The growing body of work on the history of audiovisual educational media in recent years has also led to intensified methodological efforts to grasp the complex interplay between institutional policies, screening situations, and the form, style, and content of the respective media employed (be they magic lantern slides, educational films or television programs). In particular, the (heuristic) concept of the dispositif has proved to be extremely instructive in this regard, as it allows to map these different elements in a large variety of performative educational situations and describe their pragmatic interrelations: expectations, requirements, goals. Therefore, we propose to adopt the term educational dispositif as a starting point for a themed issue and define it as a variant of the “performance dispositif” of illustrated lectures that Frank Kessler expounded in a recent article.[1] Kessler has modeled the abovementioned set of elements as a triangular configuration of so-called poles – performance context, text, and user-spectator – that stand in an interdependent, pragmatic relation to each other.
At the same time, by focusing on the educational aspects of the performance dispositif, we want to open up a space for considerations that capture the specificity—and productivity to media and cultural studies—of the pedagogical issues brought to bear on media use in the classroom and lecture hall. On the one hand, this means engaging with the heterogeneous arrangements of objects, people, spaces, technologies, policies, and implicit and explicit norms that constitute actual educational practices, and the contributions of media within them. These arrangements have been the subject of nuanced considerations as well as apodictic prescriptions by pedagogues past and present (as witnessed in many guideline documents) and have recently become the subject of increasing sociological and ethnographic interest.[2]
