Educational television in ibero-america: a communicational response during the pandemic

Abstract

The current pandemic led to the isolation of millions of Latin American students of all ages, who needed quick responses from their countries’ educational systems in order to to keep on learning at home. Public television, often underestimated and sometimes even declared dead in Latin America, emerged as a solution to this problem, due to its penetration and infrastructure, which allowed for it to be quickly transformed into educational television. Two years after the beginning of lockdown in many Latin American countries, it is time to record the experiences that different countries of the region had while developing public educational television as a response to the crisis of the school system. Thus, in interviews with leaders of those responses in seven countries (Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Panama), we discussed the challenges faced and the strategies that were found to meet them, as well as the characteristics of each country’s specific initiatives. This paper offers an analysis of the information collected in these interviews. It will be followed by more indepth studies of the impact of public educational television in the learning process of Latin American children and youth in times of COVID-19.