Health Promotion Through Entertainment Education -
Emma Durden, Professor Keyan Tomaselli and Professor
Lynn Dalrymple
Ever
wondered why Soul City is one of South Africa's
most highly rated TV dramas? Or, what the relationship
is between entertainment and education? Or whether people
can actually change the way they think and live simply
by watching television?
Find out more in the exciting postgraduate honours/masters
module on Health Promotion Through Entertainment Education
offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban).
Twenty years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and countless
HIV/AIDS awareness programmes have failed to dramatically
reduce the HIV infection rate, with prevention messages
falling on deaf ears. To find out why, we turn to the
theories of behaviour change that have been used by
governments and organisations around the world. Research
shows that the linear, rationally based psychosocial
models popular in the Western world may not have as
much impact as previously thought. A change in strategy
is particularly relevant in an African context, where
social conditions as well as cultural practices determine
a very different way of viewing illness and health.
Internationally, programme developers are turning to
more contextually based socio-cultural models of behaviour
change, that take the target audience as the starting
point for the creation of messages and programmes. Modern
development communication theories also point to the
central role of the audience as active participants
in the communication process, providing their own solutions
to their own problems.
Entertainment-education (EE) is a communication strategy
to disseminate information through the media. As applied
in development communication, it was originally developed
in Mexico in the mid-1970s and has been used in 75 countries,
including India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Turkey, Gambia,
and Pakistan. It has been developed in South Africa
with special reference to health communication. Examples
are the television series Soul City and the work of
DramAidE in the field of participatory approaches to
health communication. A basic premise is that educational
messages are more likely to succeed if they set out
to be entertaining.
The EE strategy is based upon the recognition that
the most effective programmes and messages have form,
content, character and unique features that can be analysed,
understood and duplicated.
These theoretical discourses and strategies inform
the popular new post-graduate programme offered by the
University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Culture, Communication
and Media Studies. Now in its second year, the Entertainment
Education for Public Health course has attracted students
from a variety of different disciplines. Students in
the 2003 class hail from Scandinavia, Eritrea, Rwanda,
Malawi, Lesotho and different parts of South Africa.
They include a selection of journalists, government
public policy programmers, teachers, university lecturers
and AIDS educators.
CCMS has partnered with three organisations in the
creation of this course: the Johns Hopkins University
Center for Communication Programs in the USA; South
African based Centre for AIDS Development, Research
and Evaluation (CADRE) and the KZN based NGO, DramAidE.
Other contributors have included Soul City staff and
a variety of international visiting professors, creating
an excellent teaching team.
The course aims to engender a clear understanding of
key theories of health promotion communication; of Entertainment
Education (EE) interventions; and of how to apply theoretical
understanding in the development of a framework for
EE activities; as well as developing an ability to create
criteria for research in the field of EE. The course
has a strong practical component, with a focus on current
local EE programmes, and funded research, which is project-based
and designed to teach graduate students to work in the
field with real benefit to local communities.
The partnerships forged between the mass media and
production companies; government, health organisations,
NGOs and the private sector are key to ensuring the
continued success of these strategies. And courses like
the one offered by CCMS go a long way towards developing
a pool of individuals working in these sectors who are
informed and experienced, and can apply critical thought
to the practice of EE.
We are confident that as the current class of graduates
return to their workplaces, strategy, policies and practice
can only be improved, and that the expensive Sarafina
2-style failures to impart an intelligible message and
improve the health of the nation, will be a thing of
the past.
For further information on the EE course, please click
here or email: Govends@nu.ac.za
at the CCMS, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.
Ever
wondered why Soul City is one of South Africa's
most highly rated TV dramas? Or, what the relationship
is between entertainment and education? Or whether people
can actually change the way they think and live simply
by watching television?