International Seminar on 

Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur

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The idea for this paper stems from my experience during the shooting of a short video film on Bangla Language teaching where the experts on Bangla language were interviewed and their soundbites were used to teach Bangla Grammar to students. 

   Using the television as an educational tool might seem to be a good idea.  In fact in many countries including India, television was first introduced as a medium of education and instruction rather than entertainment. However, most educational programmes for television happen to be a dull and boring, doling out tonnes of instructions and information. This kind of programming does not give the space or the scope to the learner to think and certainly not to construct knowledge.  Thus, although the medium lends itself to subtlety, nuances, and modes of telling which need not be direct and which can be used very effectively to let viewers/ learners construct knowledge, it is often not put to that use. One can of course think about films in this regard but on a smaller scale one can think of certain advertisements that do not directly talk about the product/ issue but prompt the viewers to think and form certain opinions about the product.

   Given that a case can be made of learning from a subtle use of visuals, this presentation explores the possibility of using visuals for making films for instructions. The questions that arise in this context are as follows: How does one go about making documentaries/ episodes with instructional material without spelling out the information at every stage. How much subtlety is actually possible? What kinds of information can be left to the viewers to construct and what needs spelling out?

   I would also like to talk about some problems that I faced while making video films for language teaching and discuss how it became necessary for me to be an instructivist rather than a constructivist while making these videos.  Finally, I would like to argue that Television, because of its linear one-way communication capacity and the passiveness of the viewer is not an ideal educational tool. It can be a source of enrichment of knowledge but not of fundamental education.