The Educational Film between Politics and School Instruction: The Introduction and Impact of a New Educational Media in International Perspective, 1918-1939

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Eckhardt Fuchs
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 257522893

In educational policy debates the relationship between the knowledge imparted by schools and the form in which this knowledge is communicated plays a central role. This closely correlates with the question of how teaching and learning processes are influenced by new media. A glance back into history reveals that periods of societal change and reform frequently serve as a catalyst for knowledge to be redefined and result in the production and subsequent implementation of innovative teaching and learning materials in schools. A historic examination of the "new media" phenomenon broadens the view of the current debate in two ways: firstly it allows (from the perspective of the period) an analysis of similar reactions to, and strategies for dealing with, new media, which, the hypothesis assumes, do not intrinsically differ in content or orientation from those of the current debate. Secondly it offers a retrospective resolution to the question of how new media influence teaching and learning contexts in the medium-term. The project examines the introduction of a new academic medium, the educational film, in the interwar period and investigates how new knowledge content was confronted by educational policies, teaching staff and the film producers and whether this new media format led to any alteration in teaching content or method, and if so, in what aspect. To achieve this end the researchers study examples of the representation of colonialism in textbooks and educational films in a tri-national comparison between Germany, France and Italy, whilst taking the context of transnational knowledge transfer in this period into consideration. The source corpus on which this project is founded has not hitherto been widely studied. This project takes a novel approach by positioning the textbook in the broader context of other educational media and in so doing extends the field of historical education media research. The combination of textbook and film analysis is methodological terra incognita. The comparative, trans-national approach enables international comparisons on one hand of course, but on the other it also involves central, trans-national stakeholders who contributed to the distribution of this new educational medium. By analysing construction methods and perception patterns of colonialism in educational films and in textbooks to question whether there was a distinction between the "academic" and text-oriented mediation of colonialism in textbooks and the "illustrative" presentation style required by educational films, the project positions itself at the interface between historical educational media research, media studies and history. In addition it seeks not only to operationalize new methodological approaches, such as the Visual Turn, for historical educational media research, but also to develop them by focusing on the analysis of "moving images".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants