We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. One of the giants from whom we’ve taken inspiration is Miguel Sabido, the founder of Entertainment-Education.
What is Entertainment-Education?
Entertainment-education (E-E) is chiefly associated with government messages propagated via radio and TV shows. It has a long history with well-evidenced, positive results.
We are all likely familiar with Second World War propaganda movies and, in the UK, the longest-running radio soap opera, The Archers, founded to spread information to farmers. And if you really want to stretch the paradigm we can look right back to the Iliad, a foundation story for a civilisation that had a propagandising or culturally-bonding function. And Aesop’s Fables, each of which has a moral message. So, the idea of the educative element of storytelling is as old as storytelling itself.
Entertainment-Education, as we know it today, was born in the 1970s, and its founder is the Mexican producer, writer, researcher, and theorist Miguel Sabido.
Who is Miguel Sabido?
Sabido discovered his “Theory of the Tone” while working with theatre actors. It suggests that an actor can change their delivery of dialogue, their associated body language, and the emotional resonance, the “tone” of the entire audience. Convinced that he could apply this method more widely, he tested it in 1967 in a Mexican tabloid by inserting content that would encourage readers to join the social security system of Mexico, assuming that low-brow entertainment would be a great way to spread public benefit messages. The campaign showed positive effects but was criticised by the Mexican academic community for being “not academically sound”.
The release of the Peruvian telenovela Simplemente María validated Sabido’s assumptions, as the sale of sewing machines increased dramatically after the show aired. In 1970, working for the Mexican television network Televisa, he carefully deconstructed this telenovela to understand its theoretical basis. In doing so, Sabido drew heavily on the social learning theory of Canadian-American psychologist and Stanford professor of social science Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. The theory later evolved into social cognitive theory.
Social Cognitive Theory
The essence of Bandura’s social cognitive theory is that the interaction of personal, environmental, and behavioural factors influences human behaviour. Bandura proposed that people learn not only from their own experiences but also from observing the actions and outcomes of others. Bandura’s theory suggests that people are influenced by and actively influence their environments and personal factors, creating a reciprocal determinism between them.
Theatre of the Oppressed
Sabido was also influenced by the work of Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, who founded the Theatre of the Oppressed movement (TO). TO’s techniques, based on Paulo Freire’s principles of dialogue, interaction, problem-posing, reflection, and conscientisation, are designed to activate spectators (“spect-actors”) to take control of situations rather than passively allow actions to happen to them. Boal’s work may be familiar to you via the Theatre in Education (TIE) Movement, which it inspired. TIE aimed to educate young people about various social, political, and personal issues through interactive and participatory drama, and the approach also became popular in corporate settings.
E-E begins
The president of Televisa, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, challenged Sabido to apply his theories to Televisa’s TV programming. The first show was the 1975 production Ven Conmigo (Come with Me), which was highly popular and resulted in a million people enrolling in the adult education system of Mexico after the series’ 1-year runtime. By then, Sabido had formalised his approach, calling it “Entertainment with a proven social benefit”, which would later become Entertainment-Education as it spread around the globe.
Azcarraga gave Sabido unprecedented access and power within Televisa, making him the Vice President of Research and eventually allowing him to produce six mainstream telenovelas.
Sabido went on to produce the family planning-themed telenovelas Acompáñame, Vamos juntos, Caminemos, and Nosotros los Mujeres in the 1970s, which collectively resulted in a 34 per cent decline in the population growth rate of Mexico.
Spreading the word
The United Nations awarded Mexico its Population Award; the United States Agency for International Development’s Thomas Donnelly wrote: “The Televisa family planning soap operas have made the single most powerful contribution to the Mexican population success story.”
Population Communications International invited Sabido to teach his method worldwide in India, China, the Philippines, Egypt, and the Netherlands. Since then, Sabido has trained hundreds of producers and writers worldwide in his method, which has resulted in the formation of multiple non-profits and millions of dollars invested in entertainment education programs around the globe, collectively reaching more than 2 billion beneficiaries.
What’s an E-E show like?
To bring E-E to life a little more, here’s a classic example from the early 2000’s.
An urban Indian family commissions Detective Vijay to check out the background of a young rural woman they wish their son to marry. When Vijay arrives in her village, he discovers the young woman is missing, and her family is trying to cover up her disappearance. When her body is found in the village well, Vijay investigates the death. Through a maze of intrigue and suspense, Vijay discovers that the young woman was a childhood friend of a village outcast who was ostracised by the community because he was HIV-positive. She was killed because of her association with an HIV-positive person.
This 120-episode entertainment-education detective series titled Jasoos Vijay (Detective Vijay) was broadcast in India to raise awareness, to shift social norms and to reduce stigma about HIV/AIDS. Watched regularly by 125 million viewers, Jasoos Vijay was among India’s top ten-rated television programs and was a major revenue earner for the network. In this interactive, fast-paced drama series, each episode ends with a cliffhanger and an epilogue delivered by Om Puri, a famous Indian film celebrity. Puri summarises plot developments, focuses viewers’ attention on the key HIV/AIDS dilemmas, and urges viewers to send a written response to the central question posed. Puri received 1,000 letters and emails each week.
Where is E-E now?
In more recent times, we can see the influence of E-E in the Mayor of London’s “Have a Word” campaign, which used a short online film to encourage men to step up and challenge misogynistic behaviour. Nowadays, results aren’t measured by letters and emails but by social media engagement. This campaign had over 3.1 billion earned impressions and 307 million earned reach. With 65% of social commentary coming from men, 77% expressing positive sentiment.
Drama for Change
So, Miguel Sabido is one of our heroes. In the same way that all those years ago, he created his methodology, we’ve looked at his success and applied other theoretical models, such as the insights of evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, to come up with our unique formulation of Drama for Change that brings the E-E effect to the corporate environment.
How do you think Miguel Sabido’s concepts in Entertainment-Education have shaped the way we view media and its potential for social change today?
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