A mong the many charges lodged against the modern professoriate, one of the strangest is that we’re too entertaining. We’re not, I promise you. Not everybody can hold the TED spotlight. Some of us aren’t entertaining at all, even when we try. Others of us are deeply allergic to a certain taint. It’s — well, Lorenz Hart said it of congealed love — the faint aroma of performing seals.
How did we come to edutainment as a term of art?
Wikipedia, the fons et origo of term papers, offers the modest proposal that the parables of Jesus might be considered an early example of edutainment. The Gospel’s parables were, after all, meant to hold the attention of an audience even as they delivered a powerful, if sometimes cryptic, ethical message. Never mind the distraction of sitting on a hillside and watching the miraculous loaves and fishes appear. At least the audience didn’t have smartphones.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for edutainment is a 1983 article in Fortune magazine that speculates on the potential in developing “so-called ‘edutainment’ games that attempt to make learning fun.” Few of us who teach are likely to declare our purpose “to make learning fun.” But fewer still are likely to declare that our purpose is the opposite. (“This class will be tedious and miserable for you. Your boredom and fatigue are among my Student Learning Outcomes.”) Surely only in an academic novel.
In their Teenagers and Technology (Routledge, 2013), Chris Davies and Rebecca Eynon date the neologism edutainment to 1948, only four years after Adorno and Horkheimer gave us the term “the culture industry.” Davies and Eynon point to an early use of edutainment by the Walt Disney Company to describe its True-Life Adventures films. (Square-dancing tarantulas and such. It was a different time.)
The triumph of the Disney model of entertainment has provided endless fodder for academic analysis, from media studies to critiques of urban space (e.g. the Disneyfication of Times Square) and of the Great White Way (the Disneyfication of the Broadway theater, conveniently located just off Times Square).
Somehow it seems fitting that there are two posited birth dates for the term edutainment — one at the start of the television era, the other at the start of the digicene. But it’s only this second coming of edutainment that has caused the professoriate to check its Seriousness Meter.
So what is edutainment, and why do we use the word to say bad things about what that other professor might be doing? The professor is pandering to the students, the course is glitzy, she tells jokes, he shows movies. The crimes are innumerable.
The difficulty, of course, is that one professor’s trivial pursuit is another’s pedagogical ace in the hole. Our anxiety about teaching styles (and if you teach, you have a style) is bundled with deeper, more troubling fears. The student-as-customer model, even more reviled than the edutainment charge, is a commonplace of institutional critique. The provost counts enrolled students. Enroll them, and keep ’em enrolling in the aisles. But this larger political-economic problem doesn’t completely explain what we talk about when we talk about teaching today.
[[relatedcontent align="right” size="half-width”]] We struggle to modernize teaching in many ways, but one of the revolutionary techniques we might borrow from the ancients is a commitment simply to speaking well, which means listening well, too. The classroom is a house of dialogue. It may require additional training — and I’d wager that some theatrical training with a professional coach might be worth a month’s IT help with that new piece of software.
The objective isn’t to turn academics into actors, much less cast members (the term the Disney people use for visible theme-park employees). But every day we go to work in the theatrum mundi of our classroom, and either we control it and galvanize our students, or we outsource that magic to technology. But it needn’t be an either/or. Think of tech as your research and what you bring to the class as your argument. If the class were a book, you’d see that a video is a kind of block quotation — run it too long and you’ve lost the reader as well as abdicated the responsibility of the author. So there’s a balance — between professor and student, text and commentary, media tech and printed material, the forms of teaching and the goals you set. There’s no one solution, anymore than there’s one way to play Hamlet.
You remember Hamlet — that’s the one where a ghost and a prince meet, and everyone ends in mincemeat. Howard Dietz gave us that, and much more, in the lyrics to “That’s Entertainment!”
Professors are not entertainers, you say. Well, no. Not primarily. But there’s no question that technology and student distraction — a positive and a negative charge — converge upon us educators in new and powerful ways.
It’s up to us to up our game. Classrooms aren’t miraculous spaces in the theological sense, but they’re still miraculous.
William Germano is dean of humanities and social sciences and a professor of English literature at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
