-testgroupmatchingandadjusting;completing assignments-and on staff-mostly reading out ready-made texts-the effectiveness of the visual aids could be established without 'noise'. But what is noise to one is standard practice to another. This observation of an understandable misinterpretation apparently was no reason to critically evaluatethechoiceoffilm,letalonetheexperimentasawhole,eventhoughtheauthor acknowledged that a teaching aid's didactic value is less an independent outcome than a result of teachers' interpositions and interactions with pupils. It is only in the programme's evaluations, besides the cited remark of teachers' 'effective agency', that Freeman more candidly asserts the limitations of 'various forms of concrete experience represented in visual education', as they depend on 'the nature of the instruction to be given' (along with 'pupils' previous acquaintance' with a subject). He expands on this statement, writing: The contrast which is drawn here is between concrete experience, on the one hand, and the comparing, analyzing, and generalizing operations on the other hand. The contention is that these latter ways of working over experience and of converting raw experience into thought are very much facilitated by language, if they are not, in fact, largely dependent upon it. Certainly communicationofgeneralorabstractideasisveryclumsyanddifficultwithoutlanguage. 55 Indeed, to think otherwise is to depart from the standard practice of staff introducing, explaining or framing a teaching aid, of whatever kind, and its content. And not just that. Because what I consider the second consequential effect of these experiments in situ is that by eliminating interchange with a class and regimenting its 'divergence of abilities' the experimenters deprived themselves of the possibility to observe the operation of the ways the curriculum is customarily organised, discussed, understood, rehearsed, and tested. Thus they dismantled what nowadays one would call the educational dispositif.

Routines
The term educational dispositif is an instance of a pragmatic model of performative arrangements that isconstitutedofthreeelements.Thefirstistheperformance (or presentation) whether in an educational,factual,officialorentertainingsense,executedbyoneormoreperformersdeliveringan instruction, speech, plea, judgement, lecture, sermon, show, drama, etc., live and/or recorded. Second, the designated space where this performance takes place, such as a classroom, courtroom, lecture hall, churchortheatre,includingtheirpodiumtechnologies,suchaslighting,soundamplificationor projection facilities and screens, as well as their seating arrangements for, thirdly, the assemblage of attendees to whom the performance is addressed. Proposed by Frank Kessler, this pragmatic model of theperformativedispositif,whileinitiallyappliedtothelanternlecture,issufficientlyabstractto describe other manifestations. 56 While his positional designations, or 'poles,' emphasise these elements' interdependence, I prefer to use the more general terms mentioned above. Performance replaces what Kessler called the textual pole, as his term does not immediately denote non-verbal or compositeperformances,particularlyinthearts(thinkofdance,musicalconcerts,silentfilm screenings or, indeed, lantern lectures). I replaced the performance context pole with designated space to bring out the performative affordances of various venues, whether traditional or unconventional.
And I use assemblage of attendees instead of user-spectator to accentuate that within an assembly of peoplegatheredataperformativeeventafixedorintermittentdivisionofrolesmayoccur(notablyin courts of law, church services or classrooms). 57 These three elements did not just happen to come together, but function in an interdependent andmoreorlessfamiliar,predictableway.Thatistosay,eachofthemcreatesspecificandmutual expectations that are based on custom, reputation, and/or publicity. Indeed, the interdependence of the performative dispositif is a historical, socialised (or socialisable-the model must allow for innovations)process:anyofitsinstancesrequiresmoreorlessnarrowlydefinedrulesofdeportment bybothperformersandattendeesaswellasmoreorlessnarrowlydefinedspatialarrangementswhatonemightcallspecificityconditions.(Ofcourse,aseverystreetartistknows,spacescanbe designated on the spot, but it depends entirely on their performative qualities whether or not passers-by decide to become attendees.) A classroom and its arrangement of desks, seats, and teaching aids (board, wall charts, maps, pointer, models, textbooks, experimental table, language lab software, projection facilities, etc.) allow staff to organise their instruction in distinct ways, including the allocation of tasks or turns at speaking or singing to one, some or all pupils at a time. That this is habitually accomplished is because '[m]uch of what goes on is conditioned by the need to maintain orderly relationships among from 20 to 30 or more persons in a relatively small space. Demands for such order are conveyed to students early, and their socialisation into it is rather thoroughly achieved before the end of the early elementary grades'. 58 The setups of Freeman's project, however, by shearing all that might interfere with their measurementsofeducationaloutcome,showhowthesignificanceoftheseingrained,interdependent considerations was misjudged. In general, the experimenters seemed to have been unworried that their safeguards might affect established institutional and organisational principles and procedures.
Indeed, I should review my earlier statement and propose that rather than lessons-which allow, if not require, verbal interchange-the experiments in effect largely mimicked exams, very formal arrangementsinwhichstaffprovidesbriefings,afterwhichpupilsareexpectedtoworkoutthe assignments solitarily (with these experiments' additional disadvantage of minimal preparation, which, in its turn, limited the cognitive skills targeted).
In one report, however, an experimenter did express his reservations about the programme's experimental environment: [I]t is realized that a teaching problem involves a complex of many factors impossible of absolute control, so that even the 'constants' are variables-and are very far removed from the mechanical identity possible in a physics laboratory. With such shifting data, it seems inappropriate to employ elaborate mathematical computations, whose niceties give a false impression of the accuracy of the data. For the most part, simple averages (means) were used as being most familiar to the teachers, and most appropriate to the degree of accuracy exhibited in the data. 59 This observation corresponds with a number of hesitant or quizzical remarks-some quoted abovethat are strewn throughout the book. I do not think they are critical of the programme's implicit, behaviouristorientationnorofthecooperatingschools'teachingpracticesperse;bothbeinginthe mainstream, these choices are warranted. Rather, they appear to query why the programme stopped short of its goal instead of addressing the 'complex of many factors', including teacher-pupil interaction. After all, the latter's deliberate removal for the sake of 'uncontaminated' test scores reveals the experimenters' awareness of it as a routine practice.
Modern-day routines are a relatively recent sociological concern, yet their very everydayness and persistence are not mere experiential facts, but longtime institutional supports as well. Routines and the ways institutions operate are mutually reinforcing phenomena. 60 School life, ever since the spread of compulsory primary education in the late-modern era, is among the most widely experienced institutional routines and recognisably alike over more than two centuries, changes and local differences notwithstanding. 61 From this perspective one of the most astonishing comments in Visual education was calling the rivalry that emerged after dividing classes in two sections 'an artificialstimulus'. 62 This view of rivalry as aberrant rather than customary stands for a more general disacknowledgement of the dynamic that goes on within as well as between classes. It ignores competitiveness and ranking as ingredients of pupils' motivation, possibly even a sense of identity during school hours, which in the experiments' more uniformly composed units might have been less conspicuous or, given the transience of the experimental groups, urgent. Creating identical, small groups on the basis of age, IQ, readings skills, etc. could have been appropriate when, for instance, the experiments were meant to recommend changes in the distribution of pupils over classes and concomitantadaptationsofaschool'scurriculum;inotherwords,changingtheroutineinorderto reform the institution. But that was not the programme's intention. In fact, its rearrangements of pupils were a far cry from contemporaneous, innovative practices, notably those by John Dewey, What, then, makes this early-1920s series of pioneering experiments so intriguing, even though their methodology was not quite up-to-date, its ways of using visual teaching aids were often indistinguishable from language-based instruction, while its insights 'were largely ignored and were not rediscovered until almost two decades later?' 63 The reason, surely, is not to demonstrate the progress made in the past 100 years. Not too long ago two researchers wrote: subjects, or some aspects of subjects, by means of pictures alone. In some cases they resort to verbal discussion and explanation to a very large extent'. 65 A few lines onwards Freeman concludes-not interprets-that '[t]he present study gives no support to a belief that pictures may be substituted for language'.Rather,itssignificanceconsistsintheencounterwith'certainkindsofexperienceofa concretesort'and,accordingly,headvisestorestricteducationalfilms'totheirpeculiarprovince' i.e. the display of moving objects. But even then the test results were not unequivocal. 66 (Film, incidentally,isthemainsubjectinthissection;alltheothervisualmethodstestedappearin supporting roles at best.) But the most interesting aspect of this concluding section is its inconsistency, as it bestows praise on standard procedures, notably teacher-pupil interaction, despite its near-complete deletion from the experiments. An exception is the one in which it was found that 'carefully prepared oral commentbytheteacheraccompanyingamotionpicturefilm,contrarytothealmostuniversal opinion of visual education specialists, adds to its effectiveness'. 67 But other remarks concerning teacher-pupil interaction were based on non-tested observations. For example: Theexplanation,discussion,orelaborationofthematerialwhichisshowninthefilmisa function of language. Language can be used fully as effectively if not more effectively by the teacherasbythefilm.Furthermore,theclassshouldtakealargeshareinthediscussion. 68 Andinhisfinalpoint,inresponsetotheobjectionthatvisualaidsmightmakeeducation'too easy' by merely having a subject 'presented' to pupils, Freeman recommends that a subject should be 'a working part of [their] mental machinery. To provide for this we must encourage discussion, independent reading, problem and project work, and the like.' 69 These interpretations reveal and justify the use of educational dispositif in relation to these experiments, despite the term's much later introduction. In particular the book's acknowledgment of a number of routines during which teacher and pupils engage each other in talk (in 'language'), whetherregulated,asinrecitationorquizzes,ormorefreeform,asindiscussionsorQ&As,confirms the phenomenon of pragmatic interdependence and an awareness of its historical continuity, albeit by another name. It is one more reason why the reports collected in Visual education, their attempted innovative approach notwithstanding, provided no strikingly novel recommendations.
Recently, two Dutch educators, on the YouTube channel De Nieuwe Wereld (The New World), discussed their experiences with online teaching during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. 70 It was a discussion reminiscent of Visual education, as both speakers itemised the drawbacks of virtual education: a disbanded audience (absences, e.g. by switching off the screen or simply opting out), in dispersed, non-designated spaces and their various conventions of deportment (students dressed in pyjamas, caressing their pets, asides to housemates, etc.), and the lack of focused interaction and other obstacles put in the way between teacher and pupils (e.g. screen sharing, no acknowledged eye contact).
Today, when the notion of educational dispositif is widely recognized, one would hope it may function as an analytical tool to challenge the claims made by virtual teaching's advocates and businesses.