Entertainment attracts students
more than anything and this is why they are always attracted towards the various
means of entertainment. This strongly supports why means of entertainment
should be considered as tools of education. Various educational practices are
followed throughout the country in this area. Not just the resourceful private schools
but even NCERT accepted this notion and this reflects in its recent instruction
manual for schools’ education, namely the National Curriculum Framework (NCF). Post
NCF 2005, the perceptions about education, teaching and textbooks has changed.
Textbooks are well thought and
prepared by an expert committee therefore one cannot reject a textbook easily.
Every book now has a lot of edutainment based content. There are sufficient activities
in the textbooks which can make education lively, thereby maintaining learners’
interest. If we summarize the views of the contemporary educationists we could
say that this learner centric approach will make the learning easy and aid
knowledge acquisition. There are few questions that emerge – What kind of means
of entertainment should be included? Will it be a tool of teaching or it will
be the content itself? Do we have the sufficient amount of such edutainment
based content which can fulfill the entire demand of the education system at
both small and large scale? Are we ready enough to introduce and use this
material in our school system? Do we have well equipped set-up and skilled
teachers to run this in every school?
As we know the entertainment
based education practices have already been introduced in our country and NCERT
certainly plays a big role in it. In most of the council’s textbooks, there is at
least one instruction about chapter being related with the various means of
entertainment, such that learners can use this information to understand the
topic or chapter. Sometimes, in certain cases activities based on different
medium of entertainment have been found to be a part of the content. This
situation if not handled appropriately, may turn chaotic. Neither the students,
nor the teacher can concentrate on a single method. There should be clarity
about the means of entertainment in the chapter.
Another thing is that India is a
country where there is a big gap between the idea of education and the reality.
All the educationists and textbook makers believe that textbooks are just a
tool for acquiring knowledge and it should be treated just like that. However,
in practice Teachers and student may not go beyond the textbook or use limited
or extended resources to clarify a certain concept. Thus, in practice the entire
education system moves around the book treating it as the ultimate source of
information and the goal of learning. In such a situation, completing the
course becomes more important and the teachers and students are left with
little time to go beyond the textbook or engage in an edutainment based
activity.
Another drawback is the placement
of suggestions regarding the entertainment based education. Usually these are
placed at the end of the chapter. This makes them unnoticeable and a teacher
often moves to the next chapter without bothering about those instructions. It
is widely accepted that these means of edutainment are included to facilitate
the education, but sadly this acceptance does not reflect in classroom pedagogy
as very often the methods of usage of edutainment material is not clarified.
Should it be used as a tool or content material? This depends on the aim of
teaching. If a resource material has enough data on the concept than we can
consider it as a subject material. Tangential content could however be used to
aid content building. Science fiction
films can be quoted as good examples here. Such movies would aid in
pre-teaching idea development and students will definitely enjoy. Our education
system wants to make entertainment based education popular among the teachers and
students, but, it is somewhere reluctant to accept it as a ‘course’ material. Accepting
them as course material could break the supremacy of textbooks and reduce time
and labor and make the education a fun.
Now we move on to the more challenging
part of this topic. We have a vast and diversified system of school education
in India. In practice, we do not consider entertainment based material as
content but use them like other tools, in such a case the question of quantity
and quality arises. In a textbook there are many chapters and every chapter is
unique in its nature, so, naturally we cannot rely on a single mode of working.
We need several tools to understand the subject content and the stock of
available material is scarce. We don’t have the sufficient amount of videos or
cartoons or other relevant material. The issue quality is deep set in the
problem of quantity. Qualitatively good resources from among the limited
available resources are hard to find. Some material is available for the
English language based learner, but, there are very few things available in Hindi.
Availability of entertainment based material for Math and Science in Hindi is
almost zero. We can consider films as a
material for language teaching but they too, cannot be picked up without much
thought and censoring to suit our school set up. The system still applies the
rigid and old way of handling students and learning. It does not provide the
free learning space to a learner.
Our
schools are considered a proto-type of our society and our society is diverse in
its nature so using any tool or course material becomes very sensitive in the
school’s set up. In such a scenario, learning becomes secondary. A few months
back a controversy over a cartoon in a certain textbook had emerged. The cartoon
was not seen at the learning level, but on the societal level. The idea of this
cartoon was to convey what was written in the chapter but the immature nature
of our political and social behavior just subdued the learning that could have
happened. This applies to every area of our school education. Adolescent
education in our school system is one such area. Another example comes from the
fact that every now and then we have to undergo a change in chapter content of
history and literature books, in order to suit some social group interest. Our
social and political approach is unpredictable and we cannot be sure about the content
and the idea. Thus due to this continuous change, learning and education gets
limited. Thus we can say to a certain extent that it is not easy to apply the
entertainment based education in our school system.
And finally we look at the main
stakeholder – the teacher. Teachers are an important part of this entire
process and it is up to them to handle the situation with sensitivity. Nowadays
in many states of our country, teachers are appointed on contractual basis and
it has been seen that the states are manipulating and bringing down the minimum
qualification of a person eligible for this contractual appointment as a teacher.
Sometimes teachers’ training is also ignored. Job dissatisfaction and lack of
training worsens the situation.
It is appreciable that our
education system has introduced entertainment based learning, yet there is a
lot to be done in this area to increase the awareness levels about these
materials. There is also the need to provide a good and social influence free
set up to make it more applicable to teaching learning. Once this is done
edutainment based education could then be and used to its maximum potential.
