Basic EE parameters and thoughts on student projects for teachers that will aid their understanding of how to approach teaching an EE course.
The term “entertainment-education” describes the embedding of educational information in entertainment contexts. It has been identified among the most effective strategies that combine both emotional and cognitive factors to influence behaviour and social change. The entertainment contexts it particularly uses to disseminate social and behaviour change messages may include commercial film, popular music, a television drama, and other similar products.
Entertainment-education dramas can persuade because they show characters that change their behavior to improve their lives. Stories have unique power and nuance to describe people’s behavior and interactions, and their consequences. When audience members see that they could be in the same situation as the characters, stories can move them to change, too. E-E is particularly able to influence behavior rooted in traditions that are hard to change. Theories of human behavior and behavior change underlie E-E. For example, social learning theory emphasizes how people learn by observing others. Thus the theory supports the use of dramas with characters that model healthy behavior.
Entertainment-education differs from traditional drama foremost because its primary aim is different which affects its structure, production and presentation. While traditional entertainment involves audience to simply affect them, entertainment education uses story as a way to delivery knowledge and motivate social and behaviour change. The writing process informing entertainment-education is also distinct from traditional drama, since while creating quality entertainment, the scriptwriters must maintain disciplined devotion to the mission of providing accurate knowledge or encouraging social and behaviour change or both.
Many E-E dramas portray positive, negative, and transitional role models. This scheme developed from drama theory and from the work of Albert Bandura, the social psychologist who made major contributions to social learning theory, and Miguel Sabido, a Mexican television executive who pioneered E-E dramas. When developing a story and characters, positive characters model healthy values and behaviour, and they are rewarded and negative characters model unhealthy behaviour and antisocial values, and they suffer as a result. When developing transitional characters, their behaviour change objectives are pivotal to outline – in other words, what behaviour would you want your transitional character to adopt? Moreover, transitional characters representing the audience (by creating empathy) are uncertain at first about which behaviour to adopt. Then, gradually, they become convinced. They begin to practice the healthy behaviour, and they are rewarded.
Some thoughts about what makes a good EE project for students from Caroline.
This will be the first time that most, if not all of the students will be doing this kind of project. Yes, they should pick something they are interested in for the project, but they should be realistic and pick something doable. Students get ambitious and sometimes want to tackle things that even the most experienced EE writer would have trouble with. But, the point of this course is for them to understand the theory, process and how to apply it in creative environment. Once they get these basics down, then later they apply them to the ‘bigger’ ‘more complex’ problems. In designing the course, we may have confused the teachers/students with the huge and detailed problem statements. We did that to raise issues and find data on issues that may be interesting to students. However, when students are deciding on their projects, they would select one or two aspects of the problem statement to address, not all of them. Remember, change is hard. In some of these massive problems, one EE program can not ‘solve’ all of them. Better to deeply address one or two. For example, for the men’s health problem statement, they would pick one health area only. Or for the honor killings one, perhaps they address how families can have improved communication or anger management as the behaviors.
Using the technique that is what this course is trying to teach students, I would suggest avoiding having the main behaviour of a program be to ‘change a law’ or have a political change. The reason for that is because if you wanted to change a law, the people you would address an EE program would be lawyers or politicians. This is a small group of people that would be best influenced using more traditional advocacy methods (meetings, media, etc.). It would be difficult to get funded to develop an EE program that millions would see just to reach a few people. Advocacy for laws or political change could be a side benefit of the program, but not the main part. It is simply not the best use of this methodology.
I would suggest students don’t have the intended audience be children (under, say, 12). The techniques you would use to teach this audience through a media context would be more behavioural development than behaviour change.
We try to not model things that we don’t want the audience to do. And sometimes if we show people doing something on TV, others can look and see the negative behaviour as a social norm, rather than the ‘bad thing’ that is trying to be portrayed. And this can come back to the project they choose. Remember, EE is in the business of prevention. For example, if someone wanted to do Suicide Prevention, and they show someone committing suicide on their program and how sad everyone is about it, they could be unwittingly showing that suicide is a common problem, teaching an audience member how to commit suicide and then showing that people will love them more if they kill themselves. The writer didn’t mean to promote suicide, but they have unintentionally modelled the negative, thereby defeating the purpose of helping people. When I helped a student who was concerned about suicide, he ended up developing an EE program that focused on how men can believe that taking care of their mental health is important, how to deal with anger management, how to talk about feelings, how to reach out to family members, how to make dreams and goals, etc. this kind of looked at the problem ‘upstream’ and dealt with underlying issues (ie prevention) before it was a crisis. Along the same lines, if someone wanted to do something on Honor Killing, then if they show a young woman being killed by her family, even if everyone is sad and regretful afterwards, the show will have reinforced the norm of honor killing rather than help stop or prevent it. On the Honor Killings issue, I hope students would think about going ‘upstream’ on the issue and try to address one or two of the underlying issues that relate to it. Issues around parent-youth communication, negotiation skills for young people, conflict resolution, etc. Can they find ‘positive deviant’ stories of families that were in conflict who managed to resolve as difficult issues a different way, that somehow works for everyone?
The whole purpose of EE programs to help people, not just talk about problems. Recall that using this methodology, the transitional character will need to go from not being or feeling supportive about the behaviour to being someone who is feeling or doing the positive behaviour. Yes, there are the ‘barriers’ along the way, but the power of EE is that the students will be modelling how real people can overcome the barriers towards doing the positive attitude or behavior that is identified. If EE programs only talk about the barriers and the problem and how bad they are, that could be interesting but it is not really helping anyone know what to do. And a student would be missing out on the chance of modelling someone just like them overcoming barriers just like the ones they deal with in real life in a way that is possible. That inspires change. (NOTE: I am talking about the methodology that we are teaching the students, which is EE for Behavior change, and not EE for journalisms or high level advocacy. EE for journalism and high level advocacy absolutely has value, but it is not the methodology that we are trying to add to the student’s ‘toolkit’ through this course. When I am helping students think through their projects, I repeatedly ask them, ‘yes, but what do you want the audience to do that will make things better?’ or ‘how is this helpful for anyone watching your program?’. If the problem is unsolvable or the student can’t figure out what they are saying/modelling that could be helpful for the audience, then they need to find a different issue or try to look at their selected issue from a different perspective.
It is better to clarify what the students are going to be doing with their projects as early as possible because they get really attached to the issues and if they are on the right track, then great. But if they are on the wrong track, it is harder to get them back on. So, around class 3 or 4, I require them to either talk to me or submit in writing 1) an issue you are interested in developing a program for, 2) primary and secondary audience(s), 3) what you want your audience to do. I’m sure that you recall that primary audience means the people whose behaviour you want to change and that secondary audience are the people who are most influential to the primary audience.