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Stranger Things, which just completed its fourth season run, is a flagship series of Netflix. It is a Science Fiction Horror Drama. And, it is targeted at an audience age group that can safely be placed at 15+ years (with some viewer discretion). It has its dedicated fandom. It has launched many of its young actors into stardom. The TV series has now become one of the leading subscriber-builders for Netflix. For context, I will share a statistic heavily reported across mass media. Season 4 of Stranger Things recorded 7.2 billion minutes of viewership time in less than a month from its release. And, majority of the viewership belonged to the demographically-coveted age group of 18 to 29.
This is something that you may already know if you are a fan of the show. Or, if you are aware of the hullabaloo surrounding this show on Netflix (as this is one of the most promoted series on this OTT platform), YouTube, or other mass media and social media platforms.
Or, if you haven’t heard about this series, then, now you know. You can definitely go and check this out. In today’s tsunami of online audio-visual content, a series like Stranger Things stands out as a great specimen of multifaceted quality, across several departments of what an entertainment product can turn out to be.
And, in this post, I can give you some more reasons to choose this series as something worth your while; also, you can very well block this weekend for this series (atleast one season of this), and temporarily drop the conundrum of what to watch.
As an educationist, I am always looking for ways and avenues to connect to the needs of 21st Century students. I am a strong believer in the idea that the education industry should focus on building products and services targeted at the needs of students that would arise way into their future. If what one builds, in the ambit of the education scenario, does not fulfil this basic need, then, one has not truly taken into context the stretching, ever-evolving scope of 21st Century students. These students are on their way to becoming the flag-bearers, defining a critical citizenship generation, of the 21st Century.
Keeping the focus of the educational revolution stationed in the future does not mean that the past has nothing to offer. The past is what builds the foundation, the sheer context, based on which these students will build their understanding and knowledge database. The past is what will help them compare, learn, and appreciate the nature of what they are born into. Well, these students, the 21st Century ones, the Millenials, the Generation Z, the Generation Alpha — are Digital Natives. They were born into the rising tide of the information age. And, a reality check for the Education industry can reveal that a huge proportion of thought leadership in education lies among those who are defined as Digital Immigrants. So, it becomes all the more important for the educationists and educators to acknowledge and appreciate the distinguishing factors between the two.
Again, coming back to Stranger Things… building on the context that I carried for the needs of 21st Century students, it always made me think — what is so special about this series that it attracts and holds the attention of Digital Natives?
The series is about people in the 1980s. It is a fantastic tribute to the retro, pop culture of the 80s. Nostalgia (for those who remember the 80s) is what drives the backdrop of the psychological connection that a certain audience has with its compelling storyline. What is so special about this series that builds a case over an era so unfamiliar for these Digital Natives?
It can arguably be a fair supposition that Generation Alpha may not even identify what I have displayed in the following image. Then, imagine explaining to them what a mixtape is! And such things are commonplace in the world of Stranger Things.
The answer can be derived from references to some crucial aspects that educators and educationists many a time ignore, misuse, or overuse.
One aspect that has been overused, over-abused, and non-contextually ripped into pieces is this — always provide them with content that they can relate to. Well, this is an understandable sentiment. Sentiment, because, this is more emotional a statement than a sensible one. The reason lies in educators and educationists underestimating the intelligence of their target audience. You cannot always provide students with content that can have a one-to-one correspondence with their life events or experiences or their existing knowledge base. After a certain point, showing familiar things will just add to the unending, existing pile of boredom already stacked up to a dangerous level in these young minds.
Another aspect that has been quite played over, again without ample context, is — provide them with the best technology, as they are used to the best technology. As a result, there has been a shameful rise in the Tech part of the Ed-Tech industry, with a critical drop of focus on the Ed part of it. While Education, as an industry, is flaunting the best technology to access educational content, the educational content itself (the critical passenger in this ever-evolving Tech vehicle) is largely un-updated and ignored. Note that it’s shameful, not in terms of the technological leap, but, in context to the almost-stationary crawl of the content quality riding within the carriers of this technology.
Well, Stranger Things does what Educators, Educationists, and the EdTech industry ought to have done.
Netflix’s Stranger Things provides a relatively unfamiliar backdrop of an era to the digital natives, triggering their curiosity. Layered on that backdrop, the stories of several young protagonists, who experience a variety of emotions, provide a much-needed relatability these digital natives can understand and invest their time into. There are no evident signs of alienation that appears to be happening between the characters and the digital natives, as the audience, despite the storyline running through a fantastical streak of science-fiction and horror. Spot-on Engagement is what this series achieves through well-planned, well-written, and strategically laid out journeys of characters. Such kind of engagement would be termed a dream come true for educational products. And, that is one critical area where educational content and techniques lack.
Another great feature you can observe as a consequence of this series is the need generated in the digital natives to reach out to the power of the world wide web, to try and connect to the pop culture elements, especially great specimens of music, stories, and art of the 80s era. These young kids research on the references made (and experienced by them) in this show, owing to its retro backdrop. Has any History textbook ever elicited such kind of interest in the world’s past among the digital natives?
Netflix’s Stranger Things uses an unfamiliar backdrop to woo the young audience of the 21st Century, through a technology platform, that is more than familiar to them. This endeavour in terms of audio-visual content and storytelling is a prime example of what an educational experience should vie to offer. The series itself is an education to watch.
The story of Stranger Things is about friendship, love, loss, hope, parenthood, sacrifice, resilience, transformation, new beginnings, coming-of-age, fantasy, and believe it or not, an amazing focus on science, both as a life saviour and a means to understand whatever is happening in the world of Stranger Things. Yes, this show has led to considerable research by young viewers on theories in physics surrounding parallel universes, string theory, and more. Here, in terms of education, I see Character Education, Subject Integration, Story-based Learning, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), Science Extension, and… I can just go on and on. Imagine what content like this in the hands of a motivated educator or an educationist can do. It can create wonders in terms of raising educational standards, and revolutionising learning techniques.
The educational potential of this series is immense. In context, the accessibility to this potential is exceptionally simple, i.e. you need a Netflix subscription. This series can not only lead to a great audio-visual content experience for the students, but, also build an appetite for good-quality content that can put a rest to the worries that parents and teachers, worldwide, share regarding the unlimited, uncontrolled, non-curated access to online content that students have these days.
Now, nearing the end of this post, I would like to share an account of how I once used Netflix’s Stranger Things as a means to facilitate a teacher’s attempt to raise the audio-visual appetite of his students and build an educational experience out of it.
The teacher was a movie buff, like I am. As it often happens when we meet, we were diving into some ground-level issues that students face across their educational journeys. Suddenly, he confronted me with a peculiar challenge he was facing with his students. His students didn’t have an appetite for the kind of audio-visual content that the latest OTT platforms were offering. As a result, their exposure to different kinds of stories and experiences (even if they were not their own, but, that of the characters) was extremely limited. He had made suggestions of several movies, TV series, and even YouTube channels that the students could refer to. But, it seemed that most of them were barely willing to even try anything like that. They seemed to be satisfied with the exposure that they had in terms of online content. I believed that the problem there was the choice of content. These students needed a jolt. A shock and awe experience to say the least. They needed to wake up from the slumber of repetitive content (including the ones online) that they were used to so far. So, I made a suggestion. Show them Netflix’s Stranger Things. Season One had just come out then. But, I asked him to turn this into an event, a theatre kind of an experience. I asked him to watch the series with them over the weekend, in the classroom, and become a moderator by triggering discussions strategically between certain episodes. I asked him to tie ideas in the series to concepts and life, and get a thread of connecting discussions going.
Last I heard from him was — Netflix seems to have added some loyal subscribers to their growing database of users.
Let us hope, we all learn from Netflix’s Stranger Things, the way I did when it first came out in 2016. What I shared in this post are some views on what good quality content can do in terms of an educational experience, what the education sector can learn from Matt and Ross Duffer (the creators of Stranger Things) and Netflix on how to build and deliver high-quality content (even if such kind of delivery is relatively rare), and how such high-quality entertainment product, in the hands of creative and daring educators, can do wonders in terms of learning experiences.
Let us all try to extract, drive, and deliver rich learning experiences the way Netflix and the Duffer brothers have been doing for the last six years.
Thanks to them. It’s been an education to watch Netflix’s Stranger Things.