Introduction
One of the goals of the photographers hired by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) during the 1990s and 2000s was to create images for the education of children and youth. For twenty years, CIDA sent these reproductions of images to schools in a multitude of formats, from magazines to videos, slide shows, games, picture books, and maps, produced in collaboration with academic specialists in education and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The attention and resources the international agency invested in the dissemination of information about development in Canadian schools during that period offer the historian a significant opportunity to study practical and ideological traditions of visual communications for pedagogical purposes among humanitarian agencies.
The focus of historical inquiries of visual media is often on the content produced and the intended audience, with limited examination of those responsible for the logistics and pedagogical dimensions of the distribution of the materials. This article discusses the following aspects of the practices of CIDA: the purpose of the educational resources it encouraged and the place of visual media in these materials; the extent of their distribution and circulation; the psychological theories behind the selection of visual media encouraged by the agency; and the impact of printed images on a generation of Canadians at the heyday of the age of print media. The analysis relies largely on the testimonies of two CIDA employees involved with the creation and dissemination of this material: Mary Bramley, curator of the International Development Photo Library for twenty-five years, and Marc Rockbrune, responsible for postal shipment in schools, libraries, community organizations and homes over the same period. The article is also based on the collection of educational development materials donated by Marc Rockbrune to Carleton University Archives and Research Collections (ARC) five years ago.1
The CIDA program made way for original practices of visual education at all levels. Its demise after two decades seems to be independent of the popularity it enjoyed. Several original contributions continued elsewhere: in some features that made their way in the age of digital media, in the current offerings of the NFB, and within the later practice of the photographers involved.
The Purpose of CIDA Development Education in Schools
From its creation in 1968, CIDA engaged the public in multiple ways: by offering financial support to Churches and NGOS who sent young volunteers abroad or visited community associations and schools, by sponsoring the preparation of materials on the developing world for adult education, and by designing partnerships from its ‘NGO program’ especially to create learning centers across the country (Brushett, 2019; Ryback, 1967: 111). In 1971, ‘in response to the United Nations second development decade action program and to NGOs’ requests for CIDA funding for these development education activities’, a dedicated Public Information Program was born (Baldwin et al., 1990; CIDA Memorandum, 1971: 67; Levett, 1979; NFB et al., 1988). Educational institutions had always represented about a fifth of the intended audience of the agency’s Public Affairs Division (CIDA Annual Review, 1972–73; CIDA Memorandum, 1977: 35; 1979: 28). But in 1988, a ‘Program for Youth Initiative’ was created to promote field assignments and exchanges, and a scheme of ‘education of Canadians of school age’ started in earnest, under the advice of a new National Advisory Committee on Development Education (CIDA, 1988–89: 2; 1989–90: 53).
Many factors explain the addition of Development Education in CIDA during four decades of growth (Meehan, 2019; Morrison, 1998). For those in charge of Canada’s official programs of development with countries of the Global South, school programming represented one important means to garner additional public support. Third world advocates, in Canada as elsewhere, had been convinced since the mid twentieth century that remedies to global inequalities started with the support of citizens at home (Ermisch, 2015). Many NGOs and international government agencies of the late mid-twentieth century had embarked on campaigns of information aimed at sustaining public opinion in favor of long term work, between upsurges of popular support of relief during situations of war and natural emergency. Such work with the public, education included, enhanced the humanitarian organizations’ legitimacy, and gave strength and knowledge to international advocacy and diplomacy. The massive success of the early 1980s aid campaigns to alleviate famine in Ethiopia, and to aid refugees from dictatorships in Latin America, gave a new impetus to the creation of public institutions that would sustain the popular appeal for development aid between times of emergencies (Ermisch, 2015; Hutchinson, 1997). Among CIDA officials, efforts to ‘insert foreign aid into the collective consciousness of Canada’ (Cogan, 2018: 177) were also, and more immediately, motivated by a wish to secure the support of voters for their division, fearful as they constantly were of losing government funding for development aid (Brushett, 2019; Cogan, 2019: 207–11).
At its inception, the school program contained the ambitions of CIDA leaders to educate the domestic public to global inequalities and encourage them to work towards solutions: ‘The purpose of the program is to inform young people. To get them thinking, to train them to analyze situations. To encourage them to seek innovative solutions to global problems and to help them become world citizens who are aware of the role they must play’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 7).
CIDA Photographers and School Education
Efforts to engage the domestic public soon determined most of the creation of visual media inside the CIDA. A few years after its creation, CIDA expanded the role of images from the training of officers bound for the field, to exploit its broader potential to interest the Canadian public, such as showcasing Canada’s role in the developing world, and answering the demands of its many associates and supporters (de Laat and Marshall, 2016). By 1979, the agency had partnered with educational television to produce a thirteen-part series on development, and with the NFB to sponsor six films for the general public; it also published comics for children and a teachers’ guide, as well as multimedia kits (CIDA, Development Directions, May 1978: 26, 33; Marchand, 1990). In 1987, it hosted its own International Development Photo Library (IDPL) which became ‘the go-to resource for international development photography’ for NGOs and agencies devoted to the production and dissemination of development educational material (Bramley, 2017). The photographers participated in the elaboration of a ‘visual politics’ and narrative shared by CIDA’s employees (Gorin and Kunkel, in this issue; Kunkel in this issue). CIDA’s pictures had the ambition to counter ‘information fed by a media that keeps the world communities divided and alien to one another. Today, nationalist biases are replaced by regional suspicions, daily reemphasized by the information beat … despite our entry in the “Global village”’ (Tremblay, 1988: introduction by Jean Tétrault).
In 1988, in the production of educational material, CIDA entered into a joint venture with the NFB (see, for example, Figure 1) to create a publishing house called ‘Media-Sphere Youth Editions’, also located in Montreal. The new outfit employed several of CIDA photographers to help make, in the words of Mary Bramley, the ‘kids’ publications’. For instance, CIDA regular contributor, the photographer David Barbour, became the photo editor of Somewhere Today/Aujourd’hui quelque part, which contained games, reports, testimonies, and activities. Books authored by the photographer and author Hélène Tremblay were also regularly sent to schools, especially her two substantial volumes on Families of the World (Tremblay, 1988, 1990), published in English and in French. Sponsored mainly by CIDA, with the support of Save the Children Fund Canada, UNICEF and other United Nations agencies, the volumes were accompanied by ‘Activity Sheets’ as well as ‘Introductions for the Resource Person’, produced by Media-Sphere. A series of posters produced by Media-Sphere, such as two-sided large bilingual glossy sheets entitled ‘Eastern Caribbean’ (CIDA, 1990b) and ‘Central America’, displayed reproductions of images from the IDPL, including some by renowned Canadian photographers like Dilip Metha, accompanied by the words of writers and the editor-in-chief. ‘We also made maps by continent, we had … Africa, Asia and the Americas,’ recounted Marc Rockbrune. ‘We also had a silent map. It was just the outline of the world and the educators could work in class with a map on which there was just the outline, you didn’t see the countries. It was an interesting tool’ (ACDI, 1986; CIDA, 1988; Canadian Geographic Education, 2008).
Multimedia kit produced by the NFB and CIDA in 1990. Using the themes of ‘Water: The Wonder Fluid’, ‘Food for Thought’, ‘Health Matters’, and ‘Learning from Each Other’, the kit aimed at ‘exploring life in developing countries with children in Botswana, the Ivory Coast, Peru and Thailand’. It contained a Teacher’s Guide booklet of 64 pages, four posters drawn by Lucie Chantal and Stephen Clarke, three copies of the magazine Under the Same Sun, four audio cassettes, and four fixed projections.
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds. Photo: D. Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Multimedia kit produced by the NFB and CIDA in 1990. Using the themes of ‘Water: The Wonder Fluid’, ‘Food for Thought’, ‘Health Matters’, and ‘Learning from Each Other’, the kit aimed at ‘exploring life in developing countries with children in Botswana, the Ivory Coast, Peru and Thailand’. It contained a Teacher’s Guide booklet of 64 pages, four posters drawn by Lucie Chantal and Stephen Clarke, three copies of the magazine Under the Same Sun, four audio cassettes, and four fixed projections.
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds. Photo: D. Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Multimedia kit produced by the NFB and CIDA in 1990. Using the themes of ‘Water: The Wonder Fluid’, ‘Food for Thought’, ‘Health Matters’, and ‘Learning from Each Other’, the kit aimed at ‘exploring life in developing countries with children in Botswana, the Ivory Coast, Peru and Thailand’. It contained a Teacher’s Guide booklet of 64 pages, four posters drawn by Lucie Chantal and Stephen Clarke, three copies of the magazine Under the Same Sun, four audio cassettes, and four fixed projections.
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds. Photo: D. Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
We were doing Day in a Life photo assignment earlier on, and that was just so interesting, because we would hire a photographer to go out, and he or she would live with a family, and document every aspect of that kid’s life and that family and so these were just wonderful records … Actually, to name one, [a kid who was] in India, and her family and her brothers and sisters and mom and dad and their various shops and activities. This was just another real incredible archive. They would have been as a result of those publications for kids. And they were hugely successful.
Bramley observed how the educational mission of CIDA had an impact on the very quality and the nature of the visual media itself. According to her, the fact that the pictures were taken for educational purposes often freed the photographers from the limitations associated with pictures made for sale (Bramley, 2017).
Hélène Tremblay, for instance, introduced her volumes on Families of the World by discussing the anthropological and statistical knowledge required to make such images, and the ethics of her work: the need to establish trusted, equal, and reciprocal relationships with the peoples on the pictures, many of whom women. In return, the agency could rely on these artists’ sense of what would best represent the daily lives of the peoples visited and on their skills to produce images with the level of detail necessary to for school education. The photographers were already familiar with the countries they visited, they were committed to the mission of CIDA, and many were trained in photojournalism (Bramley, 2017).
Reach and Size of the Educational Program: A View from the Postal Room
To disseminate teaching aids, CIDA deployed at high cost a large network of postal distribution, towards hundreds of Canadian schools, at all levels of education. At his arrival at CIDA in 1990, the Distribution Clerk, Marc Rockbrune, was part of the Public Affairs Communications Service, a team which received subscriptions from individuals, public libraries, and, mainly, order forms filled by educators (Figures 2a and 2b). Clerks like him coded the forms, sent instructions to the Publishing Center, received the items, and expedited boxes back to the schools. A few blocks away from his office in Promenade du Portage in Gatineau, Québec, those involved in packing were stationed in a shed on Pink Street.
Marc Rockbrune, Distribution Clerk, Global Affairs Canada, in the storeroom and the cubicle of his office in Gatineau, Québec, with the boxes he would later donate to Carleton University Archives and Research Collections, December 2016
Photos: Sonya de Laat.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Marc Rockbrune, Distribution Clerk, Global Affairs Canada, in the storeroom and the cubicle of his office in Gatineau, Québec, with the boxes he would later donate to Carleton University Archives and Research Collections, December 2016
Photos: Sonya de Laat.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Marc Rockbrune, Distribution Clerk, Global Affairs Canada, in the storeroom and the cubicle of his office in Gatineau, Québec, with the boxes he would later donate to Carleton University Archives and Research Collections, December 2016
Photos: Sonya de Laat.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
It was in the mandate of Rockbrune’s service to see that copies of all published magazines and books made their way to the National Library of Canada, according to the law of legal deposit. All the while, he thought it important to keep his own sample of what was shipped. The originality of his collection resides in the preservation of publications and recordings in an order close to the way they were sent to educators, and in their association with a variety of less official documents, from posters to maps, subscription cards, teachers’ guides and bulletins, lists of publications, publicity cards for new items, foldable order forms of all kinds, and competition adverts. For instance, the bilingual magazine Somewhere Today / Aujourd’hui quelque part (1991–95) would be shipped with the matching four pages titled Introduction for Resource Person. He recalled that it was the same for the publication Sous un même soleil / Under the Same Sun which ‘included suggestions of films, books, ask for feedback’. Similarly, African Journey ‘was a novel, a series of videos and there were activity sheets … a poster, a leaflet to order the series’.
We had several target audiences. The Youth Editions were [for] individuals, educators, then young … it was an awakening to situations of difference, let’s say … We had stories … [For] eight to eleven-year-olds … the magazine called Today Somewhere … For twelve to fifteen-year-olds, it was Under the Same Sun. We also had a target audience of sixteen to twenty years, but there was no magazine for [them] … Under the Same Sun came out three times a school year. Today Somewhere came out four times a year. Some of the issues were accompanied by an activity guide for educators so that they could do classroom activities with students.
Children’s Psychology and the Educational Uses of Visual Media
The use of visual media in the school items produced by CIDA was informed by the expert advice of members of the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. At the request of CIDA they prepared a psychopedagogical guide intended for educators, as well as a larger volume intended for the producers of educational materials (Bédard et al., 1991: Corbeil et al., 1989). Like their CIDA colleagues, the authors of these scholarly publications promoted images that offered ‘a new way of looking at the world … to control our vision, inevitably clouded with ethnocentrism’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 10). In particular, they asked for what we would now call ‘media literacy’, a type of questioning that would ‘demand for justice and eliminate the fear of exposing the roots of misdevelopment’ (Bédard et al., 1991).
The education specialists had no doubt about the crucial role of visual media in creating a ‘connection between distant reality and everyday concerns’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 11). Images, they wrote, had the power to communicate directly to young audiences, through their senses. They offered unique possibilities to bring to the attention of children the specific nature of people of faraway countries. Accordingly, the teachers’ guide offered an introduction to the ‘cognition and emotions’ of children at each stage of their growth, and matched them with types of activities most likely to teach them about the Global South. The booklet was organized around the relation of the psychology of specific age groups with ethics and morals, as well as their respective capacity for autonomous reflection, actions of solidarity, and engagement with the rules and conventions of a democratic public sphere. What follows in this section examines, with examples, the theory behind the use of the images produced by CIDA, with the help of the instructions to teachers.
The scholars of the University of Ottawa wrote, in theory, about the importance of emotions generated by images, and they instructed educators about the length of time children could pay to their content (Bédard et al., 1991: 10–11, 17). Images had an immediacy which helped teachers work with younger children, who needed short activities. In the case of children between the ages of six and eight, working with visual media provided immediate sensual contact and experiences, whether by seeing and hearing and handling. For them, as for all young people, images could also be used in the important work of ‘recognition’, the acknowledgment of the ‘global in us’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 10). ‘The child is very sensitive to shapes and colors. He is receptive to this type of simulation, and fascinated by motion’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 14). Between eleven and fifteen, however, young people’s insecurity and anxiety had to be acknowledged; images had to be accompanied by the references and parameters which would help educators accompany potentially ‘distressing activities’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 20). Several examples of image-based games included in the collection of CIDA’s educational materials relied explicitly on the immediacy of children’s lives. There was a direct and honest quality in the pictures which fitted the goals of the educators: the book Families of the World, for instance, promised ‘photographs of the family and its home’ that provided an ‘objective look into each family’s environment. There are no concessions to aesthetics or technique there. The photographs reveal the hard facts of life, and, in doing so, help us grasp the increasing depth of the chasm separating peoples and nations’ (Tremblay, 1988: preface).
The authors of the psychopedagogical guide warned that the exposure of children to images of the Global South was to be done in a relation of trust. The pupils’ sense of honesty and fairness needed to be reinforced (Bédard et al., 1991: 15–16, 22) in order to foster autonomous attitudes towards the morality and rules of international relations. Thus, in parallel with their use of visual media, educators had to introduce their class to the goals and uses of rules and conventions, and to the requirements for responsible actions in respect of differences. Eventually, they would learn to face ‘moral dilemmas’ and make decisions around them. The goal was to avoid ‘neutral, apologist or moralistic’ education in favor of ‘authentic, … critical and realistic’ education. The photographer and author Hélène Tremblay offered examples of the autonomy these educators recommended. She aimed at publishing photographs that left the viewer free to make their own judgment: ‘My personal opinions might stop you from forming your own. Does it really matter how I feel? Your feelings, as you discover those with whom you share the planet, are most important’ (Tremblay, 1988). Composed by Media-Sphere, the activity sheet linked to the second volume of her series on Families of the World invited children to identify elements in the pictures – such as building materials – to compare them with their own lives, to interpret them and think about possible improvements. It also suggested that students recognize the physical manifestations of intangible phenomena, such as faith, ‘to create a more realistic, hands-on impression of … beliefs’. Teachers could ask their class to create images about the effect of war once they had read the story of families in the book: ‘Have a participant create a visual interpretation to portray the theme of war … The interpretation could be an expression from their point of view, from the country’s point of view or from the point of view of a family member from the text … Display these visual impressions for others to view’ (CIDA, 1990a).
Reception and Impact of Development Images
CIDA’s program of dissemination of the educational materials in schools aimed at providing a community around the use of the visual media which would avoid harming children’s development. The teacher’s guide insisted on the social context of seeing visual media: teachers needed to respect the ‘keen … emotional responses’ of children, and attend to their ‘fragility’ (Bédard et al., 1991: 13–14). Like the images CIDA produced, school relations should be surrounded by enough warmth to let a child know that ‘he is being looked after and he is important’, and that the emotions experienced during the activities could be ‘expressed’ and ‘considered’. Later in life, such feelings would represent the basis for more ‘precise’ ‘emotional and social attachments’ required for the kind of international justice CIDA partners envisaged (Bédard et al., 1991).
The guide also invited ‘teachers, parents, and group leaders’ to appropriate pedagogical materials in their own practice – to ‘implement or adapt’ it, like the Canadian Red Cross had done two generations before (Glassford, 2014). The fact that the original method of geographical projection used in the popular map of the world distributed from CIDA came from a Québec professor, Léo Larrivée, might represent further consequence of the practices encouraged by CIDA. Moreover, the educational experts advised that children of all ages had to do something in order to learn. Teachers’ and students’ letters to the editors, as well as students’ projects, traveled towards the postal locker of the federal agency where Marc Rockbrune worked, and his collection contains fragments for the study of these local uses of media. As a result, the Rockbrune collection helps gauge how the CIDA visual productions were used in classrooms, where the teaching and learning visual practices occurred.
The regularity of the subscriptions managed by Rockbrune’s service, the teaching of the materials within the structure of public schools, the attention to the social relations within which the pictures were taken, their publication in tools designed to serve teachers’ and children’s autonomy, all aimed at the creation of an environment conducive of sustained, gradual, and trusted apprenticeship (Figure 3).
Order form for video series
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds, not catalogued. Photo: Elsa Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Order form for video series
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds, not catalogued. Photo: Elsa Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Order form for video series
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds, not catalogued. Photo: Elsa Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Every time there was a new publication that came in, we had to send it to subscribers. It wasn’t done on site, because it was so big … We had a warehouse, and then we had a team that worked from the warehouse. There was a team that codified all the subscription boxes, and then they would put them into a system … in which all the information was entered, and then … the warehouse… sent all the new publications to subscribers.
From where he stood, he had a good sense of their overwhelming popularity, either by reading comments on shipping orders or by seeing letters published in the magazines themselves. He recalls: ‘There were probably negative comments as well … It seems to me that some people said they no longer wanted to subscribe, perhaps because they thought it was a waste of tax payers’ money. I’m the one saying that … I don’t have letters saying that … These are things I’ve heard. But, basically, it was just positive.’ He himself appreciated the work of CIDA Youth Publications from close quarters: ‘I brought them home too’, he commented, ‘I gave them to my nephews and nieces.’
The appealing nature of the visual media explains much of the appreciation of the school public, according to Rockbrune. Among the most-shipped items, and prominent in the archival collection, ‘the famous CIDA world map … was very popular’ (Figure 4). Produced by CIDA in English, French, and Spanish, it was accompanied by ‘an activity guide with all levels of education’. Teachers also received some of the ‘corporate documents’ meant for the wider public: ‘the journal Development … was integrated into youth publishing because it is a beautiful magazine. It was not really a publication that was made for Youth Editions, but it was on the list of Youth Editions.’
According to Marc Rockbrune, the pedagogical materials produced by CIDA for Canadian classrooms made its way to classrooms of the Global South. ‘You could get pictures of people who went to developing countries. Where there were schools, there were surely maps on the classroom walls. I remember seeing a map of the CIDA world that was in a classroom.’ But the extent to which CIDA used the materials ‘in country’, like this picture of a classroom in Thailand shows, or to educate civil servants, is not well known.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, CIDA Photography Collections, Corporate Collection, Ottawa, not catalogued, 906 Thailand. With permission of Mary Bramley.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
According to Marc Rockbrune, the pedagogical materials produced by CIDA for Canadian classrooms made its way to classrooms of the Global South. ‘You could get pictures of people who went to developing countries. Where there were schools, there were surely maps on the classroom walls. I remember seeing a map of the CIDA world that was in a classroom.’ But the extent to which CIDA used the materials ‘in country’, like this picture of a classroom in Thailand shows, or to educate civil servants, is not well known.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, CIDA Photography Collections, Corporate Collection, Ottawa, not catalogued, 906 Thailand. With permission of Mary Bramley.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
According to Marc Rockbrune, the pedagogical materials produced by CIDA for Canadian classrooms made its way to classrooms of the Global South. ‘You could get pictures of people who went to developing countries. Where there were schools, there were surely maps on the classroom walls. I remember seeing a map of the CIDA world that was in a classroom.’ But the extent to which CIDA used the materials ‘in country’, like this picture of a classroom in Thailand shows, or to educate civil servants, is not well known.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, CIDA Photography Collections, Corporate Collection, Ottawa, not catalogued, 906 Thailand. With permission of Mary Bramley.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
It was only 20 images per country, and it was just … a snapshot of highlights and we touched upon issues, and a little script went along with it so the teacher would just … have a ready-made show … we produced these [slide] kits and then we ran out [of them] and then we received letters, I mean Marc probably received letters, up until a few years ago … again, just think back to the 80s, early 90s. … well we had this ready-made slide show and script essentially, so they ate it up. They loved it. And the magazines were hugely popular. Those little cartoons in the middle. … We haven’t produced them in 20 years. As I said, the education component was huge … it was really interesting. (Bramley, 2017; CIDA, n.d.)
It was a little girl, I think, who had read an article in one of the issues. It was an author who wrote the story … The article was about a girl who was missing a leg … I’m not sure … [The little girl] had sent labels and then a small cross to be given to the family … It said in her letter, ‘Please send the stickers for Albina …’ She writes in a funny way … Anyway, I think the little girl is really young, because what she writes is not readable … It was probably the team of three people who were in charge of receiving letters and subscription cards for the Youth Editions that received this. Then, when the Youth Editions closed, we recovered all the material. I went through the publications and saw that letter; I didn’t want to throw it away. I feel bad for little Kyra who wrote to get this to go back to Albina, a little girl she saw in an article … I kept this.
The editors of the three series of magazines invested much time in receiving and answering children’s communications. Rockbrune’s collection includes the 1991 leaflet announcing the annual essay-writing competition of the Museum of Civilization, a call to primary and secondary school children and youth to write tales on celebrations around the world, and the magazine Somewhere Today, which invited readers to send drawings, comic strips, texts and questions for its section ‘It’s Your Turn’ (Figure 5). To the many children who wrote, the magazine answered: ‘We receive hundreds of letters and drawings, so it is not possible to put them all in the magazine. Also, readers sometimes ask the same questions, so we try to print letters that represent as much of a variety as possible.’ Published letters from the audience contained several proofs of the autonomous and original thinking the Development Education experts were seeking: Gillian from Nova Scotia wrote: ‘I would like to know if all the stories in the magazine are real?’. To which the magazine answered that it was ‘a combination of different kinds of stories – all based on true information’. It is also a tribute to the program’s openness that CIDA received feedback from Canadian children of the diaspora, of a nature they had not predicted. Several young readers asked the magazine editors to publish articles about their country of origins: ‘I come from Madagascar, which is the third largest island in the world. It is located in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of Mozambique. It is a tropical country. I am sending you my drawing about the problem of water in hot countries. – Henriniaina Rabezandriny, Québec.’ Such propensity among young people whose extended family resided abroad to participate in development activities would be increasingly observed later by NGOs such as the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), and development scholars.
Young readers’ contributions featured regularly in the ‘It’s Your Turn’ section of the magazine Somewhere Today
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds, not catalogued. Photo: Elsa Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Young readers’ contributions featured regularly in the ‘It’s Your Turn’ section of the magazine Somewhere Today
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds, not catalogued. Photo: Elsa Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Young readers’ contributions featured regularly in the ‘It’s Your Turn’ section of the magazine Somewhere Today
Source: ARC, Marc Rockbrune Fonds, not catalogued. Photo: Elsa Marshall.
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 3, 2; 10.7227/JHA.066
Conclusion and Epilogue
This study of the educational materials produced by CIDA has shed light on the dissemination and impact of the visual media among the Canadian young public. The items accumulated by Marc Rockbrune over the years offer glimpses of a dynamic web of social relations around images of development. Rockbrune has no doubt about the lasting legacy of the materials he shipped: ‘How many people have gone into international development probably because of those magazines that had been published by Media-Sphere and CIDA?’ The picture that emerges from this analysis of the visual materials, of the pedagogical ambitions and practices surrounding visual media, is not dissimilar. Creators and distributors of CIDA’s Development Education program were concerned that children’s and youths’ engagement with visual media should be gradual, regular, accessible to all, grounded in the daily educational practices of educators, and subject to critical discussions. For a while, many of these ambitions appear to have met with success; ‘a civic space’ seems to have emerged, ‘in which modes and powers of signifying and mediating global and local relations can be questioned and negotiated’ (de Laat, 2019: 224).
For two decades, CIDA fostered original practices of education by visual media. The decline of its school program, by 2000, seems to be independent from the popularity it enjoyed. When we met Rockbrune in 2016, his role was restricted to sending exhibitions by mail, and to prepare them for events organized by Global Affairs Canada (GAC). The changes had come from many directions. For one, communications on the topic of development had been amalgamated with all topics in foreign affairs, where the educational programs were, in his words, ‘no longer the target’. The production of school media, as well as CIDA’s Development Education programming in general, were substantially reduced by budget cuts from the late 1990s and the eventual incorporation of the agency within the larger Department of External Affairs and Trade (now GAC) in 2013 (Campbell-Miller, 2014). From Rockbrune’s point of view, ‘the print side was so expensive, just the distribution of the material. At one point, budgets went down, and then one of the things that was more easily affected was the printing of publications’. The advent of virtual communications hastened the decline, as is attested by the fact that the ‘Digital Innovation and Engagement’ services, in charge of all visual communications for GAC, took over the management of the IDPL. In addition, Rockbrune points out, ‘there are a lot of programs or products that are accessible through the Internet now … At one point, budgets went down, and then one of the things that was more easily affected was the printing of publications. As a result, we have much less equipment, much less printed materials.’ The comparison between the reach and size of these three enterprises with those of the postal network of the printed age awaits analysis; and the sanitary restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic (ongoing in 2021) have accelerated the demand for a reflection on the nature of children’s access to online learning materials.
The implications of these transformations for the history of visual media are complex. Bramley (2017) suggests a direct link between the diminishing interest of GAC for Development Education and its diminishing interest for the production of images. She remembers how several of the main drivers of CIDA visual communications left to join institutions devoted to public education: André Champagne, Director of Communications, moved to the public television of the province of Ontario (TVO), taking photographer David Barbour with him (Bramley, 2017). To this day, a large part of TVO’s programming aims at educators and families, and it includes productions about development (TVO website). The NFB, whose traditions had informed image-making at CIDA in the first place, never abandoned its mission of Development Education: CAMPUS, the division now devoted to materials and activities for educators, has brought many of the ambitions of Media-Sphere to the digital age (NFB, Campus wesbite), and some of the old CIDA Youth Editions figure in their bank of materials. The Canadian Geographic Education organization continues to use maps produced in collaboration with CIDA youth publishing on the section of its website intended for teachers (Canadian Geographic Education, n.d.). While such continuities are important, these public institutions do not consider humanitarian communications as their main focus. The loss of financial and human resources devoted to schooling within GAC belongs to what development scholar Stephen Brown presents as a general ‘hollowing out’ of ‘Canadian development capacities’ and, more generally, of ‘Canada’s ability to lead development efforts in partnership with civil society organizations’. The trend that started two decades ago, he comments, has not been reversed to this date (Brown, 2021).
If several photographers and teachers continued to work with the habits of work allowed by the program, the legacy of this capacity is fragile, and historians and practitioners have much to gain in rehabilitating and curating this unique heritage. As the Marc Rockbrune Fonds will soon be catalogued, it is hoped that this article will serve as an introduction to a more comprehensive history of Development Education at CIDA; it remains to be written.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented in 2018 at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Regina, Saskatchewan, at a panel on Histories of Humanitarianism and (Visual) Media – sponsored by the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History. I would like to acknowledge the help of Mary Bramley, Team Leader of the International Development Photo Library/Photothèque until 2016; Theodore (Ted) Cogan, historian of Canadian foreign aid; Ralph Duchesne, Deputy Director, Digital Innovation and Engagement, Global Affairs Canada; Chris Trainor and Lloyd Keane of Archives and Special Collections, Carleton University; the students of the course on the History of Humanitarian Aid of the fall 2019 who helped with the transcription and translation of the interview and worked on an early exhibition of the Rockbrune collection; and Dr Sonya de Laat, who started to document the history of the Development Photo Library with me and shared the text of her own interviews.
Documents that do not figure in the references are those present in the uncatalogued collection of the Marc Rockbrune Fonds at ARC.
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