Educators Who Used Radio and TV to Reach New Learners

When Cooney helped develop Sesame Street for preschoolers, songs and animation could sit alongside the Muppets in a single episode. The variety made it possible to revisit a lesson in a different form before a restless viewer turned away. Her work is a starting point for seeing how producers can build teaching into entertainment.

For BBC Schools Radio, Power brought history lessons to life with dialogue, sound and music. A classroom could hear the scene unfold and picture the setting from what the characters said and did. Her work shows why a lesson written for listening needs a different shape from a chapter read aloud.

When Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood showed how crayons were made, it took a familiar object and gave children time to watch the work behind it. The factory films sit alongside the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, with the real and imaginary parts of the show doing different jobs. Start with crayons to see how Rogers invited questions without turning a visit into a quiz.

The French Chef let you watch Child handle the tools and ingredients a recipe usually leaves you to imagine. She could use her own body to show where a cut of meat came from, teaching an unfamiliar term by pointing rather than defining it. Her gestures and props make the lesson easy to follow from a kitchen far from the studio.

In the televised Young People’s Concert on what music means, Bernstein asks listeners to hear what an orchestra can suggest without telling a literal story. He can pose the question and have the New York Philharmonic play the evidence immediately. Watch it for the way he trusts children to hear for themselves before he supplies an explanation.

Reading Rainbow could take a book about a railroad rescue and send Burton to see one up close before an overnight journey. The trip gives a child who hasn’t traveled by train sights and sounds to bring back to the page. Look for the way a reading show uses a field trip to give the next book a foothold in the real world.

In Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Sagan recalls a childhood library visit early in The Backbone of Night, an episode that asks what stars are. It gives the viewer a concrete point of entry into a question too large to take in all at once. This is the series to watch for how a personal memory can lead into a science lesson instead of interrupting one.

The Joy of Painting gave viewers a canvas in progress, with each mark leading visibly to the next. Ross could place fresh paint over wet paint so a landscape took shape in a single lesson. Watch the brush as much as the emerging mountains. That sequence is the part a still photograph of the finished painting can’t teach.

In the Motion episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, a skateboard that needs a push and a bicycle that needs its brakes give inertia a scale young viewers already know. The show can move from the object to the physical principle and back again. Listen for the line about inertia in the song after you’ve seen the idea play out.

Life on Earth brings the viewer close enough to see an animal before asking where it fits in the larger story. Attenborough’s encounter with a gorilla family in Rwanda shows what location filming can teach that a studio presentation can only describe. There’s time to watch the animals as well as hear the presenter.

Under its first vice-chancellor, the Open University put parts of its teaching on the BBC. A student could follow a university broadcast from home, with printed course materials carrying parts of the lesson that couldn’t depend on everyone being free at the same hour. The arrangement shows how broadcasting can help an institution reach learners when it fits alongside the rest of a course.

Yan Can Cook made something as quick as knife work teachable by letting viewers watch Martin Yan do it. Look for the segments where a flourish gives way to a clearly visible sequence of cuts. It’s a demonstration a viewer can study before trying the technique at a slower pace.