Filmstrips at Buenos Aires educational system: (unexplored) history of its antecedents, its contents and the Directorate of Educational Technology (1961-1976)

RAMIRO DE PEDRO; EDUARDO GALAK

Congreso; 42nd International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE); 2021

The visual technology known as filmstrip or filmfix was created in 1920 by the French company Pathé, which at the time was dedicated to manufacturing equipment for the new film industry. This technology was seen as a commercial outlet for the remains of film reels that were discarded blank (Vignaux, 2014). It consisted of a 35mm film strip with a different image in each frame, which were reproduced with help of a projector in a sequenced and individual way, just like slides. What distinguishes both technologies, however, is that in filmstrips, since all the images are printed on a roll, their order was not changeable once the copy was produced. By the late 1920s and early 1930s it had already entered schools in countries such as the United States and France, replacing the glass plates previously used to project still images, which were more fragile and expensive, as well as more difficult to storage.Common functions for this device included its use as a didactic resource for teaching specific pedagogical content or as entertainment within the classroom, generally accompanied by a teacher's guide. These guides were scripts that indicated what should be highlighted and even what to say according to what each image of the sequence was showing.Regarding Argentina, we have found filmstrips editions produced by the Buenos Aires Province between 1961 and 1976, in the archives of the Center for Historical Documentation on Physical Education and Sports and in the Center for Documentation and Educational Information (CENDIE) of the Buenos Aires Province. It is worth mentioning that in the same archives we have also found some filmstrips which were produced in previous years (between 1956 and 1961 in the archive of the Escuela Normal Superior N ° 2 "Mariano Acosta") by international organizations, such as the UN. Although we consider that there should be more editions, we have surveyed 27 issues with a significant dispersion of topics and levels to which they were addressed, of which 18 are accompanied by part of their respective teacher's guides. Topics such as oral hygiene, environmental cycles, human anatomy and optics, treated for preschool levels, first upper school group, middle grades, higher grades and differentiated education can be rescued.It must be said that the entry of filmstrips into the educational system accompanies a growth of the conductism psychological and functionalist sociological currents in the US, which also inspired in education the emergence of the educational technology field and technocratic pedagogy (Chadwick, 1982; Maggio, 1995; Maggio, 2016; Southwell, 1997; Suasnábar, 2004). The latter conceive teaching as a technological process, structuring itself around the idea of progress to improve its efficiency, through the control of processes according to systems theory. Educational technologies such as filmstrips, which were designed centrally by specialists, and then distributed in schools with precise instructions for their application.These discourses, which thought of the educational field as a necessary part integrated in a larger process for the planning of economic growth and development, were taken up by Latin American countries (within the context of successive transitions between democratic and dictatorial governments in the region), and worked as theoretical justification for the intervention of international organizations to fight these countries' "backwardness". Various authors and records speak of events organized by ECLAC, UNESCO and the OAS in Latin America (Chadwick, 1982; De Luca, 2013; Maggio, 2016; Legarralde, 2017; Vuksinic, 2019) promoting an education view with an efficient and economic approach, in which Argentine educators participated, among others. In Argentina there were also courses on educational technology organized jointly by the national Ministry of Education and the OAS, aimed at specialists in the education system.In order to achieve a more efficient planning and control of educational processes, educational policies guided by these ideas sought to separate the design and decision-making instances from those in which the transmission of knowledge took place. The teacher was seen as an ideal practitioner who applied a series of prescriptions designed by different directions of specialists (Southwell, 1997).As revealed, the use of filmstrips as an educational policy in Buenos Aires Province, responds to the following guidelines: the work on the design of content and production of the same was carried out in a specialized direction of the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires Province (Direction of Educational Radio Television, then Direction of Educational Technology), and we have found that the explanatory text or "teacher's guide" with which they were delivered in schools, contained didactic indications and scripts for each frame of the sequence, produced by those same Directions.Various authors (Legarralde 2017, Suasnábar 2004, Southwell 1997, Galak and Southwell 2019) point out that modernization is a disputed signifier, central to political discourse in general and educational discourse in particular at this time, constituting the arrival point of a multiplicity of pedagogical statements. The study of the Direction of Educational Technology of Buenos Aires Province could be an important object to interpret how these discourses were constructed in the second half of the 20th century in Buenos Aires educational system.