“Palabra Jot!”: A History of The Write Channel and Its Origins in the Educational Research of Frank O’Hare

This article recovers the history of The Write Channel, an American children’s educational television series co-produced in 1978–79 by the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television and the Agency for Instructional Television. Drawing on archival sources, production records, preserved broadcasts, and interviews, it traces the series to the educational research and writings of Frank O’Hare (1935–2021), whose audiovisual pedagogy has been largely overlooked in histories of educational media. It examines how the production team translated O’Hare’s concepts of sentence combining, “sentence sense,” and attitudinal learning into research-based instructional television that offered an alternative to popular national productions. Recovering this overlooked regional series expands the history of educational television and offers a compelling historical model for research-based educational media in the digital age.