Edutainment

"Edutainment (also educational entertainment or entertainment-education) is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse....The noun edutainment is a neologistic portmanteau coined by Bob Heyman while producing documentaries for the National Geographic Society" ...so says Wikipedia.

Guilty as charged. I have long known that I had a tendency to hype class up a bit, that it was as much the thrill of entertaining as the product of enlightenment that kept me coming back to the classroom. I did not have a word for it, before now, and even armed with this word, I cannot decide quite how to come to terms with this...issue.

On the one hand, I feel guilty, like an entertainer who will work extra hard for applause--in that respect my instructional delivery might be deemed a self-serving opportunity to perform for a captive audience.

On the other hand, not only is there a word for it, there is an entire pedagogy developing around the thought that learning can be fun. Acknowledging the education field is full of -isms and ideologies, this one more, new stratagem can't be any worse than, say, "brain-based learning."

I wish I could take myself and my subject so seriously that I would deliver content more droll and monotonous than Ben Stein could ever muster--yet it would be so full of truth and be so very valuable that people would knock down my door to enroll in my classes. That would be some content! Instead, realizing that some people have a predisposition against my field, I tend to joke around and make the content as viable, current, and entertaining as possible. The outcome may be that I'm a goofy clown, or it may be that students learn more--I lack the skill to assess that and the ability to distance myself from my delivery. (I do know, however, that I hate watching myself on tape!)

Debate on edutainment branches far beyond the classroom. Recently I took my boys to Exploration Place, a children's museum. There was an exhibit of giant, motorized bugs on display--sure to make an impression. The literature, staff, and signage were excellent at clarifying that the scorpion was 28 times actual size, etc...but I wonder how many little kids really grasp that. Will they live in fear of a praying mantis looming over their bed? Will they grow up with a complex, never able to secure a big-enough fly swatter? I think the sensationalism that museums are now being forced to pump out has to be tempered with fact and clarified repeatedly once the clientele is in the door gawking at the life-sized woolly mammoth, etc.

It is the same, I think, with class. So long as the truth, the facts, the writing styles and models are shared fairly, I am inclined to say that it can be conveyed by someone with a rainbow colored afro and a red bulbous nose. Consider how, say, Patch Adams was able to build better rapport with patients through the use of humor. Consider how we all remember the little "Conjunction Junction" ditty. Yes, I think edutainment has its place, and I admit to being a practitioner of said pedagogy...but I'm still somewhat ashamed of it and always curious as to the effectiveness of it.

It's as old as parables, yet modernization allows one to incorporate online interactivity, YouTube and even SecondLife. I've been scheming up a design for offering a communications course inside SecondLife, and my avatar lives on an Education Island as I write.

One of my best friends, however, suggests I live my life and practice my profession as if there were no technological bells and whistles. He says the day will come when it will be revealed that all this technology was mere smoke and mirrors. He forecasts that this revelation will come all-too-late for those of us in the biz of edutainment. Old school profs, like himself, will carry the torch while folks like me will be dumbstruck with the harsh realities of the fleshworld.

I hope I'm not that consumed with bells and whistles. I hope he's wrong, too, that we can co-exist without bursting anyone's bubble. I guess until his gloomy forecast comes true, I will poke around and do my best.