2022 | 21 | Education & TV: Histories of a Vision

The articles included in this issue take into consideration the relationship between television and education in its broadest sense, offering historical studies of television programming, national policies, audience attitudes and evolving socio-political contexts. It includes case studies of different broadcasters, specific educational programming initiatives, government or state education policy delivered through the television medium, the intersections between broadcast programmes and what is retained in television archives. They cover Turkey, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Finland and map the period from the 1960s to the present day. All of this material helps situate educational provision on television within broader histories of both television as a form and education as an overarching idea or objective.

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Approaches on the Relation between Television and Education from Public Service Broadcasting to Private Broadcasting in Turkey
İlaslan, Süleyman (2022)
The educational role of television has been one of the most discussed issues in almost every period, both for its technical development and dissemination and the quality of the programs. This study investigates the establishment of the relationship between television and education in Turkey, its definition and changes. The change in approach toward the educational role of television from the early years of television broadcasting to the first half of the 1990s, when multi-channel private broadcasting began, is analysed based on a comparative analysis. This change is attempted to be contextualized within broader social, economic, and political developments that shaped the educational role assigned to television.
Editorial: Education & TV. Histories of a Vision
Barber, Sian; Caoduro, Elena; Knörr, Kai (2022)
The articles included in this issue take into consideration the relationship between television and education in its broadest sense, offering historical studies of television programming, national policies, audience attitudes and evolving socio-political contexts. It includes case studies of different broadcasters, specific educational programming initiatives, government or state education policy delivered through the television medium, the intersections between broadcast programmes and what is retained in television archives. They cover Turkey, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Finland and map the period from the 1960s to the present day. All of this material helps situate educational provision on television within broader histories of both television as a form and education as an overarching idea or objective.
Educational Imperialism: Phantom India and The Non-Aligned Movement’s New World Information Order, 1969-1980
Ćulibrk, Jelena B. (2022)
This article explores how the BBC’s new educational format, the BBC-2 docu-series, became consequential to global politics in the “long” 1970s. While educational television in the U.S. has long been an issue of contention among liberal and conservative political factions, European educational television was often understood by European legislators and media scholars as central to public broadcasting. This paper challenges such assumptions by uncovering 1970s debates over media ownership. In June 1970, the BBC showcased its new documentary series, Phantom India to much disapproval from the Indian state and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). In response to the Phantom India affair, the NAM established its Commission for Broadcasting in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia in 1976. And yet, this article shows how ideological inconsistencies between Yugoslav broadcasting and its foreign policy undermined the NAM’s efforts to truly challenge Western media hegemony. Through close textual analysis and archival research, I offer a new understanding of educational television in the 1970s as a battleground for political and cultural dominance in the, then, faltering liberal world-system.
Educational Television Goes Digital. Children’s Television and Italian Public Service Broadcasting During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Carelli, Paolo; Sfardini, Anna (2022)
Since its origins in the Fifties, Rai has always paid attention to pedagogical aspects of its offer, consistent with its Catholic inspiration, combining different genres and divulgation approaches. In the first years of its history, Italian public television represented a “second school” for different targets, producing iconic titles in learning and training. A particular branch of educational approach to television content has often been represented by the direct involvement of school groups within the programs, in the logic of game and soft competition oriented to the transmission of knowledge. During the Covid-19 pandemic, with the closure of schools and the deployment of distance teaching, Rai recovered its pivotal role in learning practices through TV programs; in a period marked by an increase of television and audiovisual consumption, Italian public service broadcasting played a distinctive role in diversifying learning opportunities of Italian students and adults.
Look and Read: BBC School Television and Literacy Teaching 1957-1979
Barclay, Steven (2022)
The BBC began broadcasting school television in 1957. As school television developed in the 1960s, the BBC engaged with educational research and addressed national educational problems. Pedagogy in UK schools was becoming more progressive, and literacy was one of its most important and complex elements. UK Schools had struggled to achieve universal literacy among 7–9-year-olds. The series Look and Read and Words and Pictures used literacy research, adapted to the best method of presentation by television. The series took advantage of the developing televisual genres of children’s drama and animation.
Public Service Television as Education: Factual Programmes and The Media and Information Literacy (Mil) Policy Discourse
Jaakkola, Maarit; Mykkänen, Marjaana (2022)
This article examines factual programmes in public service television as a specific means of education, exploring and underscoring its educational function within the framework of media and information literacy (MIL) policy discourse. Factual programming forms a multi-stakeholder genre category that has gained relevance in times of democratic insecurities. It traditionally presents a source for cultivating cultural citizenship crucial to democracy but has been less explicitly examined as a source for advancing media education and literacy. in the context of Finland, which has been considered a forerunner both in its educational and media educational system, we inquire into the MIL dimensions of some of the newest multi-platform productions conducted in factual television. The results cast more light on the genre of factual programming and its underlying educational objectives, which paves way for further research on the MIL governance. The analysis also raises questions about their strategic relevance and future development in public broadcasters’ programming content.
The Great Transformation in Germany of 1989/90 from the View of Local Television (1990-1995)
Steinmetz, Rüdiger; Kretzschmar, Judith (2022)
From 1989/90 to 1995 there was a clash of cultures in Europe and in Germany, West vs. East, in which power was unequally distributed. The approximately 40 Saxon local television programmes from this time represent - with the “view from below,” from East German people in rural and metropolitan areas – unique historical sources for the cultural memory of one of the most important historical cuts in the 20th century. The examination of these nearly never seen programmes and their re-staging today contribute to the revision of established representations, positions and assessments of this period. This contribution deals with the results of our research projects since 2017 (ongoing). We conducted re-runs of local TV programme clips throughout East German federal states (Länder). In the viewers today they did re-actualise life experiences as well as buried, repressed or (only) learned, acquired contexts and feelings of the saddle period of 1990 to 1995. This way, explanations can be given for the roots of current social problems and political discourses. For the first time in history, this singular pool of local television programmes contains the records of an important German and European transformation process through moving images, in a bottom-up production process of self-professionalized citizens, and not in a state TV top-down process of power elites. To date, these historical television sources have not been given any major attention, neither by researchers nor by politicians, nor by archives (apart from us).
“I am a historian as well.” - The West German Reception of Die Wannseekonferenz (1984) and Portraying Holocaust Perpetrators in Public Television Drama
Johnson, Nicholas K (2022)
Die Wannseekonferenz (1984) portrays the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, where Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting of Germany’s ministers to co-ordinate the “Final Solution.” Produced by the public television network Bayerische Rundfunk (BR), Die Wannseekonferenz is neither mere entertainment nor a dry, unsubtle didactic film. Instead, it portrays history in a compelling and disturbing manner. The West German press, however, panned the film, which gained critical acclaim abroad. This article discusses its negative reception within the context of the 1980s television and memory landscapes through a grounding in archival sources.

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