Rationalizing Entertainment, Re-Enchanting Education: Edutainment

Author/s: Elif Demirtaş

Year: 2020 Vol: 2 Number: 2

Abstract

The concept of edutainment, which expresses the combination of education and entertainment, came to the agenda with the 1970s, and its application in different fields spread quickly. Changes within the understanding and institutions of education and entertainment itself have been effective in developing the edutainment approach. This coupling at the same time is an important component of environments in urban locales such as touristic places, shopping malls, museums, theme parks, and art-skills workshops that are affiliated with and resemble one another by being renewed on the axis of culture, entertainment, and education. Edutainment practices are also important elements of a series of transition processes to each other in urban consumption venues. This study aims to understand how the edutainment approach and application areas affect the understanding of entertainment and education by evaluating the process in which they spread within the changes in consumption culture. For this purpose, the study examines the educational approach in three steps that develop in connection with one another alongside Ritzer’s concepts. Firstly, the coupling of education and entertainment is evaluated through the intertwined process of consumption tools. Then, the states of “rationalizing” entertainment and “re-enchanting” education are addressed in the new understanding of consumption that develops through this process. Lastly, the possible effects on learning processes from the edutainment processes where rationalized entertainment meets the understanding of education as a show are discussed. As a result, edutainment practices have spread an understanding about the need for education to be entertaining and entertainment to also be educational and have become an important component in the fields that intertwine in consumption locales. These new applications that increase the validity of daily life through consumption venues are seen to be located in a structure that constantly produces new needs where the individuals who live in the modern city, although they have created a view that is suitable in form to their new needs, remain qualitatively inadequate.

Keywords
entertainment, implosion in consumption tools, rationalizing, re-enchanting, consumption culture, consumption venues