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In the context of a wider research, this article analyzes the first stage of Jesús Martín-Barbero's work, more precisely his writings in the 1970s, in order to recover his most significant contributions to the field of communication/education during that decade. The corpus of analysis is made up of Martín-Barbero's doctoral thesis entitled La palabra y la acción, finished in 1972, and two later books, Comunicación masiva: discurso y poder, written in 1978, and Comunicación educativa y didáctica audiovisual Elementos teóricos-metodológicos para la producción de ayudas audiovisuales didácticas, published a year later. The aim of this paper is to characterize these reflections, explain them, and systematize them in order to identify the points of continuity and rupture between those deliberations. This will in turn let us, on the one hand, establish the lines of research that will allow us to relate the other stages of the intellectual production of the author in this field and analyze the evolution of these first contribution, and, on the other hand, to evaluate to what extent these approaches and their subsequent developments and transformations can still be useful to investigate the phenomena related to communication/education in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]