Enhancing the Educational Experience of Children: Joe Blatt

HGSE Lecturer Joseph Blatt, director of the school's Technology, Innovation, and Education Program, has spent most of his professional life looking for ways to pique curiosity and encourage learning using a variety of media. Over his career, he has produced several award-winning television series and specials for national public television. Now, his work at the Ed School involves teaching and designing new media and methods for enhancing the educational experience of children.

Blatt seized on television production as a means of exploring areas that fascinated and challenged him, and of acting as friendly guide for viewers testing new and potentially difficult terrain. As a perpetual and eager student, he could also educate. Now, with the advent of digital media and increasing interactivity, Blatt is pursuing new areas of educational technology that have great potential to engage young learners.

"All the media--television, Internet, and video games--have a rich potential to promote kids' healthy development and support their socialization," Blatt says.

Blatt's long association with Harvard began when he was an undergraduate student of English and American history and literature. He continued on to HGSE, where he earned his master's degree in 1977. He also founded the media center in the Gutman Library, and cotaught one of the school's first interactive media courses.

Meanwhile, Blatt began teaching himself the basics of film and video recording. He produced research and training documentaries with Harvard scholars such as Burton White and Bruce Baker, and began his life-long fascination with child development. His first broadcast series, Feeling Free, about mainstreaming students with disabilities, aired nationally on public television.

"I don't think I would have been able to do it–to conceive the series, write a successful proposal, engage the right experts, and learn from formative evaluation–without what I learned at HGSE," Blatt says.

He went on to make close to 100 programs for the Annenberg Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including the popular statistics series Against All Odds, and the contemporary mathematics series For All Practical Purposes. But in recent years Blatt has concentrated on science television, most visibly as an executive producer of Scientific American Frontiers and as producer of several episodes of NOVA. He also created BreakThrough, a series about the accomplishments of contemporary African-American, Latino, and Native American scientists and engineers. Among his most recent programs is a documentary called Surprises in Mind, about children's capacity for mathematical thinking and its relation to art, architecture, and music.

"Profiling African-American, Latino, and Native American scientists in the BreakThrough documentary series made science a more visible and meaningful option for young people of color," Blatt says. "I think the biggest impact of my work in education has been to help people discover possibilities they didn't recognize before."

While Blatt's career as a producer grew, he retained his connections to HGSE, especially with the school's media center and his mentor and friend Bigelow Professor, Emeritus, Gerald Lesser, who introduced him to teaching. When Lesser was getting ready to retire, he asked Blatt to take on the children and television course. "I was dubious," Blatt recalls of Lesser's request. "It seemed like such a high bar."

But Blatt took over the course, making it his own, expanding the scope and eventually renaming it Growing up in a Media World. "Now we look at the whole spectrum of young audiences and media users, from infants to college students, and the range of technologies that reach them, including television, movies, music videos, websites and online journals, games, and other software," he says. While he had never envisioned himself as a classroom teacher, Blatt said he found the contrast between instructor and documentary producer refreshing. "Students give you instant, in-person feedback, while after spending months and sometimes years making a documentary, your show is broadcast and you don't have a clue how your viewers are reacting."

Three years ago, after introducing a second course and making many other contributions to the Technology in Education Program at HGSE, Blatt was appointed its director. Since then he has revived the long-standing relationship between HGSE and Sesame Workshop, producer of Sesame Street and other groundbreaking programs for children. One result of this renewed collaboration is the course Informal Learning for Children, which Blatt teaches in association with many expert contributors from Sesame Workshop. HGSE students have the opportunity in this practicum course to develop concepts for new educational media ventures, and to receive feedback from Sesame programming executives. (Read more about this course in an HGSE News article and in a Harvard Gazette piece.)

"In my classes, I try to encourage HGSE students to learn about informal education channels--video, the Internet, other media and technology that are typically used for entertainment--and to recognize their potential for exchanging ideas and cultivating personal and civic engagement," Blatt says.