I often struggle with arguing about the validity of Media Studies as a subject – partly through self-loathing, but also because a tiny part of my mind is a bit Daily Mail (only a tiny bit, I inherited it from my Nana) – but this News International thing I think crystallizes why the subject is so important. There’s the issue of this scandal being a ‘media’ scandal and it is valuable for looking at media regulation, but these monumental events could should be covered in History (eventually) or Politics. Then there’s the idea that you need to know how Media works in terms of institutions and practices, to uncover and comprehend the scandal – but again I feel that this is missing the point. And this is what I feel the point is…

What is being exposed here the fact that one man and his family, has dominated UK Media, moulding it, and so society with it, into a shape that suited their needs. Whether this is how celebrities or royalty are seen, how politicians should be treated, how sections of the society are represented or how we should see the nation as whole. All this has a very visible, tangible and actual affect on the way we perceive, behave and respong. If we accept this process happens and if we don’t equip young people with the tools to deconstruct their experience, to look behind the representations and the stories, then there is the risk that the media will remain too influential.

That’s why Media Studies is so vital – it’s about creating the understanding that EVERYTHING in the media is constructed and so has the finger/thought prints of those constructed all over it. So asking WHY are things being constructed in certain ways is essential – otherwise naturalised American-Australian families with crap glasses get to shape how WE perceive the world.

And the damage this causes is very real, and if the right questions are not asked by all audiences then the damage can be deep and long lasting.

While many are rightly losing their lunches over the grisly details of the present scandal, it’s worth remembering who the forerunners were in the rejection of swallowing a perverted worldview wrapped up as ‘The Truth’. The City of Liverpool has run a successful boycott of News International’s The S*n since it attempted to stand on the neck of a community when it was already down, just to save the jobs, blushes and credibility of the establishment. This was in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster when The S*n led a smear campaign against Liverpool fans who turned up to watch the FA Cup Semi Final, but left seeing 96 of their own crushed to death and then were accused by The S*n of urinating on the dead bodies.

For the people of Liverpool the poisonous fabrication was obvious, but if more people outside the city had asked WHY? – why should we believe this? why would anyone want to soil their hands constructing this untruth? – then perhaps the city’s quest for justice would be less painful and better supported.

This is more than just understanding that today’s news will be made transparent by the grease of tomorrow’s fish supper, as we live in an exceptionally media saturated time. More so than ever, the world we experience is filtered through the media; even close relationships are becoming digital constructions; so understanding mediation, being able to pick meaning apart and to actually give a monkeys about what we let into our head should be part of every individual’s toolkit. Today’s youth are certainly tech savvy so can access content in a multitude of ways but that does not necessarily mean they are media savvy, so it would be negligent of an education system not to prepare them to become able readers and writers of media.

Media Studies has the power to do this and it’s easy to forget this when trying to explain the cultural importance of Rebecca Black in front of a fidgeting class. Media in the curriculum has never been more relevant. It’s making media ownership, media agendas and media representation less daunting and less ‘all-powerful’ and empowering the students to peek around the curtain and realize, just like in The Wizard of Oz, it was all just a little old man all along.

This piece was written late on the 12^th July 2011 so much will have happened in the phonehacking scandal since then. So as the world awaits what other horrors are to be revealed and hundreds of C-lists celebs pray to God they are one of the 3800+ phonehacking victims, this all seem very fresh, raw and important. I just hope it still is when you’re reading this.

If we were to strip away the media from media education, what would we be left with? A reflective and reflexive approach to teaching and learning, that’s what, a pedagogy that is – and has been – 2.0 ‘avant la lettre.’ In general, media education is borne from, and productive of, pretty good pedagogy. One of the advantages of working in media education is that many of the best arguments in favour of one specific approach or another are also invocations of what might be considered “best practices” in education in general. These features are well known to media educators who allow and enable some combination of a participatory, dialogic, critical, analytical, productive, historically contemporary and socially and culturally relevant pedagogy into their classes or community settings.

Such approaches to teaching are not new to media education, and whether they were drawn from Paulo Freire’s conceptualization of education as dialogue, or from other sources, they have long been the hallmark of media education where the teacher is always cast as a learner and has to concede expertise over much specific media subject matter to students. What has changed today, however, with the low costs of media production and the easy access and capacity for distribution, is that media education has become much more production-centered. This is cause for great excitement – a marvellous development – but it has opened up some new quandaries, and a new “talent gap” between many media educators and also between media educators and their students.

Over the years, some media educators became proficient producers of media content, and others came to the field of media education already adept at production with backgrounds in the media industries or with personal experience as media makers. But others among us stayed primarily in the trenches of semiological guerrilla warfare, deftly working the crafts of highly attenuated, subtle critiques of media representation and media industries that gave space for pleasure, agency, empowered audiences and often edgy youth practices and resistances. A problem many with well-honed skills in the ideological skirmishes of negotiated readings, guilty pleasures and counter hegemonic strategies encounter today in the era of productive media literacies is finding ourselves behind a big, fat learning curve, trying to catch up to the technical expertise of other media educators, and, perhaps more significantly, our own students.

At the center of discussions about young peoples’ learning in relation to contemporary media cultures are ideas about digital natives who are like ‘aliens in the classroom.’ In an article with that very same title written almost two decades ago, Bill Green and Chris Bigum (1993) raised the question as to whether educators need to adapt to new types of students whose coming of age corresponded with the birth of a digital culture. In response, Green and Bigum proposed that teachers should adapt to young people, who are in some ways fundamentally different from previous generations. The intervention made by Green and Bigum was intended to challenge the traditional skill-and-drill and sage-on-the-stage models of education at a time when students’ out-of-school experiences in and with new technologies were already setting up a profoundly different engagement with learning. The questions raised by Green and Bigum were not intended as a critique of media educators, and can instead be seen as in support of positions long held in media education.

What Green and Bigum tentatively raised as questions, however, hardened in Mark Prensky’s (2001) formulation about the differences between digital natives and digital immigrants. Prensky’s terms have caught on like wildfire in the public imaginary and surface frequently in the practitioner discourses of educational policy makers and molders (the latter category referring to school administrators, school board consultants, teacher educators, and others who closely influence classroom practice). In Prensky’s casting it often seems like students can learn nothing in contemporary classrooms. Says Prensky: “Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language” (emphasis by Prensky, 2001, pp. 1-2). Prensky goes on to argue that those raised with the new tools have more than simply a new engagement with learning; he argues they also have entirely new brain structures and wiring.

Whatever one makes of this claim – and the validity of Prensky’s brain research has been called into question (McKenzie, 2007) – the more important point is the uncritical manner in which this distinction between educators and learners is posed. The problem with the discourse on newly wired digital natives (i.e., students) versus digital immigrants stuck forever with an accent (i.e., teachers), is that it upsets the educational apple cart. If the immigrants can never catch up with the natives, how can they/we be presumptuous enough to teach them new literacies and practices associated with digital technologies?
Fortunately, media educators have long ago crossed this threshold. The recognition that the media educator can never know everything about evolving media discourses and practices is a central truism in the field. To teach media is to adopt the necessary humility of a Freirean educator who is willing to teach in order to learn. The media educator thus needs to bring strategies, concepts, and frames to the teaching context, but with an open mind towards media production practices that may be better known by young learners. Ironically, Prensky’s formulation seems to ignore this possibility and the history of practices that allow educators to operate at the junction point between new media developments and change in older educational contexts.

In this era of gleaming machines that facilitate the creation, distribution and discovery of multimodal texts, we are easily tempted to confuse certain surface changes for much more substantial shifts in our social and cultural realities. Of course, despite a strong dose of hyperbole that pervades some discussions around new technologies and digital literacies, it is undeniable that they have changed the way we act and interact, particularly in relation to how we communicate with one another and how we access knowledge. Finding a way to adapt to the potentials occasioned by increased access to, and ease of, new production tools and distribution platforms is a nice challenge to be facing, but it is also the case that we need to continue to seek space, now within discourses of new and digital literacies, for media education’s rich legacy as an area of critical, grounded critique of media representations, audiences and institutions.

References

Green, B. and Bigum, C. (1993). Aliens in the classroom. Australian Journal of Education, 37(2), pp. 119–41.
McKenzie, J. (2007). Digital nativism, digital delusions and digital deprivation. From Now On, 17(2). Retrieved July 13, 2011 from http://fno.org/nov07/nativism.html.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. Retrieved July 13, 2011 from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf.

Education has such an important role in one’s life that it is not surprising that it has been the locus of the sharpest controversies for hundreds of years. Many influential thinkers of their time (e.g. Aristotle, Aquinas, Dewey, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Locke, Mill, Peirce, Plato) have tried to attempt to answer questions about the nature, purpose and ideal forms of education. According to the New London Group (2000) if it was possible to define the aim of general education, it could be said that it is the preparation of students for fully participating in social, political and economic life. Media have been an essential part of the modern world and it could be argued that there is almost nothing more crucial for comprehending the present than the study of media.

A lot has been said and researched around the world about children’s media consumption and interaction, along with ways of how to improve their abilities to analyse, critically evaluate, use and create media messages. Educational reformer John Amos Comenius had already launched the reading and analysing of newspapers in schools in the 1630s. However, media education did not receive sufficient attention until the second-half of the 20th century. Since then, various organisations (e.g. The Society of Film Teachers since 1950; The British Film Institute since 1980, Nordicom since 1997; United Nations since 1999, and EU since 2007), researchers, educators and media philosophers have repeatedly argued about what media education is for, should be for, and why children should be formally media educated.

The manifestos for media education naturally vary from one country to another due to different media, economic, social, cultural, and political conditions. For instance, Wai (2002) states that media education in Sierra Leone should ideally decrease social differences between children having an access to media education and those who do not. Media education in Asia ought to prepare children for every day use of fast developing technologies (Chi-Kim, 2009). In Australia New Zealand and Northern Europe, pupils involved in media education learn about the ways media can serve their individual interests and personal development. The USA has traditionally assumed that higher media literacy achieved through media lessons will protect children against negative media influences. Although the protectionist theory of media education holds a subtle presence also in British popular studies it does not hold much sway in intellectual and academic circles. The increasing number of British media education advocates, and more people besides, argue that media education should above all play an empowering and liberating role for the sake of children’s wellbeing.

Countries with less experience in media education, for example the Czech Republic, commonly search for an inspiration in places where the theory and practice of media education seem to be more advanced. Buckingham and Domaille (2009) warn of the danger of the idea that the aims and contents of media education can be simply imported from one country and implemented in another. On the other hand, Butler (2010) emphasizes that ‘the struggle in this is that scholars work alone and changes made remain individual… individual changes may be powerful, but if the individual changes remain in isolation, there is restricted room for collaborative growth’ (p. 37). The European Commission for Media (2011) states that the importance of media education has been widely recognised but its progress varies in relation to the country and can suffer from lack of funding and governmental support.

Various organisations such as UNESCO and projects like ‘A Manifesto for Media Education’ address the lack of international cooperation by providing a virtual space for sharing knowledge, experience and attitudes towards media education. Thanks to this, media education proponents dealing with similar problems can hypothetically learn from each other. As a case in point, Jan Jirak (the head of the Centre for Media Studies in the Charles University in Prague) said (2011) that in the Czech Republic, and in many other countries, the strongest disagreement with the implementation of media lessons into schools arises from the opinion that it would only have a small chance of success, because teachers will always know less about media than their students. A similar trend is also recognisable in the UK where more than a half of British adults believe that children have higher media literacy than themselves (OFCOM, 2011). The counter argument could be used in both cases that just because students can use media and technology does not mean they use them effectively and critically.

The opportunities for cross-national debate have been positively received by participants as well as among bystanders, hence, it is a good time to move forward. It would be strongly of benefit if the proponents of media education coming from different countries actively work together on developing and spreading media education. While respecting states’ individual visions, some aims could be shared globally, namely helping media education around the world gain an adequate place within mandatory school curriculums.

Buckingham and Domaille point out that there is still only a small amount of evidence internationally of systematic media education, above all for children under eleven years, and stresses that it tends to be mainly enthusiast-driven and highly variable in quality. These years are crucial for children’s social, biological and mental development. There is a high chance they will carry over to adulthood attitudes and manners acquired during their formative years. In the UK alone 91% of children under eleven years watch TV almost every day, 61% use the internet, 32% use a mobile phone, 23% listen radio, and more than one third of them do so mostly without an adult supervision (OFCOM, 2011). The majority is also economically active thanks to them having their own pocket and occasional money; British children under twelve spend nearly £5billion a year. The individual efforts of segregated media education scholars have only had a limited success. Currently primary school pupils are being educated about media mainly in the form of short-term and occasional courses, or within other school subjects (e.g. citizenship, ICT, history, literature and language classes).

At this juncture the question arises whether an internationally unified manifesto centring on media education for primary school children as a global concern should be written. As Aesop famously put it:

‘In union there is strength.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buckingham, D., and Domaille, 2009. In: Chi-Kim, C. ed. Media education in Asia, 2009. Hong Kong: Springer.

Butler, A., 2010. Media education goes to school: Young people make meaning of media and urban education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Chi-Kim, C., 2009. Media education in Asia. Hong Kong: Springer.

European Commission for Media, 2011. Available from http://ec.europa.eu/culture/media/literacy/index_en.htm [Accessed 1 May 2011].

New London Group. A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. In: Cope, B., Kalantzis, M., Multiliteracies, ed. Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, 2000. London: Routledge, 9–38.

OFCOM, 2011. UK children’s media literacy. Available from http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/media-lit11/childrens.pdf [Accessed 1 May 2011]

Wai, M. Z. Globalisation and Children’s Media Use in Sierra Leone. In: Von Feilitzen, C. A. C., U. ed. Children, young people and media globalisation. Göteborg University: The UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media and Nordicom, 2002, 171 – 187.

Whatever media education actually is, there is a clear and urgent case to guide education and media studies to better understandings of disability. Always under-theorised as a social construct, disability is rarely approached as an issue of social justice in media education, and conventional attitudes towards people with impairments go unchallenged within many areas. Common-sense, individualistic understandings of deficit and damaged personhood prevail, leaving the cultural and structural causes of disablement firmly intact.

The MeCCSA Disability Studies Network has media education at its heart. It was founded in 2010 to support and promote the development of the research and teaching of Disability Studies within Media Studies and Education. We are particularly concerned with research into disabling imagery, disabling aspects of media institutions, cultural equality in the academy and media industries, and the disabling aspects of research itself. We aim to support interventions in media, culture and communications by disability activists, disabled practitioners and academics, particularly those which are designed to interrogate and counteract stereotypes, prejudice and disabling practices. We hope that work on disability (as a form of social oppression) will begin to occupy as prominent a place in media studies and media education as does sexism, racism, postcolonialism and homophobia.

The network also provides a space to support and promote the work of disabled academics, lecturers, researchers and media practitioners working in Higher Education, whose needs and potential contributions are often marginalised and overlooked in academic and media practices. To these ends we have been working to facilitate the sharing of information and to develop and promote research and publication in the fields of media, film, music, communications and cultural studies in relation to disability.

We believe that the need to consider these concerns has become increasingly urgent over recent years. A number of recent initiatives led by disabled people have reflected the growing concern about images of disability in the media and in government documents. These include Inclusion London and Leeds Independent Disability Council (LIDC), and LIDC is currently examining links between media images and the increase in hate crimes and harassment directed towards disabled people.

Media education has much to offer the improvement of attitudes towards disabled people, but only if cultural representations of disability are taken seriously as a focus for critical engagement within both media and studies and education. Media images are replete with images of impairment and disability, yet non-disabled assumptions of ‘normality’ continue to go unseen in approaches to media and education. We firmly believe that critical examination of disability should not be a niche area and that our inclusion is necessary to a Manifesto for Media Education.

Some unfashionable thoughts

My main interest in media education has been from the perspective of a classroom teacher, a role I have fulfilled for over 15 years. However from different places (Head of Department, Advanced Skills Teacher and teacher training tutor) I can see that it is a highly contested space and now is as good a time as any to map out where we are and the possible future direction of the subject area.

It is true that the foundations of media education have been undermined by the increasing digitization of popular media. ‘Givens’ in the subject, for example our focus on the broadcast media, our conceptual frameworks (a loose but generally cohesive body of knowledge) and a broad vision of ‘empowering’ students to read and create media formed over a 30-year period seem to be increasingly subject to critique.

There are many others (e.g. Livingstone, 2002, Jenkins, 2006) who have more eloquently explored the impact that digitization and Web 2.0 has had on media production, distribution, exchange and consumption practices. Our focus has shifted to ‘new’ media (not that they are new to the children we teach mind): social networking, e-commerce, digital rights. Our well worn conceptual framework has come under criticism for not reflecting this new media ecology. From outside our subject area, the tools of our trade: computers, video editing, podcasting, DTP are now an accepted part of any teacher’s arsenal: a movie maker in History, a podcast in English, a Photoshop product in RE. Media education has crept into the curriculum via the media literacy initiative a cross-curricular or trans curricular project but with what seem relatively limited aims for a media educationalist with a long enough memory.

There are few media teachers who have not had to teach a topic that they had little prior knowledge but the issues facing new media teachers is much deeper rooted. I have delivered a GTP teacher training course at the University of Sussex which trains media graduates or those with media industry experience to gain their QTS in media. With good degrees or first hand experience in media they often feel ill equipped in the teenage classroom. Apart from the usual anxiety that goes hand in hand with a teacher training course, I have witnessed an increasing existential anxiety. Who am I? What am I trying to do? One can sense their discomfort. All those years studying the intricacies of Kurusowa is no use when you are teaching the long tail, those perfected Final Cut skills have no sway when your year 10 already has the mastered the program and has her own YouTube channel. In school, your expertise as a media teacher is mirrored as the maths students use Flip cameras for their investigations and the history students identify bias in a recent documentary. The only statutory media study in school is some form of media literacy. As Buckingham (2008) has identified, media literacy is an arm of regulation not education in neo-liberal public policy. At its bleakest, it doesn’t seem like such a good career move.

So what is the difference between the media education in its media studies sense and media literacy. Media studies needs to offer something distinctive. I agree with many of the participants in this debate that there is a need to pare down the aims of media education. Too often the subject has been saddled with lofty aims that are impossible to achieve, however laudable they may have been: student empowerment is the most problematic for me. We need to scale back what we do to what is definable and doable. My list may sound rather instrumental but teaching and learning requires tight objectives and I still think that the old fashioned set of key concepts still have some life left for them in the digital age.

• Students need to know about laws that relate to media practice.

• Students need to know about government policy that relate to media practice.

• Students need to know about the history of media organisations.

• Students need to know about the structure of various media industries.

• Students need to understand key theories/ideas that have informed study of the media.

• Students need to be able to use digital technology to create texts that can consciously follow industry practice and/or function as a more creative/aesthetic exercise.

• Students need to know why some media texts are ‘better’ (aesthetically, commercially, culturally, politically) than others – although the criteria need to be suitably varied.

• Students need to know that there is a world of alternative practice that emanates from networks beyond the mainstream

• Students need to know that the media, arguably, offer powerful representations of the world and some of these can come to define certain social groups, places and ideas

• Students need to know that media texts are complex and that there have been various studies/models that examine audience responses

The ‘radical’ that still exists within me hopes that within this framework children go far deeper in understanding the role that the media play in their own identity formation, the institutional domination that media transnationals have over them, the complex ways in which we, even with or in spite of this knowledge, have complex relationships with the texts we consume and that media representations can be debated on all sides with passion. Unfortunately, this is not the realm of formal media study. This is much more important than that and as such is not measureable and assessable in the crude terms required by the examinations system. These issues are far too toxic in the classroom where adolescence, classroom relations, examination specifications and the teacher’s individual position are unstable ingredients in the achievement of these open-ended outcomes relating to empowerment or (political?) engagement. Only those who believe naively that all these factors can be effaced in some form of ‘radical pedagogy’ can seriously sustain a belief in the transformative power of media study at such a deep level for all students. This is not to say that some students will take their learning and apply it meaningfully to their own lives, it is just that this will happen over such a period of time and in other environments far removed from my media classroom. For most students the course will just be like any other, a subject where they learn ‘stuff’ that generally attunes their critical faculties offers a creative outlet and provides new technical skills. With a somewhat heavy, but realistic, heart I think we need to retreat into areas with more manageable and tangible outcomes.

We continue to exist in a wider culture of mistrust of our subject and to some extent we do need to reconfigure the subject so that it is challenging, a technical, creative, analytic subject area in which courses reflect the importance of each area. A level Film Studies may be more analytic, BTEC Media Production may be more technical and A level Media Studies may be more creative. Each course would retain aspects of all three features but in different compositions to reflect the pathway that the student intends to follow.

I am aware of the Media Studies 2.0 thesis (Gauntlett, 2007, Merrin, 2009) that has been proposed and in many ways, it seems as though I am retreating into what has been labeled Media Studies 1.0. As Dovey and Lister (2009) maintain, this rather caricatured characterisation of the subject is simplistic and masks the enormous variation that the old conceptual framework offered. That said, the over reliance of textual analysis predicated on some kind of dominant reading position was perhaps given too much weight. Conversely, there is a problem with some of the Media Studies 2.0 perspective which takes us to another unhelpful extreme where, instead of the critic, inventing meaning through semiotic gymnastics we now have the academic who sees ‘activity’ ‘participation’ and ‘connection’ using their learned eyes. I wonder if participants in this research are as aware of all the complex ways their media consumption (and production) can be understood.

As we are speaking amongst friends, my greatest anxiety is when I have my own crisis. Could the Daily Mail actually be right? Have I spent most of my adult life developing a low status subject with little tangible academic or vocational worth? Was it all one big wheeze, a sop to all the unfulfilled dreams of a post 1968 generation caught on an anti-Thatcherist wave? Was this frustration channeled to mollify ourselves that we were fighting the system from within or at least from the margins? Maybe…

Now might be a good time for media studies to make a distinction between what students study and how they demonstrate their understanding. I think media students should be encouraged to use digital technology for specialist purposes to demonstrate creative skills using industry standard equipment. In this was we give them something different to what they can use as a ‘regular’ user of media technology. Teachers need to up skill or use outside expertise to inform students of industry practice. This offers some qualitatively higher knowledge for students. In the same way our job is to give students knowledge but knowledge in quite a traditional sense. It cannot be right there isn’t a broad body of knowledge that all media students have access to. I know this sounds a little Govian but it is little embarrassing when A level media students don’t know who the Director of the BBC is or who owns BSkyB (even this week!!!) It does us no favours that an A* grade requires the teachers list of theory rather than some accepted body of knowledge from the examination board. It just doesn’t help our cause for legitimacy.

And so it is to the classroom I return. I still see innate value in a progressive form of specialized media study. I still feel the need to call for legitimacy within the curriculum, however forlorn that might be. I think media/film studies, not media literacy, can offer something distinctive that functions either as another humanity subject or as a truly vocational subject which can be fashioned into a number of appropriate courses (GCSE, A level, Nationals). Whatever its form, it must be rooted in tangible knowledge and skills. For too often we have tried to do too much to do with what can broadly be called ‘identity’. I think we bit off more than we could chew!

References

Buckingham, D. (2008) The future of media literacy in the digital age: some challenges for policy and practice in Media literacy in Europe Controversies, Challenges and perspectives. http://www.euromeduc.eu/IMG/pdf/Euromeduc_ENG.pdf (Accessed 9 December 2010).
Dovey, J. and Lister, M. (2009) Straw men or cyborgs? in Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture Volume 1 Number 1
Gauntlett, D. (2007) Media Studies 2.0. http://www.theory.org.uk/mediastudies2-print.htm. (Accessed 26 October 2010)
Jenkins, H. (2006) Fans, bloggers and gamers: exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.

Livingstone, S, (2002) Young People and New Media. London: Sage.
Merrin, W. (2009) Media Studies 2.0: upgrading and open-sourcing the discipline in Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture Volume 1 Number 1

Cultural Heritage

Growing up in nineteen eighties and nineties Liverpool, I consumed a lot of television. Today, it would probably be deemed as dangerously addictive levels, although at the time my mum considered it to be a safer, more contained alternative to hanging around the council estate where we lived. The physical object of the TV box represented a visual world of escapism, a space where fantasy forfeited reality. In many ways, the TV schedule, dictated my behaviour outside school. I can still associate certain emotional triggers associated with key stages of my youth when I think of specific programmes or download relevant theme tunes!

The Young Doctors signified initial downtime from school, sharing biscuits or toast with my brother Stephen. LA Law was aspirational, the idea of a high salaried, high-powered profession seemed seductive in my early teens and Sons and Daughters was the original Home and Away but with poorly lit sets and without the beach and juice bar. Such relics of my former life are not the focus for my contribution here although they do set the scene regarding my own unique cultural heritage.

The act of ‘watching the telly’ and religiously following such multifarious texts ranging from Moonlighting, The Equaliser, Dempsey and Makepeace, Boys from the Blackstuff and of course, Prisoner Cell Block H, ignited my interest in the formation and deconstruction of the ‘stories’ we have to tell, of performance, language, representation and ultimately the impact on ones’ sense of self and perception(s) of others.

Reality Bites

Having provided a backdrop to my cultural heritage, it is important to establish that when I think about media education, there is a persistent and huge tension, even a void, between possibility and reality. My own experience of Further Education, over the past decade, is one of increasing and incessant struggle because my vision of what media education, indeed what success should look like (reference to Natalie Fenton symposium podcast) is remote, even distant from day-to-day reality.

The drive and pressure to recruit increasing numbers of learners; the marketisation of media education (see David Buckingham symposium podcast), usually consisting of a staged set up; including two PD170 cameras, tripods, green screen and not forgetting the obligatory boom, is partly to blame for societal misconceptions and learner unpreparedness for the actual content (75% critical theory) as prescribed in the specification.

Students only require 4 GCSE’s (grade C in English as a preference, not a requirement) to register onto any Level 3 course. However, actual (based on diagnostic data calculated on entry) literacy levels paint a very different picture for many of us in the FE sector. To reiterate, the canyon between level of learner and his/ her ability to handle the knowledge required (for learners to develop the critical skills on a Level 3 Extended Diploma in Media Production, when their identified literacy levels remain at either Level 1 or 2), has simply become wider. Lower literacy levels adversely affect learner ability to critique and do texts. Studying media at Level 3 should not be expected to fill the canyons left behind by a seemingly disastrous literacy strategy legacy.

In addition, Edexcel have opted for in-house verification of assessment grades as a cheaper alternative to external site visits. This decision can only impact negatively in the long-term regarding quality, standards and sharing good practice across institution and only serve to relegate the pedagogic possibilities of our subject.

I Have A Dream…

The Manifesto for Media Education (MME) presents a platform that potentially signals a transformative moment for our subject. The ‘stories’ contributed so far signify the beginning of a long awaited and necessary dialogue across institutional and geographical boundaries, as Ruth Zanker rightly reiterates, that will hopefully continue to locate and engage a broader community of practice.

In order for the MME to have an impact, generate a deeper, more cohesive understanding of our subject and its possibilities (for the benefit of all stakeholders including learners, parents, critics and curriculum planners), it needs to extend its online presence and develop an accessible, user-friendly space where our pedagogic practices, regardless of sector or examination board, can be disseminated and reflected upon. In the same way we ask our learners to begin the process of creating a product, by identifying its users/ market, we as a community, need to think about the actual impact of the pedagogic choices we foster.

As Buckingham states in his contribution, ‘we need to cast a more dispassionate eye on what really happens in the classroom, however awkward (my italics) or even painful that might be. We need to come up with evidence that media education actually works.’

Zygmunt Bauman (2005: 1097) provides a practical cure to Buckingham’s seemingly ruthless yet honest diagnosis, however it comes with a warning, as he asserts:

Disclosure is the beginning – not the end – of the war against human misery.

Practice

In 2009, whilst undertaking the MA in Creative and Media Education (MACME) at Bournemouth University, I attempted to disseminate and make transparent my own learning for the benefit of others. As a product, it is flawed, however its message remains relevant. It evidences or discloses my attempts to disseminate the learning that occurred that day. The additional creation of an accessible, audiovisual resource enables our pedagogic experiences to live outside of Moodle or Blackboard.

The idea of a shared dialogue is not new. Historically, the contextualization of culture has always been part of media education but the dissemination of what we do across institution has not.

The research methods employed, adapt and make explicit techniques used in Creative Explorations, by David Gauntlett in his chapter (2007: 128-157) entitled, ‘Building Identities In Metaphors’. Due to cost of Lego bricks, I developed ‘Serious Play-Doh’ instead, as a cheaper alternative – pedagogic research doesn’t have to be expensive. I simply created a space for colleagues to reflect on their own pedagogic behaviour(s). In the spirit of making transparent the awkward and as an example of autoethnography in action, you can access ‘The Death of the Teacher’ exhibition video here: http://creativechameleon.weebly.com/exhibition.html

In a time of fierce competition, student-as-consumer and pedagogic accountability, our subject is in the midst of a somewhat vulnerable yet highly reflexive period of educational history.

As I see it, a MME should not seek to standardize or unify media education in a set of coherent and agreed principles but make visible, critique and account for what we do. We need to document the development of our understanding on a localized level for future generations of media educators, to enable them to locate and make reference to a database containing our subject heritage. Refraining from dissemination whatever the rationale (institutional USP, fear of disclosure, protecting intellectual copyright) only presents us with an array of missed learning opportunities. Our knowledge base will continue to splinter off, as the walls separating our silos of understanding thicken.

Ironically then, media education finds itself in a unique position. In a time of severe cuts to staff development budgets, we need to apply our learning here, we need to merge theory and practice and make our rhetoric live.

What It Means To Be Human

Unlike our fixed, biological fingerprint, our unique cultural heritage is determined by our ability to identify, distinguish, unpack, reconstruct and ultimately re-present the self. In an individualized world, our cultural heritage is intrinsically mobile and inherently at odds between ones’ online (reconstructed) and offline (inner) self. For instance, Facebook, You Tube and Twitter are platforms associated with the reconstructed self; places where we consciously redefine, present and publish self-selected elements of ‘the self’.

In part, I am in agreement with McDougall (reference to his manifesto contribution) who observes that our learners are ‘apprentices in theorising their culture’ and that learning about ‘the media’ is ultimately a defunct entity. However, we need to be cautious about referring to pedagogic learning spaces as belonging to ‘the inexpert’.

As a community, we need to move beyond the defensive and avoid terminology that might confuse and hinder the possibilities of this crucial moment. On the contrary, I would argue that media education needs new forms of research on what it means to be human; it is about making connections between the online and offline self as we attempt to become ‘experts’ of the (holistic) self and perception(s) of others. For instance, questioning the ways in which texts re-construct and re-present themselves, validity, reliability, provocation, dealing with uncertainty, managing conflict, and ultimately, it is about learner preparedness to function with confidence in our society.

Denzin and Lincoln (2005: 1086) aptly refer to the current state of play as, ‘para-ethnography’ where the classroom is our field of inquiry, and our learners, ‘treated as experts, as collaborators and partners in research’.

Finally, if our subject has the courage to come out of the closet, we might just be able to access, what Bauman (2005: 1089) describes as, ‘human possibilities previously hidden’.

In Summary

Point 1: Actual disclosure of our pedagogic practices will be essential if we are to develop a community built on academic rigor and accountability.

Point 2: Engage and exhibit exploratory research projects on what it means to be human, based on:
a) Offline (inner) and online (reconstructed) sense of self.
b) Individual and community (tangible and virtual).

Bibliography

Bauman, Z., 2005. ‘Afterthought: On Writing; on Writing Sociology’. In: Denzin. K. Norman and Lincoln. S. Yvonna, eds, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

Denzin, K., Norman & Lincoln, S., Yvonna, 2005. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

Gauntlett, D., 2007. Creative Explorations – New Approaches to Identities and Audiences, pp. 128-157. London & New York: Routledge.

Websites

A Manifesto for Media Education: http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk (accessed 17 January to 06 July 2011)

Chameleon: http://creativechameleon.weebly.com/exhibition.html (accessed 01 July 2011)

Manifesto for Media Education Symposium Podcasts: http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/symposium-podcasts/ (accessed 27 June 2011)

(In line with John Potter, I didn’t feel the need to provide the exact references.)

With regard to access to technology and the use of digital tools, Norway and the Nordic countries are ahead of most other regions in the world. However, there seems to be a growing and common interest, both on a European level and in other parts of the world, in how issues of empowerment, citizenship, skills and competencies should be worked out and realized as an educational subject in the school curriculum. In the Nordic countries, the preconditions for media education and media literacy are strongly related to the overall access (nearly 100%) to Internet, smart phones, digital devices and the standard of living more generally. In this case, the Nordic countries are of interest as a context for studies about the penetration and access to new digital technologies in societies as a whole and more specifically as a test-bed for new production practices in media education.

Two emerging trends in schools are well worthy to notify as an introduction. First, digital literacy (digital kompetanse) was introduced across the whole curriculum a few years ago (like in Australia and New Zealand) as one of five core competencies (the other four are writing/reading (literacy), oral presentation and numeracy). In this sense kids and youngsters in every school are supposed to work with computers and media production in all subjects during their 13 years of compulsory schooling (from the age 6 to 19). Putting digital literacy on the agenda is primarily policy driven, and the implementation of ICT as well as the use of computers to do advanced media production varies to a large degree. However, things are changing, although a bit slowly.

However, developments in upper secondary schools are more remarkable in relation to the manifesto upfront here. My argument, a bit of a provocative one, is that this quite new vocationally oriented subject sets the scene for what media education can be in the future. Since the turn of the century, Media and Communication as a vocational programme has become very popular at upper secondary schools in Scandinavia. In particular, this subject has become increasingly trendy in Norway, attracting more than five percent of the youngsters in the age group 16-19 years old. In terms of pupils applying for this subject, only those with good marks, in the central areas, qualify for the programme. Across Scandinavia, these programmes vary to some degree, and in Sweden, for instance, this programme has been removed as a vocational programme from the school year 2010/11. The course structure today in Norway is based on a joint first-year foundational course, after which students are to choose between a crafts-oriented specialization and a course qualifying for higher education. The argument for Vocational media education is based upon what is seen as a need for apprentices in some part of the media business. However, as noted above,only a few (less than 5% of the students) decide to do two years in school followed by two years practice in a company, due to lack of interest as well as the lack of places for apprentices. Over 95% of the students choose the latter, which gives an opportunity to qualify for university and University Colleges afterwards. Consequently, the students combine a vocationally oriented media programme, but acquire access to academic studies in universities as well as university colleges. So, what happens in these classrooms, and why is it important in a manifesto for media education?

Vocational media education – only good for the GDP?

In the introduction to this manifesto, it is proposed that there is a stark contrast between a vocational view of media education (backed up by the government in the UK as well as in the EU) and media education as a teaching method to teach kids what role media should have in a civic society. After doing fieldwork, as a researcher, for a number of years in these classrooms, I have identified two groups of students among those who are doing the vocational programme with an academic programme as a bonus.

The first, and major group comprises students with good marks, mainly middle-class students, who want to ‘have fun’ for three years before they continue to study in colleges and universities. These youngsters do all apply for the academic subjects besides doing the vocational media programme throughout the three year long programme. The schools, offering the vocational media programmes, provide the kids with brand new technology, studios and expertise. In this sense the classroom practice of re-mixing subjects, knowledge and genres in media production both mirrors an existing tendency in media culture and provides the opportunity to engage in this mode of production in a ‘transactional learning space’. Consequently, in many schools, teachers are now increasingly doing collaborative projects across disciplines and subjects, mixing media production and domains of knowledge to be found in subjects such as social science, Norwegian (mother tongue), English language and literature as well as math. In this sense, the students are gaining media literacy, as a technical skill, on a sophisticated level, connecting core issues to be found across the curriculum through their media production. This approach is of course not so different from good media education projects to be found in many places around the world. However the subject in Norway offers the students 20-25 hours a week to prioritize such projects. In addition many of the students spend the rest of the afternoon in schools to finish their work, besides doing the shooting in the weekends. The same group of youngsters does also, to a large degree, engage in young entrepreneurship as a subject in these schools. This is a very recent development. In their engagement with this ‘subject’ they are working with media and media production in a number of different ways. Young entrepreneurship has become extremely popular in the Nordic countries over the last five years, engaging youngsters from the age of 14 to 25 years old in one year long project, where the aim is to establish a small company. Production practices such as web design, commercials (radio as well as video) and flyers/brochures must be produced, and those students who engage in such practices draw upon their interest in media as part of the media programme.

But there are also others engaging in the creative and cultural sector, but not as young entrepreneurs. These ‘geeks’ are aspiring young artists and filmmakers to be found among the media students in upper secondary school. However, they find resources for their learning trajectories in a number of different places, in particular in online communities. By carrying out an interest driven genre of participation across different contexts and sites, they work their way into the industry. In this process, the subject Media and Communication does play a vital role as one of many contexts for learning. There seems to be an increasing number of students with expert knowledge about specific topics in digital media production. In terms of exploring semiotic work with sophisticated technology, it is also necessary to ascertain how these kinds of knowledge and experiences among young people are negotiated, valued and judged in the educational context. Thus, a need exists to pose crucial questions, such as; Are the geeks’ knowledge of different production practices at all relevant for media educators? And if they are, what kind of media literacy do learners gain through time by participating in these (online) communities of practice? Moreover, there seems to be an urgent need to recognise if and how these young people, engaging at a semi-professional level with a set of digital means, deploy this knowledge into educational settings. On the other hand, will young people find (vocational) media education valuable for their goals and purposes as they try to work their way into the media industry?

Of course, I can already hear some voices here whispering in the background; is this media education? Is this about media literacy? My answer is yes. Throughout these production practices every student has to engage in how to communicate and brand their product as young entrepreneurs. This is of course top-down, policy driven student engagement in the first place, but the ways in which students spend days and night to finalize their products, tell us something about their engagement in school through these processes. And in particular their engagement is very much connected to their production of a wide range of media genres.

A manifesto must be short and easy to remember. Based upon my introduction I pose three points for the future of media education:

• Remix vocational production practices with subjects to be found across the curriculum. Production before analysis. Production with content. The ease and availability of cheap and easy technology will make possible in all age groups and schools within the next decade.

• Remix students’ engagement in entrepreneurship, commercial activities, freelance work as well as their literacy practices in fan-cultures, online communities and blogs.

• Remix media and genres in order to teach students how different kind of knowledge, narratives and overviews can be transducted from one media (or mode) to another.

A final comment on researching new production practices.

On the level of the learner there seems to be a need to further explore the interrelationship between the out-of-school practices and the media production practices carried out in educational settings. As pointed out above, there seem to be vast differences with regard to previous experience with digital media among different kinds of learners in schools, and, more specifically, in media and communication studies in (upper) secondary schools.
One of the aims in the future must be to formulate a distinctive, but holistic approach to the practices that involve sophisticated editing tools. (Yes, I do agree here with Lev Manovich. Media literacy is also – but not only – ‘software literacy’). The point I wish to underscore here is how different fields of research, must merge into a broader discourse on young people, new media and learning that can inform new research on young people and digital media production. The task is an important one if media literacy as a term is to be driven by empirical research and not the primarily policy-driven discourse which, at least until now, has been lacking substantial empirical evidence and is constantly fuelled by normative perspectives on young people and digital means. With this in mind, it seems as if the field of media education may be renewed in the next few years, and there appears to be adequate justification to rename the field ‘New Media Education Studies’.

What the Manifesto for Media Education Symposium seemed to be asking is how and what and why we should teach the media. These questions have been asked repeatedly but it is important.

How We Teach Media

At the Symposium, Jenny Grahame raised the difference between teaching about the media and teaching through the media. I think, like her and others at the symposium, that both Media Studies and Media Education are of a profound importance to what happens in the classrooms in our schools and colleges.

How we teach the media then requires a commitment by teachers of both Media Studies and teachers who use media to teach their subjects. Both involve different approaches and sometimes different skills obviously, but both are fundamentally using the media to teach about society, about the world we live and about the technology we use to participate in this world. In order to teach media, I don’t agree with Alison Pemberton’s point on this blog about media teachers needing to come from a media background. I don’t think that it belies the importance and credibility of the subject to have teachers from other backgrounds – if anything it informs the subject further. On top of that, I can’t imagine anyone is ‘forced’ into teaching the media. But then maybe I would say that because I didn’t come from a purely media background.

I became interested in using media texts such as film, television, storyboards and ultimately moving image as a means to get boys critically engaged in the de/construction of texts during my PGCE in English and Drama at the Institute of Education in London. I became a teacher of Media Studies as a result of my profound interest in the radical pedagogical aims of the subject in the late 90’s, influenced by through the work of Paolo Freire and Augosto Boal, the work being done in the English and Media Centre by Jenny Grahame as well as by my lecturers Anton Franks, Gunther Kress, David Buckingham and Jane Miller.

What We Teach

With the digital boom, I have gone from helping students crash edit in my Media Studies lessons to teaching Flash for sophisticated animations, Adobe premier for editing and Photoshop for desk top publishing. My students blog all their work, use tumblr to collate and share images and some tweet. All use Facebook to communicate, at times illicitly, in the classroom. However, while the technology changes the content of my lessons has to remain engaged in a critical analysis of media texts supported by a range of theoretical frameworks. The theory, the critical creativity, the study of society is essential otherwise the subject becomes empty: the reproduction of media texts with no critical questioning behind them. I might be teaching my students how to make a music video using a basic hand held cam corder and adobe premier editing but they could probably do that on their own. Indeed they might already be doing that. My role is to get them to question why music videos are made in a certain way using the frameworks of critical questioning: feminism, postmodernism, artistic and cultural movements, social and visual semiotics etc. All of this will move the video from a dodgy, sweded piece of work with no awareness of its own postmodernist intertextuality to a critically creative piece of work irrespective of quality of the technology.

Why We Teach Media

Media Studies has run the risk of festishising technology instead of reclaiming the content (Jenny Grahame). In my experience, I have worked in centres which have shifted from the critical to the purely techie ‘how to’ check list of skills; where I am the ‘theory girl’ and not involved in the practical work. I think the students work has suffered as a result of the theory becoming detached from the practical. We need to encourage students to become active ‘makers’ of media texts within the classroom, so that students became involved more readily in the actual process of critical analysis. This is supported by the claim from Jenkins (2009) that ‘educators have always known that students learn more through direct observation and experimentation than from reading about something in a textbook or listening to a lecture’. P42

However, this raises serious questions about what exactly happens in the classroom and therefore opens up the debate to a broader more exciting one concerning pedagogy.

“…emerging youth media programs have been motivated by the belief that engaging in media production should be the cornerstone of media education and lead to youth empowerment through the development of self expression.” p247 Lange and Ito

As the teacher’s role becomes that of facilitator then does school/college become just a formal time frame for students to hang out in? (Lange and Ito 2009). Does this lead to students becoming active learners following in the radical pedagogy of Freire and Boal? For the purposes of my doctoral research, by examining the pedagogical aims and learner outcomes of Media Studies, I hope to explore this enquiry.

The question here then is how educational institutions are going to adjust to that shift and whether students and teachers will still recognise/value it as ‘learning’.

Education designed by adults for children also has an unavoidably coercive dimension that is situated in a systematic power differential between adults and children. P.23 Lange, P. and Ito, M.

This comes back to Pemberton’s concern about untrained or non-specialist media teachers. Media Studies is situated between self taught/peer based learning which values youth expression and creativity, and the project briefs and aims of the teachers institutions and exam boards delivering it as an academic subject. This is the site then of intergenerational tension according to Lange and Ito; between adult autonomy and youth autonomy and educational and entertainment content (Ito 2007 cited in Lange and Ito 2009).The results of my research will hopefully lead me to an enquiry of whether the encouragement of self expression through digital practices on a media studies course will ever be viewed as a meaningful task by young people or simply a attempt by teachers to ‘get down with the kids’?

References

Buckingham, D. (2003) Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture. Polity
Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society
Jenkins, H. (2009) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture MIT
Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age Routledge
Lange, P.D. and Ito, M. (2009) ed Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. MacArthur Foundation.
Moayeri, M. (2010) Classroom Uses of Social Network Sites: Traditional Practices of New Literacies? Digital Culture & Education, 2:1, 25-43

In the 1990s, the then Education Secretary in the UK, John Patten, called media courses and programmes, ‘pseudo religion’ and a ‘cultural Disneyland’. This from a government which established the Department for Media, Culture and Sport in 1992 – then called the Department of National Heritage. Nonetheless, it seems that media education has suffered from an inferiority complex ever since. However, far from damaging our subject, these criticisms are actually the result of a significant success story. There were once heated debates about the introduction of English Literature at Oxford University, and even Jane Austen had to defend the novel in her own Northanger Abbey.

In the years after that novel was posthumously published (1818), others would have to defend the right to study their particular media of choice, but the examination – and surrounding scholarship – of what we would now call the ‘modern mass media’ has in reality been an aspect of the teaching curricula in the UK since the 1950s. This was partly the result of the first British Film Institute (BFI) conference in 1946, whereby a select group of largely London-based school teachers began using film in their classes (see Bolas 2009). There was definitely a sense of paternalist inoculation here as it was felt that children and young people needed to be ‘protected’ from this potentially dangerous media; the perverse logic went that if children could be taught how to discriminate between good and bad films, then they would become better citizens – and the cinema industry would be forced to clean up its act as a consequence. A ‘film appreciation’ movement later emerged in schools in the 1960s and 1970, where film clubs were very popular – although this was generally extra-curricula, and very middle-class. Those early teachers, who used film in their teaching in some way, came from subjects such as of Physics, Geography and Economics. Decades later, Len Masterman (1985) would argue for a film education to be an integral part of Geography, Science, English and History subjects:

“[I have] used a great deal of film in my English teaching in the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly with low-stream kids to whom print was synonymous with failure” (1985, xiv).

This was reflected in the emerging media studies programmes in the latter-half of the 20th century, and their ultimate purpose: to foster a sense of media literacy in students. In the wake of the 1963 Newsom Report, UK schools where divided along the lines of those teachers who saw a media education as an essential part of ‘good’ citizenship and a means to promote ‘critical thinking’; those, like Masterman and David Buckingham, who argued for a type of media education in all schools; and those who taught media in polytechnics and some universities to students who wanted to make their own films and who wanted to work in, what was then, thriving British film and television industries. As the UK film industry declined in global prominence and influence in the 1980s and 1990s, conversely media, as a taught subject in schools, colleges and the new ‘post 1992’ universities, was booming: dozens of media studies and production programmes were being set up to sate the appetite of a generation eager to participate in some way; if you were a young person in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and to an extent, the 1990s, who wanted to make your own media texts, you had to take a media programme of some type at your school or college. Today, new technology mean that this is no longer the case; pretty much anyone can get access to production, acquisition and production equipment, and this poses particular challenges for those of us in media education, or who use media in some way, in our teaching.

Media literacy, was seen by many, as a crucial aspect of a wider literacy education. But the problem was that media education began to move away from the media and creative industries (and practice) towards ‘high theory’, just at a time when students were becoming more involved in creating their own media texts, and this has caused a dangerous schism. As Buckingham notes:

“Media teaching has been historically been dominated by ‘critical analysis’ – and indeed, by a relatively narrow form of textual analysis [original italics]” (2003, 49).

This then, has been the core problem for media education, as it became further divorced from practice. In addition, the ‘high-theory’ of media studies was now being integrated into the wider arts, humanities and social science subjects: many History programmes started to look very much like media studies. Indeed, many teachers of film and media studies began their careers as English or History teachers, for as Deborah Cartmell, notes:

“Surely, there’s not an English teacher anywhere who doesn’t use film to illuminate Shakespeare, or who doesn’t ask students to translate a literary text to a context that is relevant to their own situations. However, this process, utilized by so many educators, is rarely interrogated or explained” (2010, vii).

Some large claims have been recently made about media’s pedagogic reach, but as with Masterman in the 1980s, such use of media texts in the classroom is usually in the context of using it as some form of prophylactic, or to help young people who are struggling; so paradoxically the teaching of media has both been seen as a cure for something, and the cause of it:

“It may seem unlikely, but E.T. and Wall-E are being credited as playing an important role in aiding the educational development of today’s schoolchildren…[M]ovies help disengaged pupils to connect with their lessons” (Doward 2010).

So, clearly we haven’t moved far in 30 years, while the rest of the arts, humanities and social sciences subjects coalesce around us, and take the best bits for their own. This problem has been made worse, with the emergence of medium specific silos and their attendant canons from the 1980s. Nothing has done more damage to media education than by the imagined distinctions between film studies, television studies, radio studies and now new media and games studies – and this has not been helped by the medium specific nature of school and college curricular.

Some, such as Jonathan Gray, perhaps point a way out of this mess:

“[W]hile ‘screen studies’ exists as a discipline encompassing both film and television studies, we need an ‘off-screen’ studies to make sense of the wealth of other entities that saturate the media and that construct film and television” (2010, 7).

Perhaps a focus on these paratexts is a better way of understanding the relationship that different media have with other media? Since the late 1980s onwards – the very beginnings of the schism I describe – many of our students have been actively involved in what is loosely deemed ‘Web 2.0’ phenomena, such as online fanfic writing and fan filmmaking. Many young people – and therefore out students – now live in an era of re-purposing; they are their own authors (or auteurs) of content. They are also ‘digital natives’ in that new social practices are often non-medium specific – failing to recognise the, often imagined, distinctions between different media. The creative and media industries are no longer ‘out there’ in any traditional industrial context. Significant aspects of today’s creative and media industries are constituted in bedrooms and classrooms. This is in part due to new technology, but educators often fail to aggregate these types of activities. Today’s student has probably spent a decade making media before they apply to film school and this now poses particular challenges for the media teacher:
This medium specificity has also resulted in a fetishism of technology, as our schools and colleges engage in an arms race to acquire the latest production kit. For many, media studies is just about technology and tools. The view is that students will therefore chase the technology, but often they have better kit at home:

“The technology young people use these days in their out-of-school/college contexts will often be more sophisticated than what we are offering, and they may find our interventions into their everyday digital culture clumsy and awkward, rather than inspiring and empowering” (McDougall 2006, x).

This obsession with technology has been to the detriment of media education. So, we now need to turn away from the ‘high theory’ and return to our modern, completely mediated, lives and the core principles of professional conduct, for as Marc Prensky would have it:

“[U]sing technology is the student’s job. The teacher’s job is to coach and guide the use of technology for effective learning” (2010, 3).

Media education is at its best when it is studying and critiquing practice and policy. A media education should not just be for those who want a career in the creative and media industries, in the same way not all literature graduates will write novels or plays. However, there is probably no subject that shadows its industry so closely. A media education then, and one which is closely aligned to the modern media industries, its professionals and its practices, should benefit anyone who lives in our very mediated world. Media education today, and therefore any manifesto for media education, must be attuned to the relationships perceived distinct media have with each other, and the abundance of texts and practices which are the direct result of such exchanges. Media education should seek to explore these commonalities between media, what they share, what and how they exchange professional personnel, technologies and techniques, and the texts which are the result. No one would ever the question the value in reading and studying a novel, a play or a poem. No one should question then the value in reading and studying a film, television programme or videogame, if only for what these ‘new’ medias owe to older ones.

Bibliography

Bolas, Terry. 2009. Screen Education: from film appreciation to media studies. Bristol: Intellect.
Buckingham, David. 2003. Media Education: literacy, learning and contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity.
Cartmell, Deborah. 2010. Foreword. Pp. vii-viii in Redefining Adaptation Studies, ed. D. Cutchins, L. Raw, and J. M. Welsh. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.
Doward, Jamie. 2010. How classic films give pupils a taste for learning, The Observer, (31 October 2010).
Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: promos, spoilers and other media paratexts. New York: New York University Press.
Masterman, Len. 1985. Teaching the Media. London: Routledge.
McDougall, Julian. 2006. The Media Teacher’s Book. London: Hodder.
Prensky, Marc. 2010. Teaching Digital Natives: partnering for real learning. California: Corwin.

Over the past fifteen years, I have worked with young people in various forms of creative media production, largely through Pacific Cinémathèque, Western Canada’s leading film institute, but also through other community-based media programs and courses offered at post-secondary schools. An ongoing challenge in this work has been to conceptualize notions of critical citizenship in relation to the goals and ambitions of media education. Equipping young people to be participants in public spheres has long been a key objective of media literacy. It is consonant with the moral agenda that circumscribes the field and is crucial in societies where to be a citizen means to participate critically online and in everyday life through images, sounds and written texts. Nonetheless, I think critical citizenship has less to do with the way young people learn to become certain kinds of activists or to take part in the formal mechanisms of politics (i.e., voting, membership in political parties, etc.), and more to do with the way media education fosters students’ modes of thinking and judging, including their sense of hospitality towards strangers.

I argue thus because young people are increasingly engaging in multiple forms of civic participation, including consumer activism, social movements, issue-based politics, and new forms of volunteerism that circumvent or ignore more traditional liberal democratic institutions. Moreover, it is not the job of media educators to determine the political project young people will inherit, and public life itself is not sustained by mere acts of voting once every three or four years. Rather, public life is sustained through a culture of speech and action that counteracts thoughtlessness. Democracy is fostered through a rich social, cultural and political field, an everyday lifeworld in which conformity is contested and thoughtful and vigilant resistance to the power of ideology, bureaucracy, and artificiality are enabled. Such a field is not a singular space however; it is “a space of conflicting and competing discourses, of stories, and images, and performances” that do not reveal truth as much as “the worldliness of the world” (Silverstone, 2007, p. 49). A vital social, cultural and political lifeworld is thus sustained as much by the complexity and richness of the stories and perspectives we find there, as by the way truth itself is articulated in public life.

This is really to say it is the plurality of people, stories, images, and performances that sustain ‘the worldliness of the world.’ Plurality acts as a bulwark against thoughtlessness because the presence of other people, new ideas and images, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt (1958) calls the “web of human relationships,” that ensure our mediated lives are open to change. Plurality thereby counters a kind of oblivion that can blind us to the possibility that things might be different than they are. It nurtures thoughtfulness and constitutes the ground on which democratic dreams might be born. As such, it is essential for developing a common world, a public culture in which we are all involved.

The question this raises is: how does media education foster plurality (and thereby, thoughtfulness) among children and youth? I argue it does by “preserving newness” (Arendt, 1968), by working with young people in such a way that our students gain a felt sense that new beginnings, new directions in their own and other people’s lives are possible. This happens, first, when media education enables thinking itself, the habit of examining “whatever happens to come to pass or attract attention” in our lives (Arendt, 1978, p. 5). It is through our faculty of thought, our ability to reflect on the world that we move beyond routine circumstances and routine behaviours, and begin to consider these circumstances and behaviours in relation to other problems, other people, other possible answers. A more complex (or plural) field of social, cultural and political life is thereby opened up.

Where media education enables thinking and contributes to the critical citizenry vital to public life, it does so by helping young people to de-naturalize the images and mediated experiences that are so much a part of our lives. By helping young people to become historians of the present, to read into the fabric of everyday consumer life, media education demystifies the given world. Distance is thereby introduced into the way young people experience their identities, their relationships with others and their sense of the world itself. The constructedness of our social and cultural lives is thus brought into view. Certainly, the fact that our lives are constructed in and of itself is not the problem; but unless we learn to think about how this constructedness operates, change is not possible. Media education also fosters thinking by helping young people to question bias in media, to see how figures of authority are constituted as such, to examine the production of media texts and practices in relation to an ecology of structures and forces, and by helping children and youth to use media texts as looking-glasses into the cultural patterns and pressures shaping their lives. The use of various forms of new media can foster thinking by helping students learn how to leverage the networking form and capabilities of the Internet. This includes learning to think via forms of collective intelligence, but more broadly, network thinking refers to thinking enabled through the production of meaningful connections in a world rich with information and digital media. This is a central ambition of what is sometimes called Media Literacy 2.0, as are efforts to foster thinking by developing young people’s abilities to sift through the information and narratives produced across media platforms.

Where thinking works to open up routine behaviours and practices, nevertheless, on its own it is not sufficient to foster young people’s democratic habits of mind, because thinking is typically something we do on our own. To preserve newness and nurture democratic cultures, however, requires that we engage with that culture, and to do so, requires that we learn to judge (Arendt, 1978). Judging brings us into the world because judging is something we can only do by forming opinions with and through our encounters with others. Judging is not something we do on our own, because to judge is to form points of view or positions regarding others, and to do this requires that we involve ourselves in “a talking through, a bringing forth, a constant engagement with one’s own thought and that of others” (Silverstone, 2007, p. 44). This requires that we act in the world, that we go out and engage with others in order to understand others. Through this, judging involves risk taking and oftentimes a challenge to the status quo because to judge is to see things from many sides and thus to understand perspectives not yet taken. Judging nurtures what Kant called an “enlarged mentality,” because to judge is to engage with the points of view of others and to mix these perspectives with our own. Through this comingling, we develop richer and more complex views of the world and our place in it. Thereby, thoughtfulness is preserved because our imaginations are increasingly habituated “to go visiting” (Arendt, quoted in Smith, 2001, p. 83).

Media education fosters young people’s ability to judge by affording opportunities for children and youth to talk back to various publics, to leverage the production possibilities made available by new (social networking spaces, blogs, podcasts, and increasingly accessible video production tools) and older media (including written text) to contest, engage, visit, and act with others. These resources make it possible – as perhaps never before – for students to be active agents in their lives and the lives of others. That said, young people don’t take on such roles automatically or easily. Rather, a willingness to judge with others, develops at least in part as students are provoked and challenged (by teachers and those working in other learning environments) to examine how media cultures operate in and through their lives, including how these cultures might be changed to make way for more equitable futures. To do this work, a production-oriented media education curriculum is not only an interesting add-on to the critical analytic work media education has long been committed to. It is essential for ensuring that media literacy programs nurture a kind of engagement that challenges and invites students to share their views with others, to learn to judge in such way that an enlarged mentality, a form of thoughtfulness, is the result. Where media production opens these possibilities, so too do a range of websites – i.e., TakingITGlobal, YouthNoise, Tolerance.org, etc – that create interactive spaces where young people appear with each other and address issues of culture, race, sexuality, and youth action on global issues. Such spaces enable dialogue and the sharing of media resources among youth and educators, and by doing so, critical citizenship is fostered in relation to the media young people increasingly see as their own.

Of course, not everyone is willing to engage with ideas and people that are unfamiliar or unknown, and the same opportunities for media literacy and media production are not available to all young people. For these reasons, I argue that a third crucial way media education nurtures plurality and a democratic world is by fostering young people’s sense of hospitality towards strangers.

By this, I don’t mean that young people should be encouraged to go out and contact any stranger that happens to come their way. This idea would be naïve and irresponsible. The point is rather that the presence of strangers is crucial to democracies, because any democratic public worthy of its name must include more people than simply those one knows or those who are like me. As a consequence, strangers are a normal part of our social worlds. If so, it is also true that where young people are concerned, strangerhood is typically (and often unjustifiably) understood as a social condition thread through with fear. Strangers pose threats to children and youth (stranger-danger), particularly where kids’ online lives are concerned. Strangers can also signify the fluidity, volatility and precariousness of increasingly globalized lives, where meeting people we don’t know can often feel like what Zygmunt Bauman (2001) calls, “mis-meeting.” Conversely, adolescents themselves can become emblematic strangers when they are portrayed as being so different and unlike the adults around them, that they are seen to pose a threat to the very fabric of social life.

In each of these castings, strangerhood comes to represent uncertainty, precarity, and danger, the upshot of which is that the very idea of a relationship between strangers and young people comes to operate as a way of controlling, disciplining and managing adolescents’ sense of agency and belonging. Young people themselves often fight back against these restrictions and “engage in … ‘boundary performance’ – risk-taking [that] is often publicly performed as part of the process of identity construction in a peer group context … [The result is that] whatever we as adults worry about, whatever social norms we seek to defend, children will be motivated to transgress precisely those norms that society has constructed as vital to the preservation of childhood innocence” (Livingstone, 2009, p. 155). If young people are likely to be curious about that which they don’t know, nurturing a form of stranger hospitality is also about fostering a duty of care, a sense of responsiveness, or ‘responsibility’ to the world (Levinas, 1985). Hospitality in this sense is a central element of freedom, because in the final instance, “the only indispensable material factor in the generation of [public life] is the living together of people” (Arendt, 1995, p. 203). But this requires that we learn to live with others, many others, including those we don’t know.

If this is so, media education can nurture a hospitality towards strangers and thereby help sustain a democratic world by ensuring that “the digital and analogue spectrum” is available for all those who are marginalized in contemporary culture (Silverstone, 2007, p. 143); by drawing attention to those voices and bodies (including people who are homeless, refugees, migrant labour, sex trade workers, and others) that are regularly disappeared from view in the mainstream press; by helping young people to experiment with new forms of association, including ‘crowd sourcing’ and online community forums that are changing the political spaces of our cities and neighbourhoods; and so on. Most importantly, media education helps to nurture a hospitality towards strangers when those in the field enable young people to confront “fundamental and structuring wrong[s], a miscount, a radical and unjust exclusion” of people, of ideas, of media practices “that cannot be tolerated” (Barney, 2010). When we do this, media education not only helps to foster a regard for strangers, we also help to nurture a form of thinking and doing, a critical citizenry conscious of the ways all meaning (including that revealed through media texts and experiences) has a social and historical context, a form of contingency that is susceptible to change.

References

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1968). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (enl. ed.). New York: Viking Press.
Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, H. (1995). Men in dark times. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace and Company.
Barney, D. (2010). ‘Excuse us if we don’t give a fuck’: The (anti-)political career of participation. Jeunesse, 2(2), 138-146.
Bauman, Z. (2001). Making and unmaking of strangers. In P. Beilharz (Ed.), The Baumann Reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Livingstone, S. (2009). Children and the Internet: Great Expectations, Challenging Realities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Smith, S. (2001). Education for judgment: An Arendtian oxymoron? In M. Gordon (Ed.), Hannah Arendt and education: Renewing our common world (pp. 67-91). Boulder, CO: Westview.

At the Manifesto symposium held in London on June 10th, we did some rethinking of aspects of media education. As I came away, I thought that pedagogy needed a stronger presence in the discussions so I have put together some thoughts.

In the discussion, I thought that there was some danger of taking for granted the language of pedagogy. Nothing unusual about that – taking pedagogical words for granted is the norm. Our language for teaching and learning dates from the time when, in formal education it was considered that what was taught was learnt so we only needed to talk about teaching (not learning) and the emphasis was on instruction and training methods, on aims for teaching, on describing the curriculum and on the skills and intentions of the teacher and so on. More recently we have changed our focus to learning – and since the learning of the learner is what is central to education, that seems appropriate. With that change of emphasis, we can, to some extent recognise that in a taught lesson there are students who will learn most of what is intended by the teacher, some will pick up some bits, some will misunderstand and get wrong ideas and some will be thinking about what they are planning to wear for the weekend party. However much of the language of pedagogy has lagged behind the change of focus. In particular I think we muddle ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ as words. They refer to different processes and we trust that they have some meeting in the middle. The teacher teaches and we hope that the learner learns, though she may not, or she may learn the same thing from a source other than the lesson. We cannot make a learner learn through teaching – we can only hope and pray….and do our best to be clear, engaging and interesting and so on. Learning happens everywhere and enriches that done formally, as well, one assumes, as vice versa. What is important is that we recognise that when something has been taught, learning of that thing is not automatic. It is common for teachers to say ‘I covered this or that’ and in some way imply that learning has therefore taken place.

Another problem arises in our incorrect use of words. Since the fashion changed and we now talk of learning instead of teaching (excuse my scepticism) educational activities have now become described as learning this and learning that. An example is ‘learning technology’. When students learn something via the medium of a computer screen, their brains are probably undergoing just the same processes as when they sit in a classroom with a teacher teaching. The role of the computer is as an element of presentation – of teaching. If we talk of teaching technologies there are many other ideas that start to apply and a rethink is really in order.

I also want to look at the word ‘theory’ which we tend to use glibly. It means so many things. I spent a lot of my undergraduate days wondering what this thing called theory was (in a zoology degree). As a student I never did find out and it was only with a more sophisticated manner of thinking, that I could much later understand my difficulties. One meaning of theory is ‘what is taught in the classroom’. Most of the time, that is the meaning to which we refer but because of the other meanings, it has mystique and grandeur about it. Another more precise meaning is that ‘a theory’ is an attempt to explain an observed phenomenon. There might be several theories that attempt to account for a particular phenomenon and we may know that no one of them is ‘right’ – whatever ‘right’ might mean, but they all add something to our understanding or they represent a particular approach (which might be a discipline). For example, psychologists and sociologists may have different interpretations of audience behaviour. ‘Theory’ might also be what you need to know before you perform some practical operation. You would want to know elementary ideas about the functioning of a camera and the physics of light before, for example, making a film. When we talk of theory we need to know what sort of theory we talk of. Or, on the other hand, maybe we should not use the grand and convenient generalisation of ‘theory’, but instead try to be more explicit. I wonder how many of us as teachers would know what to say if a student asked us to define what ‘theory’ is! We use it too easily as shorthand for vagueness.

However there is another issue relevant to the idea of ‘theory’ and also to thinking and learning processes. I consider this to be important and though I only know the ideas in their application to higher education levels. When we talk of knowledge and of learning, there is a tendency to think of the existence of a body of ideas that are to be absorbed by the brains of learners and described in a curriculum. In the process of education, it is assumed that students learn more and more of this body of knowledge and in effect, they fill their heads with ideas – their heads ‘swell’ with knowledge that is accumulated. However, research on learning shows that education is not about learning more and more, but about changing ideas. As a learner’s ideas change so what she knows is known in a more sophisticated manner. Learners develop at different rates – so – as William Perry entitled an article, there are ‘Different Worlds in the Same Classroom’. In other words, students at different levels of development understand the same material in different ways – and these variations between learners are likely to be manifested in the same class group. In general terms, it seems that learners arriving for undergraduate programmes tend to see knowledge in the way I have described above, to be accumulated. Their teachers are the experts with the knowledge to ‘give’ them (as clearly and concisely as possible please!). In the course of education, students come to see that knowledge is often not like that – some is uncertain. There is not a right or wrong answer – and no one theory is ‘right’. They realise that to make a decision they need to look at evidence and evaluate the quality of the evidence. They can understand how knowledge may be constructed and they are beginning to see that teachers are not the founts of knowledge that they once thought, but are also in a process of learning, developing knowledge and managing uncertainty. It is only at this stage that they can begin also to appreciate what theory is….and that is why I, on my undergraduate zoology programme, could not understand this word ‘theory’. The ideas to which I refer here are called epistemological development or the development of epistemological beliefs.

If anyone is interested in any of these ideas, I am happy to point the way to references and I will be doing a session on epistemological development at the Media Summit in September. Jenny@cemp.ac.uk

I teach at The BRIT School in South London, perhaps better known for producing musicians and performers, but we also teach young people who aspire to a career within the media industries as content creators, filmmakers, writers and broadcasters. Vocational education is at the heart of the school and as such my manifesto is a vocational media education manifesto.

Manifestos are ultimately about idealism and revolution. With this in mind my vocational media education manifesto is primarily concerned with the following four areas.

1. Student engagement
2. Specialist teaching
3. Development of skills
4. Routes for progression

1. Student engagement

I’m sure many teachers who haven’t experienced a vocational media course would be surprised to find out just how much ‘writing’, theoretical understanding and research that vocational media students complete alongside practical projects and development of technical skills. Vocational education doesn’t just mean ‘making’, look at any of the vocational qualifications on offer from the BTEC diplomas in Creative Media Production or the OCR Nationals and you will see specifications committed to theoretical knowledge and understanding alongside skills development and practice. I believe this variety of teaching and learning is key to student engagement on any media course.

Vocational media education should be concerned with the encouragement of ideas, providing a safe space for students to experiment, to fail and to succeed and to develop their authorial voices in a variety of mediums. Work that students produce should be promoted, valued and recognised. Students should be encouraged to distribute their work whether this is through YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, broadcast on student radio, Flickr or entered for competitions. The ability to share work with real audiences is vital. Work that is only ever watched or looked at by teachers in the comfort of a media office somehow seems redundant.

In order to maintain student engagement, media teachers have a responsibility to ensure that we are up-to-date and relevant with our resources, teaching methods and ideas in order to engage students and to share in best practice Relying on that old newspaper article that has been photocopied a hundred times or setting the same essay question year after year is not the way to get students actively involved in what Julian McDougall would call ‘subject Media’. If media teachers don’t make their lessons up-to-date, relevant and interactive to the students in front of them, how do they expect their students to be interested in their lesson content? I believe that media teachers shouldn’t be divided amongst those that ‘just teach the theory’ against those who ‘do the video and editing bit’. A good media teacher will be a well rounded theorist and a strong practitioner being able to teach film studies in the morning and demonstrating Final Cut Pro editing techniques in the afternoon. For me theory and practice are and will always be interlinked. This is why I find teaching media so enjoyable and challenging; always trying to use and find new examples, learning new technologies and subject areas; I can’t think of any other subject at 14-19 where this is a prerequisite.

Specialist teaching

I strongly believe that media teachers should have a background in media, whether this is as an ex-industry professional or through the study of media specific subjects at degree or post-graduate level. I do not believe that English teachers who have been forced into teaching the subject or those who teach both subjects are the best models. It belies the importance and credibility of the subject. I believe those who have studied media at degree level have the capacity to truly understand the subject and all of its related fields. However it still makes me somewhat annoyed and frustrated that there are still too few media specific PGCEs that train media teachers without them having to simultaneously train as an English teacher.

My route to becoming a media teacher at The BRIT School has meant a lot of hard work, repetition of qualifications and having no option but to teach some English. In 2001 after finishing my degree there were only one or two institutions offering a specific media PGCE and I think even these had an emphasis on English and the English curriculum in some form. I therefore had to study for a PGCE in post-compulsory education and training (PCET), which meant I could focus solely on teaching media and film alongside some vocational qualifications for 16 years olds and above. I was qualified for FE level only and hence went onto teach at a college. A few years later after the disillusionment of FE, having to produce weekly retention rates, working out achievement rates, constantly knowing value added scores and dealing with redundancies, I traded FE for a secondary school. I was lucky to be employed, as my PGCE (PCET) didn’t have Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) meaning legally I wasn’t able to teach anyone under the age of 16. I had to complete a Government Training Programme (GTP) to order to achieve QTS (anyone getting bored of the acronyms?); effectively completing a PGCE twice, only this time also having a full time teaching job at the same time. But what did I have to do in order to gain QTS, that would legally allow me able to teach pre-16 students GCSE Media Studies and BTEC First Diplomas, even though I had taught these qualifications in FE? I had to teach key stage 3 English, specifically my placement asked me to teach year 8s Pride and Prejudice. So in order to be able to effectively deliver media education from 14-19 and to prove my abilities and to get the piece of paper that made me legal, I had to teach Jane Austen. It’s not just me, but this is madness, is it not?

This conundrum has faced nearly every person thinking of becoming a media teacher. Do I focus solely on FE, which often has different pay scales, holiday allowances and structures and become a ‘lecturer’? Or do I focus on secondary schools, which uses the main teachers pay scale, means you might have to teach English or not have great technical resources and become a ‘teacher’? I believe this system and the lack of choice in specific PGCEs or conversion programmes is potentially blocking a lot of excellent prospective media teachers or in the very least quickly generates disaffected media teachers.

Development of skills

Vocational media education should encompass the development of technical, theoretical and creative skills. Students should be ‘getting their hands dirty’ with equipment at every opportunity, making videos, podcasts, taking part in photography shoots etc. in order to develop both their technical and aesthetic skills. Vocational media education shouldn’t and doesn’t ignore ‘writing’ which is often a common misunderstanding of the subject. Written skills through essay writing, producing presentations, research, pre-production paperwork, producing scripts and textual analysis is integral to the ability to communicate.

All subjects have their own specific skills and as I’m sure all media teachers can attest, media courses perhaps encourage the broadest skills of all. Whether this is learning a set of specific and professional software from the Adobe Creative Suite to Final Cut Pro or learning to use a HDV or DSLR camera to using the skills of composition to capture visually interesting work. Or it might be learning how to work in a team, to collaboratively create a television show and learn how to communicate with people, when no-one is talking to each other or being entirely responsible for the organisation of a shoot or perhaps knowing what to do when you realise you’ve gone out to film, your actors haven’t turned up and you’ve forgotten your tape. The skills of organisation, thinking on your feet, communication and group work are just as important as learning depth of field, parallel editing and how to operate a boom.

Routes for progression

I am writing this manifesto knowing that my current year 12 tutor group will potentially be paying in excess of £8000 a year in tuition fees if they chose to attend university.
As someone who only last month paid the last instalment of my student loan, the introduction of higher fees will have a direct and immediate impact on the amount of young people who can afford to attend university. For me, this changes the landscape of post-16 education. What we deliver is now more important than ever. We need to question whether we are providing the correct courses, ensure that we are keeping ourselves up-to-date and relevant and that the content of our courses is appropriate. We need to be able to deliver a curriculum that simultaneously allows students to progress into employment in a media related industry whilst also providing them with a rich curriculum that enables them to continue at higher education if they choose.

On a vocational media course, links with industry is vital. The encouragement of outside speakers, organisations, use of ex-students and organising trips is only going to generate a richer experience for students and help establish discussion and the promotion of ideas. Work experience opportunities are incredibly important, this certainly doesn’t mean that students should automatically be provided with a work placement on every media course, but students should be encouraged to seek out and create opportunities for themselves. If organised correctly, work experience can be more than photocopying and stuffing envelopes. Work based learning allows young people to experience the world of work, for all its positives and negatives, and provides them with some real word experience. Actually being a part of a busy, hectic production company allows people to learn in a way that perhaps is not achievable sitting in a classroom. Ultimately I think work experience can used as a tool for aspiration and progression.

In conclusion, I think vocational media education has over the years had a bad reputation; the Creative Media Diploma certainly hasn’t helped matters. But there is space for A Levels, GCSEs, BTECs and Diplomas to exist alongside one another and they share more commonalities than people give them credit for.

So is there one media manifesto to suit all? Well I feel glad, relieved even, that I am not teaching the same issues, subjects and examples that I was when I first started teaching, how boring would that be! And I continue to be intrigued as to what I will be teaching in ten years time. I don’t think we will ever have one clear and precise media education manifesto; instead we are a rich and diverse community of teachers that are so committed to our subject that we contribute to discussions such as these and get involved in debate about the future of our subject.

Media education is a basic entitlement for all children and young people. At least that’s what the Australian government recently decided by choosing to include Media as one of the five Arts forms for inclusion in the new Australian (National) Curriculum. I’m not sure the federal government meant to make that decision, but in effect that is what happened. Media education in the Australia Curriculum is to be called Media Arts (more on that later) and will be mandatory for all Australian children from preschool to year 8. A curriculum will also be written for years 9 to 12 for those schools that choose to implement it. The Media Arts curriculum will be familiar to most media educators; underpinned by key areas of knowledge around media languages, representations, institutions, audiences and technologies. It will be completely unfamiliar to most primary school teachers and many lower secondary teachers who will be required to implement it; and that poses some significant challenges for implementation.

As an advisor to the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, I am in the privileged position of having direct input into what the Media Arts curriculum will include. This has required me to go back to answering some of the basic questions about what I believe are the reasons for including media education as a mandatory requirement for all children and young people, and what a media education should ‘look like’ from pre-school to senior secondary school. The thoughts outlined below sit behind a number of decisions that are currently being made about the shape of the Media Arts curriculum. They will not appear as curriculum policy, but they are my thoughts as an advocate for media education for over twenty years. Several of my claims are based on assumptions that probably need to be worked through via solid classroom based research. But as this is a manifesto, for now I’m putting aside my researcher’s anxiety of taking a solid position.

Why should media education be mandatory for all children and young people?

Australian society should aim for media education that leads to high levels of participation in digital cultures because it is good for democracy. By high level participation, I mean the ability to produce short videos, create podcasts and other digital content that provides alternatives to alphabetic literacy for communicating ideas. In societies in which video can be shot on mobile devices and edited on personal computers, why shouldn’t we expect people to communicate ideas through recording, editing and sharing video and audio and other digital forms? I am enough of a Foucauldian to believe that the greater the number of people who have to ability to produce media, the better our societies and communities are likely to be. Pluralism is superior to homogeneity and genuine participation in digital culture by more people will lead to greater cultural pluralism.

Some young people successfully participate in digital culture without formal education. Of course, many do not. A quick (unscientific) scan of the skills and knowledge of young people coming into the teacher education courses at my University suggests that while most students can use computer hardware and software to undertake everyday activities like communicate with email, use social networks and access online videos, few produce media content in the form of videos or podcasts. I believe that’s because they do not know how to produce videos efficiently and effectively – it is not because they are uninterested or unwilling. The creation of meaningful media products relies on a range of complex skills and knowledge that should be developed over several years and that is most likely to occur through the formal education system. This is also true of children and young people’s ability to think about the reasons for media production and the consequences of its consumption. There continues to be a role for media analysis of both media texts and contexts and this should be taught and practiced over several years of schooling.

What is the distinction between media education as a form of Arts education and as an aspect of English curriculum or literacy learning?

Media education more ‘naturally’ belongs in the Arts than in English curriculum or as an aspect of literacy education. Actually, I don’t really believe that to be entirely true. Of course it depends on the type of media education to be implemented and the purpose for its implementation. However, media education needs to have a ‘home’ in the curriculum if it is to be treated seriously by teachers, parents and students. Cross curricular approaches to media education only seem to work where dedicated enthusiasts ensure that their schools build media education objectives into other curriculum areas – and this occurs too infrequently. A home curriculum, with a detailed set of learning objectives provided for various stages of schooling, is required to ensure that teachers feel supported in their implementation of any curriculum. This is particularly the case if it is a curriculum that is likely to be unfamiliar to them if they are working in primary school contexts. The Arts provides a more logical fit for media education than English because media education is most successful when it involves creative media production.

Of course, there is a convincing argument that English curriculum should include media production, but the reality is that media production is not a priority for most English teachers (in Australia, creative writing is not a priority for many English teachers). Media is being called Media Arts in the Australia Curriculum because the curriculum authority does not want to confuse teachers, parents and students with the existence of Media in both English and the Arts. In some jurisdictions, like New South Wales, media education mostly occurs through the English curriculum. In other States like Queensland and Victoria, Media has been offered through both English and the Arts since at least the early 1990s. Until Buckingham’s suggestion in Beyond Technology (2007) that we reconceptualise media, English, technology and literacy education into a broad curriculum focus called something like ‘cultural studies’ becomes a reality, I believe the Arts is the best place to locate media education.

What is achievable in schools suffering from ‘crowded curriculum’ syndrome and where there are few media specialists?

The reality in most Australian primary schools is that media education is poorly understood and that it exists in small pockets of activity where enthusiasts implement it. Making media education an entitlement for all children in this context is challenging and a long way off being achieved. It is a good thing that the Australian Curriculum is being touted as ‘aspirational’. The current situation in Australian primary schools, where high stakes testing, accountability measures, and multiple competing priorities are a reality, makes media education a low priority. The Australian Curriculum will make it mandatory for all students from pre-school to year eight to have achievement reported against Media Arts standards – most likely in two year intervals.

The curriculum will need to be written in such a way that is able to be understood and implemented by non specialist teachers. This means that it will be outlined quite differently to a specialist secondary school Media Studies curriculum. There will be more emphasis on the Arts practice aspects of media education and less on “theory” although key conceptual questions will still underpin all aspects of the curriculum. This has already caused some concern amongst specialist media educators as they have provided feedback on the draft shaping papers. Some have suggested it is not enough like ‘Media’ as we know it. Some have objected to the name ‘Media Arts’ and others have argued that it is too focused on the ‘cultural studies’ aspects at the expense of ‘aesthetic’ knowledge – meaning there is too much focus on concepts like representations and institutions.

Some final thoughts

In my opinion, a manifesto for media education must call for media education to be an entitlement for all. But I believe media education should continue to evolve to meet the needs of today’s children and young people who have different relationships with media than the kinds of relationships children and young people had with media in the 1970s and 1980s– when media education was initially established as a field. It must also evolve to be relevant and practical to all educators, not just specialist media educators. There are some basic principles that continue to be important to me as a media educator – such as the belief that universal media education should be our goal, because high levels of participation in media cultures by many is more desirable than participation by few. It is also desirable that young people graduating from upper secondary school should be able to think critically about media texts and the contexts in which they are produced and used. Beyond that, I think media educators should be careful to avoid being weighed down by past practices and beliefs. In other words, a manifesto for media education should ne non normative, open to interpretation and adaptable to multiple contexts.

Our Survey Said …

According to the Confederation of British Industry (2009) Future Fit: Preparing Graduates for the World of Work report, “when asked in a CBI survey what universities should prioritize, 82% of employers chose ‘improving students’ employability skills’, suggesting this should be a key focus for universities”. The emphasis on ‘employability’ has been made clear in a number of recent government reports, and the Browne Review (2010) further cemented the prominence of employability in the core activities of Higher Education Institutions. In relation to media education, Sue Thornham and Tim O’Sullivan’s discussion (2004) of their three-year HEFCE Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning project identified the increasing concentration on ‘employability’. More recently, the 2008 Department for Culture, Media and Sport Creative Britain report works from the position that a range of media industries are ‘creative industries’ and addresses how ‘talent’ can be fostered to ensure full contributions to the ‘creative economy’. Whilst attentive to the broader implications of these positions and strategies for higher education, I want to focus specifically on how questions around employability connect closely with ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ debates that have been an ongoing part of discussions on media education.

Perspectives on professional practice

If engaging students in terms of employability extends to how we explore and make sense of students’ career aspirations and their potential future work contexts, then research on media industries and media work has an important role. Exploring employability with students is an opportunity to draw on this research in applied and personally proximate and meaningful ways. For example, when Gillian Ursell (see Ashton, 2011 for this and more references on ‘critical media industries analysis’) wrote on the television apparatus as a vampire ingesting youngsters at a low price from a large pool provided by the education system, how might this research be used with students to explore the status of work placement schemes, the forms of activity that are available and undertaken, workplace conventions and routines, and how they are positioned and feel?

Work placements and internships present a crucial opportunity for connecting the emphasis on employability and students’ investment in their futures with critical perspectives on the nature of employment within media industries. Existing reports, documents, studies, etc. have addressed: internships as an essential part of the career ladder (Unleashing Aspiration); creativity in student work-related learning in the public and not-for-profit sector (Creative Interventions); creative career patterns and connections between courses and careers (Creative Graduates Creative Futures; Creative Career Stories); and developing professional identity (Learning to be Professional Through a Higher Education). From and in addition to these reports, I would stress engagement with broader ethical questions of ‘media work’. For example, ‘unstable working conditions’ (Creative Graduates Creative Futures) and the National Union of Journalists ‘cashback for interns’ campaign. Employability and exploring ‘professional practice’ is an opportunity to locate research on media industries and media work in ways that are personally meaningful for students. As Henry Giroux (2000: online) asks, “what relation should public and higher education have to young people as they develop a sense of agency?”.

A range of hugely insightful empirical research studies has addressed issues of working hours, job insecurity, and challenges of ‘upgrading the self’ (both in relation to media industries and more widely). These questions are central the situated and lived experiences of students undertaking part-time work, placements and internships as part of their degree course, and who then may go on to secure work as part of their longer term career plan. Employability addressed as part of media education is a space in which connections can be made that prompt and provoke students to evaluate, assess, challenge and contest understandings of industry structures, professional practice, and individual investments.

‘Researching the Media and Cultural Industries’

I have made some recent attempts to consider what a higher education undergraduate module on ‘Researching the Media and Cultural Industries’ might look this. This combines existing aspects of modules already in place and further ideas for curriculum development. An extended outline touching on aims and assessment is available ((see Ashton and Thebo, 2010), and the following focuses primarily on the themes:

1) Amateur and professionalism

Under this theme, students could examine existing and emerging conventions and practices through which different forms of media work come to be understood as ‘professional’, and explore forms of amateur media production and user-generated content and ask how these engage with ‘professional’ media production?

2) Becoming and non-becoming

Under this themes, students are encouraged to consider how they give meaning to their activities and make sense of these in terms of ‘becoming’ a media and cultural worker. This is an opportunity to assess range of opportunities and options, consider expectations and aspirations, and extend beyond limited or narrowly focused perspectives (for example, as ‘making it as director’). As well as examining being a ‘cultural worker in-the-making’, they will explore the potential ‘non-becomings’ in terms of undesirable industry work practices and issues of identity positions and access.

3) Creative biographies

The Open University’s ‘Creative Biographies’ event in April 2009 posed instructive questions around the use of the concept for exploring the experiences of media and cultural workers and how these biographies are inflected by inequalities relating to class, gender, race, age and disability. Students could be introduced to questions from the conference which would be followed by sessions with guest lecturers discussing (in a panel containing students) their own lives and work in the media and cultural industries. Discussions and lectures would be filmed by student teams, who are also asked to source and share other ‘Creative Biographies’ from magazine articles, blogs, director’s commentaries, etc., for class discussion. This theme would focus on the intersection of industry and personal narratives.

4) Passions and precarity

A commonly circulated idea in relation to media work, are the passionate investments that individual make in their work. Exploring these different forms of investment and attachment, this theme encourages a critical exploration of issues of pay, working conditions, and ‘precariousness’. Industry will be evaluated not just as something ‘to learn about’, but also as bound up with imminent ways and places of living and working. The ‘Creative Biographies’ lecture/discussion films and sourced materials could be reviewed and reassessed by students in this different context.

The overall aim under these themes is for accounts and discussions of employability to be informed by research conducted into employment contexts. For example, work placements are a site both for increasing students’ ‘employability’ in the view of employers and for interrogating issues of access and exclusion. Similarly, ‘networking’ is a way to develop communication skills and develop important contacts relevant to recruitment working opportunities, and can be discussed in terms of exclusion and social capital. Questions of power and ethics run through much of this research and can be drawn on in exploring employability and articulating a response to Giroux’s question.

Approaches emphasizing that employability should be embedded within the curriculum rather than as a ‘bolt on’, could perhaps be seen under this conceptualization as less about the erosion of ‘subject-specific’ content and more as an opportunity to develop a programme of media employability education. Ample resources exist in teaching and learning literature for (media) educators in facilitating student personal development planning; with media industries and work research, media educators can engage students with, often empirically rich and in-depth, accounts that address issues of employment conditions and contexts. Media industries and work research can be a resource in the process of embedding employability within media education.

On one hand, these suggestions may be seen to reinforce vocational perspectives in which ‘doing media’ at higher education is a pathway into working in the ‘media industries’. On the other hand, these are not programmatic mandates. When/if students, perhaps more obviously on ‘media production’ courses, identify a desire to work as media practitioners (whether that be, for example, independent documentary filmmakers, freelance magazine writers or salaried television producers), then media industries and work research is an instructive resource for them that can be meaningfully located in terms of professional practice and employability.

Beyond these ‘top down’ suggestions, pedagogical research into students as ‘agents of change’ and student engagement in curriculum development present resources through which to explore how students with industry and career priorities can reflect on ‘industry’ (or, rather, industries) composition and characteristics, and what working in these contexts might entail. Furthermore, Andrew Chitty’s ‘manifesto’ call for researcher practitioners is a prompt for even greater engagement in analysis and research examining media industries. The case studies included in the Stepping Out report published by the Art Design Media subject centre of the Higher Education Academy (ADM-HEA) focused on creative and cultural sector practitioners in art, design and media education and how “their engagement enhances their professional practice”. The importance of the role of the reflexive teacher practitioner was clear in the ADM-HEA reports, and Chitty’s suggestion around researcher practitioners seem to present the opportunity for further engagement with media industries research.

Comments for a manifesto

This contribution encourages making connections between critical media industries research and the situated experiences of media students who are enthusiastic about working within industry contexts and relate to themselves as future workers, and then sharing examples where this interplay can be examined with students. Promising efforts in this direction include, exploring the role of research practitioners and the sharing of curricula that work to make critical media industries research proximate in terms of students’ future industry career contexts. There remain critical interventions to be made on proposed changes for higher education and the status of ‘employability’. There are also some interesting openings and opportunities, and employability and media education could be one of these.

References

Ashton, D. (2011) ‘Media education and media industries: Identity, anxiety, and aspirations’. Media Education Research Journal, 1(2): 85-93.

Ashton, D. and Thebo, M. (2010) ‘Researching the Media and Cultural Industries’, in Stanbury, D. (ed.) New directions in career studies: English and Media Degrees (Ideas for modules that explore career, identity and subject). University of Reading: Centre for Career Management Studies, pp.3-4.

Giroux, H. (2000) ‘Cultural Politics and the Crisis of the University’. CultureMachine 2. Available at
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/309/294 [accessed 16 June 2011].

Thornham, S. and O’Sullivan, T. (2004) ‘Chasing the real: “employability” and the media studies curriculum’. Media, Culture & Society, 26(5): 717-736.

My concern is the education of those who work in the media. When you’re running a digital media business your primary asset is the knowledge, learning and creativity of your own staff. Not just what their education has provided them with before you meet them, but how you can support and develop their continued learning. To add value to their own careers, and yes I admit it, add value to your own business – be that creative value or commercial value or, ideally, both. And for me that concern spreads out beyond my current staff – we hire people, and when we do its often because we’re developing into new areas so like most creative businesses we’re interested in the education and development of the wider workforce. This is not altruism; it’s about creative and educational capital across the network.

A significant part of the media industries educational capital is of course acquired through school and universities programmes – but it’s a stark fact that 85% of the media workforce of 2021 are already in the business.

And the more digital your media business the more obviously it’s changing. Future practitioners will be largely today’s already highly skilled and motivated people. We can’t just rely on the new entrants however brilliantly educated, to sustain our creative sector. So our current workforce will need to learn a lot of new tricks and that means a huge ongoing need for education and development.

You’ll notice I said education and development – not training. Because training to me implies we know exactly what they need to know, how to teach and apply that knowledge. And that’s way too definitive for me. We may have some ideas, a sense of different traditions they need to be exposed to, new conceptual and analytical frameworks that might be useful, even some skills and processes that might be important. But there’s no readily available upgrade that we can install to reboot the workforce, whatever our neighbours in the technology sector might think.

Instead I think we need to think about three things –

What do we need a) to teach and b) to learn?
What is the research base we’d use to decide?
And
How does this teaching and learning happen?

The big one is obviously the first, so in a rhetorically traditional way I’ll take them in reverse order and see if I can get over the first hurdle without tripping up and then see where we get to.

How does teaching and learning happen?

Well first I’ll say what you’d expect from a digital practitioner. Online (and socially) it’s amazing that we don’t use this stuff to do this stuff. That we haven’t captured the potential of social and online learning through communities yet. Later this year I’m hoping we’ll be able to announce a platform for professional development that will link with MT Rainey’s brilliant Horsesmouth online mentoring network. Time and again mentoring comes out as one of the most effective supports for practice based learning but most mentoring schemes just don’t scale. Horsesmouth does.

Having got the obligatory online promo out of the way let’s turn to the more substantive point.
So (drumroll) should teaching a learning be vocational or theoretical?

And the answer is … neither … or both. Can I suggest there’s a real need to move on from this dichotomy? Why? Because as digital disruption rolls out I think the craft skills many media professionals need are changing and the theoretical frameworks practitioners need to draw on extend far beyond traditional media studies. We need to teach and learn more widely

What should we teach and learn?

Let’s take the vocational approach first – in the ‘traditional’ or ‘established’ media by which I mean journalism, film production, broadcasting or publishing, it’s still possible to identify craft disciplines which can be taught in the traditional way – writing, producing, directing, camerawork, sound, design maybe even commissioning. But even these disciplines are starting to fray around the edges – where does publishing begin and end – certainly not with books. Future media practitioners need to engage with much wider references and be exposed to far wider disciplines if they’re to understand their practice in the digital landscape. If their practicing in a purely digital space it’s hard to be sure that today’s ‘craft discipline’ will have developed any core body of practice before it morphs into something else.

Many of tomorrow’s media professionals (and not forgetting that the vast majority are today’s media professionals) will be working in teams drawn from very different traditions and they’ll need to understand and work with the fundamental practices of those different disciplines – computer science, software development, innovation practice, product, user experience and service design, audience and user behaviour, business studies and aspects of economics and certainly elements of IP law. They’re craft skills Jim, but not as we know it. Or rather knew it.

The craft/theory split just doesn’t work at the digital, converging end of the media business. The crafts aren’t solid and slowly evolving and we’re all educated in different traditions not just one. It’s a perfectly valid approach where the fundamental creative structures and values of a discipline aren’t changing rapidly – the most obvious example being perhaps film. But even here there’s a bit of digital disruption in the value chain to think about. It’s not as if you can rely on DVD sales in Turkey any more..

Thinking of any part of media education as fixed or traditional is potentially dangerous with a risk of preparing emerging practitioners for a world that no longer exists. Particularly if those teaching these ‘practical’ or ‘production’ courses left the business they’re teaching some time ago, before the changes in creative practice, production and business took hold. Something that I think is an ongoing concern in the UK particularly in the television sector.

But if the craft model of education has some digital challenges what does that imply for the academic approach to media education? At the risk of alienating everyone it seems the needs to open up our thinking is at least as large.

The theoretical frameworks of media studies, deriving from textual or discourse analysis have been very powerful in analysis and occasionally useful to practitioners. Sociological approaches to media (especially to new media) have delivered new insights into the modes and meaning of consumption to viewers and users. But they have focussed on the social relations arising from the consumption of media rather than those in its production. One of the exceptions of course was the late Roger Silverstone. I first read his book ‘Framing Science’ as a graduate student looking to understand documentary production and see if it was a career for me. A few years down the line, when I joined BBC Horizon, working for the very same producer featured in the book, I realised just how useful Silverstone’s insights into the constructed nature of factual television could be to a practitioner but also how little shared they were by the community he had reported on.
Today’s media practitioners can benefit from textual and sociological perspectives but in the digital media other frameworks are equally if not more useful – perspectives from design and information theory, behavioural and cognitive psychology, certainly economics and business studies, computer science and commercial and IP law. Oh and public policy.

You can maintain the division between theoretical and vocational approaches to media education if you want to but either way you’re going to have to change, both what you teach and how you teach it if you’re going to support and development the media practitioners we need.

But we still need more. Because there seems to me a great big hole in the middle of our understanding of contemporary media. A great big hole where research should be. Where is the research base on the developing practice of contemporary media; its production rather than consumption? Who is doing what I found so useful in Roger Silverstone’s work 20 years ago?

Where’s the research – a call for Practitioner Researchers

The immediate reaction will be there’s lots of research on the contemporary media. But is there a real body of high quality, quantifiable evidence and analysis of the production of media?
It’s an oft quoted statistic that 54% of all TV formats traded worldwide are created in the UK. But where is the academic study into the creative, cultural, economic or even regulatory environment reasons for this?
Where indeed is the series of monographs that examines globally successful formats and looks at them as creative products – their origins, development process, innovations in form, in production methods, in distribution and their performance in business terms? Not Big Brother as a social phenomenon but Deal or no Deal as a creative product.

Where is the work that examines the development of geographical clusters of creative businesses, for instance in the computer games sectors and explores that in terms of a creative and business ecosystem with educational, technological and financial inputs, talent and business development strategies that could challenge the idea that everywhere can become a media city?

Who is studying the remarkable growth of the independent TV sector with a critical eye and wondering for how long it can continue to develop creatively and indeed stay British?

Where are the in depth independent studies of the BBC as a creative business – looking at everything from its creative decision making to its changing investment in different genres across time to how (or even if) its unique public purposes impact on or are reconciled with the content it commissions and the services it provides?

The data and indeed the contexts needed to develop this research are hard to gain access to for those outside the media businesses and that might be the reason why this research gap exists. Why the academic perspective regards the media from outside.

That’s why we need a new generation of practitioner researchers and a different relationship between experienced media practitioners and educational institutions. Instead of practitioners entering academia to passing on their production skills we need to create opportunities for them to inquire, analyse and reflect on the changing nature of the contemporary media and work with those who have the analytical frameworks. Researcher practitioners will bring the necessary access and know where the bodies are buried.

You might think this doesn’t matter. It’s neither interesting nor important; perhaps that it’s not really research at all but a sort of business school lite approach to media education. Or even that the research exists. But having spent a bit of time working with government policy on the Digital Britain Report I really felt the lack of high quality independent academic insights. Reports from consultancies are just not an adequate substitute. Like dodgy dossiers they’re normally created to argue a case rather than analyse and enquire.
Only with a real research base can we make the right choices – to develop our professionals and to develop our media. Public policy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but if we want to maintain a vibrant and economically successful UK creative sector that attracts and brings out the best in creative practitioners we have to fight it out with the likes of the pharmaceutical and finance sectors and that means develop powerful arguments backed up with credible research. And by the way that means numbers as well as words.

Like all discussion about learning in general, media education is clearly more than just what happens in schools. But it was in a secondary school – in Tottenham – a socially deprived part of London – where I began the first leg of my sentimental education. In the late 1980s/early 1990s media education meant three very particular things for me.

The first was a wider political project about culture. In the UK at least there is a very explicit demarcation between forms of cultural hierarchy ( I think the same arguments are present in other cultures, from France to the US, for example, but they take different forms). Forms of ‘high’ culture are opposed to forms of popular or low culture. The pleasures of the popular, at that time especially popular TV, soap operas – were proscribed from the curriculum. Building on what was at the time the new audience theory, analysing and valuing the interpretative capabilities of members of the audience, I was interested in a Media Studies that valued forms of cultural experiences, that took seriously pleasures and meanings that my students found in their readings of such forms. I was particularly interested in forms of resistance and identification – how readings of popular culture offered spaces for young people, who, marginalised by their youth, could also engage with other forms of suppressed (and oppressed) identity work around gender, class and race – where young people ‘s pleasure in culture gave voice to and reflected on their worlds, their interests and the spaces available for a developing sense of self.

This focus on the young person, their social worlds and their cultural identity also underpinned the very particular theory of media learning that gave focus and direction to being a teacher at that time. Developing ideas from Vygotsky – especially a notion of progression suggested by his description of the development of ‘scientific’ from ‘spontaneous’ concepts – I was interested in how what I knew, the academic discourse of Media Studies, the language of theory and the framing provided by the literature, offered clear added value to what the students knew. I felt that media education offered a very particular (though not unique) curriculum, that the way it built on students’ knowledge offered both a politics and form of education which meant that teachers and students contributed in different ways to the value of the subject. Key here was the role of practical creative production work. Not only did this allow for forms of expression within the conceptual frames given meaning and value by young people, it made the subject ‘expressive’ in that it gave ‘voice’ to young people as they could make, share and reflect on the process of making and exhibiting forms of popular culture.

This attention to the potential for voice (obviously not a naïve or simple matter – especially given the complexity of working in popular genres and forms) , also offered a model for the role of media education in curriculum debate. The idea of expression and of developing prior knowledge and experience built on older ideas about the role of education as bildung, and a wider neo-progressivist set of pedagogic relationships. Coupled with the subject’s content, its focus on the contested, the popular and the Political (with its attention to a current News Agenda), Media Studies appeared to provide a critical and political curriculum – with self-evidently important and relevant content yet where the kind of knowledge at stake was negotiated and where the way of learning was more widely shared. It also offered a curriculum form that could challenge and unsettle more traditional types of subject discipline. It seemed to provide a route to make the matter of being a contemporary citizen, of developing forms of subjectivity to negotiate the world, the very subject under discussion – a mode of ‘educating for Democracy’ – in the particular conditions of the decay of London’s post industrial, post-colonial struggle for the purposes of Education.

These three principles, a politics of culture, a theory of learning and politics of curriculum, weren’t just isolated ‘in-principle’ reasons. At that time, I felt very much part of a larger community of teachers, researchers and other education policy makers and curriculum reformers. Many of these people have written for this Manifesto project, and one challenge I have for readers of this moment in time is that despite the growth of community in virtual worlds , I wonder whether there is the same level of activism around in this field (what motivates it?) but maybe that’s something else to think about.

Working in schools, long term, on a reform agenda is wearing and just as I thought I had worked out what media education could offer, I became disenchanted with the limits of change in schools. In particular I became vexed by how far a discourse of Media Studies, the values of an academic language, really made a difference (and empirically in what ways, to what degree, to whom) to these ambitions for change. Whilst there is always a challenge to any self-espousing radical agenda, to the self-satisfied smugness of the avant garde, I was troubled by how limiting a field of enquiry, the discipline of this subject could be in the context of the kind of educational changes happening in English schools. The more I investigated any difference Media Studies might be making to young people‘s lives, the less apparent it was that School was doing any more than recuperating a critical discourse and continuing to find ways to exclude those young people to whom that discourse appeared to offer so much. Media Studies became just another way to grade and stratify young people. What’s the point in that?

I then moved into the non-formal leaning sector, working in an out-of-school organisation offering a series of programmes to young people from low-income families at all ages in arts and media. Here, there were no examinations, little interest (originally) in credentialisation but a constant focus on how the kind of knowledge I was interested in and how the development of creative possibilities might in some ways support young people’s learning and growth. Whilst there was less interest in explicit modes of critical expression (essay writing), the kinds of discussion and reflection involved in making, production and other kinds of circulation of cultural products within the community of the institution and online, meant that the idea and importance of values, of engaging in learning and of expressing oneself in cultural forms was at the forefront of this agenda. Whilst academic Media Studies was less fluent in some of the aesthetic and creative discourses, a production based approach and a connection within more open-ended learning agendas within Art education gave this kind of project a unique position within the wider economy of media education possible in the UK at that time. The possibility of employment in the creative and cultural industries gave the idea of production a purpose and value that it lacked within the simulated world of formal education – although the aspirations and individual life-pathways that were really on offer for these young people was not always what they promised.

Clearly, the development of ‘new’ digital technologies allowed this production-centred curriculum to develop. Changing possibilities in the production, circulation and reception of output made some of the hypothesis about the value of this learning plausible. I would also stress that what the institution made available, made a big difference: physical resources, intellectual and creative structure and teaching, the disciplines of iterative reflection and attention to detail. But of course this is an offer to those who chose to attend however troubled and wide ranging their life-experiences – or indeed for those deemed in need of intervention: it isn’t a measure of what the broader society values.

A manifesto implies a programme of change or reform with some ambitions about governance, a clear articulation of need and an offer of an intervention to remediate that need. The three key principles with which I worked in the school system are sound and hold true: and they need support. Not that governments and education policy-makers around the world are committed to such ends. Schooling in general around the world is less interested in diverse and popular understandings of culture; it holds little truck with forms of knowledge that don’t meet instrumental ends; and normative and restricted understandings of learning now dominate the agenda of teachers and other education professionals. Working out of school is great but it seems a bit of luxury to bother with a manifesto. It is already not-school, the interventions are justified on other grounds. It is also a limited sphere of influence. How could one seek to manage a more programmatic intervention?

If I had to choose one key principle to take forward it would be about a theory of learning, not because I think that the politics of culture or even that of curriculum reform is less important but because without a sophisticated, empirically justified, broadly understood model of how learning works in practice, how it makes a difference, what interventions are needed and what kinds of intervention are effective, then we all risk sinking into aspirational platitudes. We will lose the capacity to ‘engineer’ change by losing sight of how change actually works at an individual level, in collective social groups and in key enduring social institutions like schools. I regret most of all the difficulty of working with teachers in ways that they can influence what happens in their classrooms. That may be the oddity of the English Education system at this time; it may be a general point. Unless media education aims to have some effect at that level I can’t see the point.

For those immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society, it is …important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticise its meanings and messages (Kellner 1995: 2)

Reading through the contributions submitted so far, the diversity of the various manifestos presented is quite striking and fascinating. It is also interesting to note that for some contributors there are clear-cut distinctions to be made between media education, media studies, media practice and media literacy and some definite tensions around these terms. I have chosen to write my manifesto for Media Studies, because for me, Media Studies by definition encompasses elements of all the other three (or at least it should do).

Deacon et al. (2007) discuss the twin lineage in media and communications research and make a broad distinction between Media Studies (rooted mainly in the social and behavioural sciences) and Cultural Studies (rooted for the most part in the humanities). This strikes me as a useful distinction to make and it certainly resonates with my own experiences at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. It is also well documented that Cultural Studies itself is something of a trans-disciplinary discipline “comprised of inputs from a whole range of disciplinary environments that pre-existed it” (Tudor 1999:6). Deacon and his colleagues go on to point out that the ‘interaction’ between these fields characterises media and communications research as an “interdisciplinary space, where a range of existing academic disciplines meets” (Deacon et al. 2007: 2). I couldn’t agree more. A key strength of Media Studies is its propensity for absorbing and taking on-board theories, methods and concepts from wherever it so chooses. It truly is, at times, what Geraghty (2002) terms an ‘unruly discipline’ (2002:25). This is what makes Media Studies such an intellectually worthwhile and academically exciting endeavour.

My route into Media Studies was principally shaped by the social sciences – predominantly Sociology – and this has, for better or for worse, certainly influenced my understandings of what media studies is or should be about. I believe that Media Studies can continue to be underpinned by a broadly sociological form of inquiry and sets of concerns. I am not advocating a purely sociological approach or the application of a singular sociological perspective to the exclusion of everything else, but I am suggesting that a broad-based sociological ‘lens’ for a Media Studies manifesto is more than useful. This isn’t to say that sociology has all the answers – clearly it does not. But I do think that the sorts of questions that sociologists ask and the key concern of at least attempting to theorise / conceptualise the relationship between the media and / in society is an important one. This is because in the Twenty-first century, the media play a key role in social, political and economic life. According to Deacon et al (2007) the media and communication industries

..are central to organising every aspect of contemporary life, from the broad patterning of social institutions and cultural systems, to intimate everyday encounters and people’s personal understandings of their world and their sense of themselves. We cannot fully understand the ways we live now without understanding communications (Deacon et al 2007:1).

This seems to be a fair enough point to make. If we map the quote below from Fenton (2000) directly onto this statement, some interesting connections and intersections can be made:

..most of the information through which we understand the world around us is constructed from media messages of one sort or another. The media are thus relevant to all areas of social research and media saturation of societies raises important issues for the key sociological questions of social order, social change and the relationship between the individual and society (Fenton 2000: 297).

At the heart of much sociological work in the field of media and communications is the central problematic of conceptualising the relationship between media and society and I would maintain that in its broadest sense, this core issue or theme should always underpin Media Studies as a foundational concern. Central to much sociological work on media is an attempt to better understand the workings of the media both as industries and as part of a wider set of institutions that are inter-connected within a societal context, taking into account production processes, economic organisation, regulation, media content and audiences. A sociological lens always critically foregrounds the role of the media within a wider societal context, opening-up core issues around media accountability and responsibility, funding and regulation, ownership and control, everyday life, economic and social relations, the construction of meaning, and power structures in society.

Historically, these concerns are well established in media sociology and with good reason. Take the recent furore over the possible regulation of social networking media wherein Twitter and Facebook might become subject to similar privacy laws as press and broadcasting media. At the centre of this controversy are some fundamental issues that emerged in early media and communications research in the broadcast era: the public and private spheres of social life, media regulation, media freedom, accountability and social responsibility, the public interest and so on. If we cut through the commercial hype and utopian rhetoric surrounding the ‘digital revolution’ it is evident that, as Croteau and Hoynes (2003) argue, some enduring questions and issues continue to remain on the agenda. With these themes in mind, I have constructed my manifesto as follows:

Media Studies must be:

• Relevant: it must always be able to say something relevant – that matters – not just about the media but also about social relations and the world we
live in today.
• Theoretical: the creative exploration and generation of theory and the application of theory to concrete examples / instances of media performance, systems, technologies, texts and audiences must remain central to media studies.
• Textual: an understanding of texts and inter-texts, of style, form, signification, representation, traditions, conventions, aesthetics and genre are all crucial to understanding the construction of meaning(s) and the potential ambiguities in meaning production / reception.
• Practical: the application of ideas realised creatively through actual production practices and techniques in a range of media formats / contexts. Where applicable, theory and practice should be inter-twined.
• Research-driven: the use of established methods along with the application of emerging and the creation of new techniques should continue to be a feature of media research / media studies in the study of audiences, institutions, technologies and texts.
• Reflexive / Reflective: an understanding of the strengths and limitations of different approaches, methodologies, theories and models.
• Critical: although ‘critical’ should not be conflated or confused with pessimism / negativity. The task should be to provide a critical but balanced assessment of media culture(s). The end point of every study should not necessarily be that the media are ‘bad’ / capitalism is ‘evil’.
• Historical: a sense of history – of systems, technologies, institutions, practices, texts and audiences. But also a history of media studies / theory / research and how it has evolved. An understanding of the past (and all the baggage that it entails) is important if we want to move forward and (critically) trace the continuities and discontinuities within the ongoing transformations in media culture in the Twenty-first century.
• Social-psychological: an understanding of how we make sense of our-selves and others through our engagement with various media texts, practices and technologies.
• Contextual: in order to be truly meaningful all of the above points must always be framed by an understanding of the complex ways in which they are constituted in and through as well as framed by specific social, political, economic and cultural contexts.
• Global: increasingly important is the need to understand the circulation of meaning(s) and levels of media activity / power in terms of local, regional, national and international contexts. Imperative if Media Studies’ is to remain relevant in the Twenty-first century (back to the first point).

There is considerable debate at the moment about the future direction of Media Studies, about what should be dispensed with and what should be retained in terms of theories, concepts, models, methodologies, issues and debates in light of ongoing ‘new media’ developments. On one level, these internal debates are both necessary and welcome because they represent a healthy and robust subject area that is not afraid to interrogate its own roots / routes. But too much introspection and internal wrangling can be unhealthy. Similarly, the writing of manifestos (which we can’t all agree on) brings the risk of circumscribing too tightly or ring fencing “some absolute object called media study” (Burton 2010:12).

Whatever the outcomes of these debates, I believe that a broadly sociological orientation will provide a useful foundation (or a framework) for a Twenty-first century Media Studies manifesto. If my understanding of Gauntlett’s (2009) assertion that “Media Studies 2.0…emphasises a sociological focus on the media” (2009: 149) is correct, then it seems plausible to at least consider that a sociological orientation might be the common ground for bridging the (potential) chasm between advocates of Media Studies 1.0 and Media Studies 2.0. The trajectories that Media Studies might take over the next few years are, to an extent, in our hands but what we should never lose sight of is centrally addressing “the critical problem of media-in-society” (Toynbee 2008: 277).

References

Burton, G. (2010) Media and Society: Critical Perspectives Second Edition. Open University Press.

Croteau, D. & Hoynes, W. (2003) Media Society: Industries, Images and Audiences Third Edition. Pine Forge Press

Deacon, D., Pickering, M., Golding, P. & Murdock, G. (2007) Researching Communications: a Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis Second Edition. Hodder Arnold.

Fenton, N. (2000) Mass Media, in Taylor, S. (ed) Sociology: Issues and Debates. Palgrave MacMillan

Gauntlett, D. (2009) Media Studies 2.0: a Response, in Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, Volume One, Number One. Intellect.

Geraghty, C. (2002) ‘Doing Media Studies’: Reflections on an Unruly Discipline, in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Volume One, Number One. Intellect.

Kellner, D. (1995) Media Culture. Routledge.

Toynbee, J. (2008) Media Making and Social Reality, in Hesmondhalgh, D. & Toynbee, J. (eds) The Media and Social Theory. Routledge.

Tudor, A. (1999) Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in Cultural Studies. Sage Publications

Dr Mark Readman, Lecturer in Media and Education, The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice

This manifesto forum is encouraging us to ask questions about what media education is for, and how it is constituted, as well as making us question the distinctions and similarities between categories such as media education, media studies and media literacy. In this sense it is a philosophical project and, as such, it has caused me to reflect upon my own ‘philosophy’ of media education and to try to articulate a growing sense that media education should, in itself, be philosophical. This ‘sense’ hasn’t come from nowhere, of course, so reflecting on my own history has been a starting point.

I’ve done my share of proselytising about media education in the past, mainly in the FE sector, and I can see now that I quite relished being the underdog in the staff room – it gave me licence to be oppositional and to tease psychology teachers about behaviourist research. And I can identify in my current thinking a retention of that desire to be oppositional – a pleasure in the perverse.

When I started teaching media studies the last thing I wanted for my students was a job in the media; the media were characterised by venality, mendacity and cynicism – why would you want to work for them? The texts that had value for me were reflexive, counter-cultural and oppositional (except EastEnders, which I admitted watching as a guilty pleasure) and I bored a lot of students. But felt strongly that media education shouldn’t be the same as media ‘training’, so I really struggled to rationalise what I was doing when I found myself running a BTEC National Diploma course, for which the index of success was the progression into media employment. Questions of power were irrelevant in this programme, ‘ideology’ was something for politics courses and assessment was (according to a senior assessor) as unproblematic as identifying competence in a driving test. Even now, despite working in a media school which produces many graduates who gain a foothold in the industry, I find it hard to celebrate the acquisition of a researcher’s job on Snog, Marry, Avoid. (A comment, of course, which is dependent upon assumptions about a hierarchy of labour and a hierarchy of taste; would I be more likely to celebrate a student becoming a director on Misfits? Yes. And I did.)

So what’s my problem? Over the past few years I’ve had the luxury of thinking about concepts, and the distinction between instrumental and philosophical approaches has emerged as a crucial one for me. And I think that education should be, fundamentally, philosophical, by which I mean driven by questions about knowledge, power and being. Given that the media are constitutive of knowledge, power and being it seems reasonable to argue that media education should be philosophical.

This manifesto features much discussion about the philosophy of media education – what it is for, what it should do and how we should do it. But this treats it as if it were a ‘thing’ with a discrete (albeit blurred and deformed) identity and the project seems to be to sharpen its edges, reinforce its boundaries and bring it into focus. An alternative might be to treat media texts, practices and interactions as exemplifications of negotiations, constructions and contradictions – to do philosophy as media education. I know that in ‘Media Studies’ this already happens to a degree, but often inconsistently and incoherently; I have, in the past for example, encouraged students to question the construction of knowledge and ‘truth’ in news and then, barely acknowledging the irony, handed out news articles that explain ‘convergence’. Similarly, I’ve put ‘auteurism’ on trial and then applauded student video work that replicates the ‘authorial signature’ of a ‘great director’. Reflecting on my intellectual ‘bad faith’ has forced me to try to imagine a more coherent way of engaging with the media.

Maybe it isn’t possible to resolve the tension between instrumental and philosophical approaches, but an acknowledgement of their foundations would be a start. This would involve students in a meta-discourse about the ways in which their educational experiences are produced, how their production of ‘valid media knowledge’ is conditioned and regulated. The recent claims that students are now technological experts (which sometimes seems to rationalise an abnegation of responsibility) could be examined in this context, and the nature, value and utility of such expertise could be assessed and its performative, dynamic function in the classroom addressed.

This would also mean tackling the seductive rhetoric about collaboration, technology and creativity which are offered as self-evident ‘good things’ in recent discussions of education in general and media education in particular. A philosophical approach would necessitate an engagement with the foundations of such concepts and the ways in which they are mobilised in the service of particular agendas. In education policy, for example, ‘creativity’ is a particularly promiscuous signifier and has lent itself to claims about democracy, aspiration, economic well-being, STEM subjects and the arts, to the extent that it has become, as Gottfried Wagner puts it “a beloved non-word”. In the past decade or so, in this context, we can see how ‘creativity’ has been manifested rather chaotically as a desirable ‘otherness’ in All Our Futures (the Robinson Report) and, most recently, pressed into service by Ofsted as a label for a set of ‘inventive’ activities designed to realise National Curriculum goals.

Given (as I would argue) the simultaneous emptiness and plenitude of the word ‘creativity’, its presence as an assessment term in media specifications should elicit critical scrutiny and debate, and assessors should be prepared to explain what aspects of work, student or process are being judged and what metrics are being used. There is a notable contrast between the impassioned advocacy of creativity in education and the coherence of the proposed means of assessment; it is significant that the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ ‘Creative Thinking Value Rubric’ prescribes evidence of problem solving, rather than physical production, thus anchoring the term in such a way as to make more amenable to accountable judgements.

I am not opposed to students (or anyone else) making things, but feel that we need to create the conditions for them to engage critically with the ways in which sense is made of these productive practices. This means interrogating the claims that are made about their ‘creativity’, for example, and involving them in this conversation – identifying when it is being used to refer to an individual’s disposition or the qualities of a piece of work or, most interestingly, how particular conditions obtain which make it attributable to people. In other words, how and when do these ‘stories’ get told? And what’s at stake in them?

Admittedly this approach doesn’t sound like loads of fun or promise happiness (whatever that means), but this philosophical approach might encourage students to not take anything for granted, to question the foundations of knowledge, and to see truth as always inevitably contingent.

I don’t know how workable this is, except perhaps at a local level where some individual teachers are already ‘doing’ media education as philosophy, and, like some other contributors here, I’m starting to question whether or not media education should be a ‘thing’ in its own right. The curriculum is constituted by a range of ‘subjects’ which tend to be defined by their objects of study and, in our field, this has led to the fetishisation of texts, ‘artists’ and technology. So perhaps we need to break away from the objects and reconfigure an approach that is based on principles of enquiry, scepticism and challenge.

And with that I realise that my position perhaps hasn’t changed all that much in the last twenty years.

In the early morning of September 11, 2001, I was at the Oakland, California Airport getting ready to board a cross-country flight. I was traveling with a couple of colleagues from Youth Radio, a youth-driven production company and media education program where I’d been working for just over a year. We were heading to an awards ceremony on the east coast. The prize we were picking up honored a series Youth Radio had produced for National Public Radio called Making the Grade, about the effects of standardized testing on public education in the U.S. On a television suspended from the ceiling of an airport cafe, we watched the World Trade Center catch fire and the Pentagon explode. The mother of a high school student on our team who’d come to the airport see her daughter off shook her head and observed, “This is what happens when you live in the belly of the beast.”

As soon as the reality of what was happening started to register, my first thought was that we’d all go home. Fresh out of grad school, I was still pretty much exclusively an academic in mindset, identity and instinct. My decision to pursue a professional path that combined scholarship with journalism and community-based education was still new, and maybe a little shaky. So I gathered my bags and got ready to catch a ride back to my house in San Francisco, where I had every intention of planting myself alongside countless others in front of the TV. That is, until we got the signal from Youth Radio’s headquarters that a morning editorial meeting was scheduled in the organization’s newsroom and we better get there ASAP.

Youth Radio is an after-school, non-profit, tuition-free organization founded in 1992, with a home-base in Oakland and bureaus in Los Angeles California, Washington DC, and Atlanta Georgia. Young people ages 14-24 are recruited from local under-resourced public schools by program grads. Once enrolled, they learn transmedia production skills and peer education; obtain college, career, and mental health support; and deliver news and commentary, in word, sound, and image, to some of the most powerful public and commercial media outlets in the US and internationally.

Media Education When it Matters the Most

Youth Radio’s headquarters in California was 3000 miles away from the devastation on the east coast on 9-11, And yet we immediately started calling in young people, gathering tape and assigning stories, reaching out to far-flung networks of youth who could cover the unfolding events, dispatching teams of teens to local high schools to track student and teacher reactions, and pitching angles to our varied local and national outlets. That day and the several that followed flew by. Teams of teens, young adults, and seasoned producers and editors scrambled to cover a story that we knew was changing the world. At one point a few days in, I took a breath in the bathroom off Youth Radio’s back corridor, looked in the mirror, and said to myself, “So this is what it feels like, in a time of profound crisis, to have something to do.”

Media education is about creating conditions for young people to have something to do when that matters the most. It’s not just any thing they do, but a crucial thing: notice, document, investigate, frame, and report meaningful information. In doing so, they ask hard questions, stretch beyond first assumptions, and tell what they see, in ways that make a difference. In the youth media programs I’ve worked in and researched across the U.S. since 1994, young people don’t work alone. They produce media in partnership with adult collaborators. Entering into a distinctive dynamic Vivian Chávez and I have called collegial pedagogy, they engage in projects where neither party could complete the work without the other, and where both young people and adults stand mutually invested in and vulnerable to the judgment of outside audiences (Soep & Chávez, 2010). They need each other to get it right. The time when this work matters the most is not necessarily a period of extreme international crisis, as was the case with 9-11. It can be a fleeting moment of personal turmoil or revelation, a family transition, a community event that would otherwise go overlooked, a popular culture phenomenon that inspires fandom or critique.

This work of hands-on media production reaching significant audiences is especially important for those who otherwise would be left out of collective action and pivotal policy decisions, and denied the right to frame stories about their own lives and communities around them. At stake is credibility. By that I do not so much mean credibility as typically defined by today’s digital media scholarship. Researchers worry that young people are under-prepared to judge the truthfulness of existing sources, including social media’s dizzying array of user-generated and unevenly substantiated sites. While dramatic shifts in knowledge production and information-flow do raise important concerns, I’m struck by the ways in which young producers establish their own validity and value, again and again, with every publication or broadcast, as authors with urgent insights to share.

Seeing Small, Seeing Big: From Actual to “As If”

In her book Releasing the Imagination (1995, p. 10), the philosopher of education and aesthetics Maxine Greene puzzles through the question of what it means to see the world small, and to see it big.

“To see things or people small, one chooses to see from a detached point of view, to watch behaviors from the perspective of a system, to be concerned with trends and tendencies rather than the intentionality and concreteness of everyday life. To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human behinds as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead. One must see from the point of view of the participant in the midst of what is happening if one is to be privy to the plans people make, the initiatives they take, the uncertainties they face.”

Seen small, with some distance, the purpose of media education resides in school-sponsored and neighborhood-based systems as well as online communities that enable young people who’ve been marginalized from digital privilege to emerge as full citizens in media worlds. Seen small, we notice local, national, and global disparities not only in terms of access to and use of existing equipment and tools, but also crucially, in terms of participation in the networks and literacies required to create new digital media platforms. We can assess goals across “the field” and compare outcomes, and call for new methods for research and practice.

Seen big, from up-close, the purpose of media education materializes in the lives of people we know, inside contexts where we serve as participants in the midst of shared production. Seen big, we can start to discern moment-to-moment discursive practices that media production invites—like near constant meta-cognitive inquiry into how makers know what they know, and what remains to be discovered before a story is complete. We can identify the properties of critique, when young people assess one another’s unfolding media projects, sometimes face-to-face, and sometimes inside fan communities and peer-to-peer networks of interest-driven activity. We can trace how so much of the work of production now starts when it used to end. The moment of online publication triggers a public, searchable conversation that can take the story in a direction the original author neither predicts nor controls: its inevitable digital afterlife.

Seeing things small and big is both a way to understand the purpose of media education and a habit of mind young people develop as they become makers themselves. They learn to pan out in search of patterns, and to zoom into the details and nuances that turn a topic into a story you can’t forget.

Ultimately, seeing the world as it is gives communities of youth something to do that matters, and enables us together to imagine the world as if it were different. It is by looking through the windows of the actual, Greene says, that we can start to see “as ifs” (1995, p. 140). Sometimes that means acting as if a media project will get done on deadline, even when that seems impossible. It means taking a hard look at sobering statistics about digital media disparities as if those patterns can change. It means toiling away on a mediocre project as if it will get great. It means writing, and researching, and teaching, and policy-making as if media education were a fundamental human right. Until it really is.

References

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Soep, E. & Chávez, V. (2010). Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Academics, media artists, and journalists have been writing extensively about “new media” since the early 1990s. In many of these discussions, a single term came to stand for the whole set of new technologies, new expressive and communicative possibilities, and new forms of community and sociality which were developing around computers and internet. The term was “digital.” It received its official seal of approval, so to speak, in 1996 when the director of MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte collected his Wired columns into the book Being Digital. Fifteen years later, this term still dominates both popular and academic understanding of what new media is about.

When I did Google searches for “digital,” “interactive,” and “multimedia” on March 2, 2011, the first search returned 1,390,000,000 results; the other two only returned between 276,000,000 and 456,000,000 each. Doing searches on Google Scholar produced similar results: 3,830,000 for “digital”, 2,270,000 for “interactive”, 1,900,000 for “multimedia.” Based on these numbers, Negroponte appears to be right.

I don’t need to convince anybody today about the transformative effects internet, participatory media, mobile computing already had on human culture and society, including creation, sharing, and access to media artifacts. What I do want to point out is the centrality of another element of IT which until recently received less theoretical attention in relation to its role in defining what “media” is. This element is software.

None of the new media authoring and editing techniques we associate with computers is simply a result of media “being digital.” The new ways of media access, distribution, analysis, generation and manipulation are all due to software. Which means that are they the result of the particular choices made by individuals, companies, and consortiums who develop software. Some of these choices concern basic principles and protocols which govern modern computing environment: for instance, “cut and paste” commands built into all software running under GUI (or newer media user interfaces such as iOS), or one-way hyperlinks as implemented in web technology. Other choices are specific to particular types of software (for instance, illustration applications) or individual software packages.

If particular software techniques or interface metaphors which appear in one particular application become popular with its users, often we would soon see them in other applications. For example, after Flickr added “tag clouds” to its interface, they soon become a standard feature of numerous web sites. The appearance of particular techniques in applications can also be traced to the economics of software industry – for instance, when one software company buys another company, it may merge its existing package with the software from the company it bought.

All these software mutations and “new species” of software techniques are social in a sense that they don’t simply come from individual minds or from some “essential” properties of a digital computer or a computer network. They come from software developed by groups of people and marketed to large numbers of users.

In short: the techniques and the conventions of computer metamedium and all the tools available in software applications are not the the result of a technological change from “analog” to “digital” media. They are the result of software which is constantly evolving and which is a subject to market forces and constraints.

This means that the terms “digital media” and “new media” do not capture very well the uniqueness of the “digital revolution.” Why? Because all the new qualities of “digital media” are not situated “inside” the media objects. Rather, they all exist “outside” – as commands and techniques of media viewers, email clients, animation, compositing, and editing applications, game engines, and all other software “species.” Thus, while digital representation makes possible for computers to work with images, text, forms, sounds and other media types in principle, it is the software which determines what we can do with them. So while we are indeed “being digital,” the actual forms of this “being” come from software.

Accepting the centrality of software puts in question a fundamental concept of modern aesthetic and media theory – that of “properties of a medium.” What does it mean to refer to a “digital medium” as having “properties”? For example, is it meaningful to talk about unique properties of digital photographs, or electronic texts, or web sites, or computer games?

Or, what about the most basic media types – text, images, video, sound, maps? Obviously, these media types have different representational and expressive capabilities; they can produce different emotional effects; they are processed by different networks of neurons; and they also likely correspond to different types of mental processes and mental representations. These differences have been discussed for thousand of years – from ancient philosophy to classical aesthetic theory to modern art theory and contemporary neuroscience. For example, sound, video and animation can represent temporal processes, language can be used to specify logical relations; and so on. Software did not changed much here.

What it did fundamentally changed, however, is how concrete instances of such media types (and their various combinations) function in practice. The result is that any such instance lost much of its unique identity. What as users we experience as particular properties of a piece of media come from software used to create, edit, present and access this content.

On the one hand, interactive software adds a new set of capabilities shared by all these media types: editing by selecting discrete parts, separation between data structure and its display, hyperlinking, visualization, searchibility, findability, etc.) On the other hand, when we are dealing with a particular digital cultural object, its “properties” can vary dramatically depending on the software application which we use to interact with this object.

Let’s look at one example – a photograph. In the analog era, once a photograph was printed, whatever this photograph represented/expressed was contained in this print. Looking at this photograph at home or in an exhibition did not make any difference. Certainly, a photographer could produce a different print with a higher contrast and in this way change the content of the origina image – but this required creating a whole new physical object (i.e., a new photographic print).

Now, lets consider a digital photograph. We can capture a photo with a dedicated digital camera or a mobile phone, we scan it from an old magazine, we download it from an online archive, etc. – this part does not matter. In all cases we will end with a digital file which contains an array of pixel color values, and a file header which may typically specify image dimensions, information about the camera and shot conditions (such as exposure) and other metadata. In other words, we end up with what is normally called “digital media” – a file containing numbers which mean something to us. (The actual file formats may be much more complex, but the description I provided captures the essential concepts.)

However, unless you are a programmer, you never directly deal with these numbers – instead, you interact with digital media files through some application software. And here comes the crucial part. Depending on which software you use to access it, what you can do with the same digital file can change dramatically. Email software on your phone may simply display this photo – and nothing else. Free media viewers/players which runs on desktops or over the web usually give you more functions. For instance, a desktop version of Google’s Picassa includes crop, auto color, red eye reduction, variety of filters (soft focus, glow, etc.) and a number of other functions. It can also display the same photo as color or black and white without any changes to the file itself. It also allows you to zoom into the photo many times examining its details in way which my mobile phone software can’t. Finally, if I open the same photo in professional application such as Photoshop, I can do much much more. For instance, I can instruct Photoshop to combine the photo with many others, to replace certain colors, to, make visible its linear structure by running edge detection filter, to blur it in a dozen of different ways, and so on.

As this example illustrates, depending on the software I am using, the “properties” of a media object can change dramatically. Exactly the same file with the same contents can have a varirty of identities depending on the software used by a user.

What does this finding means in relation to the persisting primacy of the term “digital” in understanding new media? Let me answer this as clear and direct as I can. There is no such thing as “digital media.” There is only software – as applied to media data (or “content”.)

To rephrase: for users who can only interact with media content through application software, “digital media” does not have any unique properties by itself. What used to be “properties of a medium” are now operations and affordances defined by software.

If you want to escape our prison “prison-house” of software – or at least better understand what media is today – stop downloading Apps created by others. Instead, learn to program – and teach it to your students.

The ‘elephant in the room’ is the naming of the beast; how to call what we do? That the study of media in a globalised context is the most important subject in the Humanities and Social Sciences at all levels of education is, I would suggest, beyond question. And it is heartening to see the subject named as such and embedded in the curriculum in various parts of the world. In the UK, however, the term ‘media studies’ (or is it just the added ‘studies’?) is problematic due to a public and indeed, mediated, perception that it is somehow not a ‘proper’ subject – a perception which is similar but more intractable than that which greeted the introduction of English Literature into Universities in the late nineteenth century or sociology and cultural studies amongst others more recently.

When we wrote and named the undergraduate programme at York St John University many years ago, we called it ‘Comparative Media’ because that seemed to describe exactly how we believed the subject should be perceived in relation to, for example, Comparative Literature programmes and also partly because I was rather taken with the writings and thinking of Henry Jenkins, I ‘borrowed’ the name from the programme at MIT (sorry, Henry!). However, those who were neither my elders nor betters but who were certainly above my pay grade determined that the term was confusing to prospective students and so we dropped the ‘Comparative’ bit and became ‘Media’.

I think part of the debate needs to take account of the level at which the subject is being studied; perhaps the term ‘media literacy’ is more appropriate for a school curriculum – alongside other kinds of literacy- but not for a University or College where it might be seen by industry and by the public as vague and superficial. Whilst I would personally and cheerfully identify myself with the movement known as ‘media ecology’, I am equally not sure that this is a sensible and coherent banner under which we can work and which has traction for the public, the Academy and the various cultural and civic institutions we would hope to contribute to. This would also go for other contemporary funky descriptive mashups – media ‘archaeology’, media ‘geography’, and so on – all of them exciting and academically valid but not wise choices for the naming of university awards.

I have always considered that what I do – media education – is, to appropriate Clausewitz on war, “an extension of politics by other means”. Our job is not to act as cheerleaders for new communication technologies; the job is simply (when I say ‘simply’…) concerned with the importance of understanding how these new technologies change the way we live, understand the world and behave towards each other. And, I would hope, to use these understandings to somehow contribute to making the world a better place as well as providing a set of invaluable critical and analytical skills – call it ‘literacy’ – for a modern generation. The old fashioned and tricky subjects of ‘ideology’ and power are clearly central to this.

In The World Ahead Frederica Mayor and Jerome Binde of UNESCO’s Analysis and Forecasting Office, write – “A study of functional illiterates by the linguist Alain Bentolila reveals that the conversation of young functional illiterates contains scarcely 0.5% of abstract words – ‘a shortcoming that leaves them terribly helpless against the imposition of any concept presented as a unique and universal explanatory principle’ (italics mine)” (2001: 314). In other words, illiteracy in language use makes people vulnerable and powerless and politically susceptible to forms of persuasion. Is it too fanciful to suggest that a similar illiteracy in media competence – the reading of them in terms of ideologies, symbolic power and preferred meanings – can also render people helpless and politically naïve..?

Neil Postman, in discussing the differing dystopian visions offered by Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, wrote – “Contrary to popular belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think (…) Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared the truth would be kept from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture”. (1987: vii)

Well. However, if a media education can provide modern citizens with a critical understanding of media complexity and ambiguity at the same time as making us aware of the social, cultural and cognitive effects of the actual technologies themselves, perhaps that same understanding can be used to affect other behaviours. The practice of ‘education-entertainment’, of using appropriate media forms and technologies to positively change attitudes and behaviours towards socially desirable ends –particularly in the developing world and especially around such issues as sexual health, domestic violence, adult literacy, ecology, healthcare and so on – builds upon a sophisticated understanding of media production and consumption and demonstrates how media education in our universities and schools might be considered. The work of the Population Media Centre (amongst others) in which traditional forms of popular narrative in a variety of media forms (radio, tele-novelas, comic strips etc.) attempt to positively influence the behaviours of targeted cultural groupings, is a good example of this. Similarly, if media education is to mean anything, it must address the inequalities of access to new technologies in a global sense as well as the profound understanding that new technologies are firmly rooted and embedded in networks and lived experiences of power and poverty; technologies only have meaning in so far as they affect the lived experience of the global population – you can’t eat a BlackBerry.

It might also be that, in addition to providing students and pupils with the critical tools to explore the media landscape without becoming confused or controlled, and apart from using media to affect beneficial change, a media education should also encourage us to evaluate and perhaps radically disturb our very relationship to communication technologies and the information or experiences they mediate. It might just be that initiatives such as The Slow Media Manifesto or the Long Now Foundation – both in very different ways – can encourage us to think about the levels of our engagement with the media world and whether we want to re-negotiate these. Postman again: “…it is an acknowledged task of the schools to assist the young in learning how to interpret the symbols of their culture. That this task should now require that they learn how to distance themselves from their forms of information is not so bizarre an enterprise that we cannot hope for its inclusion in the curriculum; even hope that it will be placed at the centre of education” (1987 : 168) Indeed.

At York St John University we have been working on a ‘Media Manifesto’ of our own with some of our students, partly as a way of articulating initial preconceptions about the subject, its value and how it should be studied but perhaps more importantly as a way of attempting some sort of mission statement as to what media education involves and what it hopes to achieve. In many ways, this has been a more exciting and rewarding way of considering the subject than the required and traditional forced march through the curriculum; it makes dialogue and discussion possible without any pre-conceived aims, outcomes or assessments and, in attempting to at least describe the animal and what the point of it is, we hope to reach some understanding of how we should live with it, whether we like it and maybe and finally what we should call it.

References

The Long Now Foundation – http://longnow.org/
Mayor, F. and Binde, J. (2001) The World Ahead: Our Future in the Making Zed Books Ltd
Postman, N. (1987) Amusing Ourselves To Death Methuen
Slow Media Manifesto – http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto

“Pedagogical experience demonstrates that instruction in concepts is impossible. It is pedagogically fruitless…” (Vygotsky,in Daniels, 2001)

As a newly appointed English teacher in 1991 I was eager to find openings in the curricular that would explore and expand upon current student awareness of and experience in critical media techniques.

UK.

The first real smuggling opportunity came from a most unexpected quarter: the Conservative government’s return to ‘basics’ was grounded on the newly developed SATs testing regime. The National Curriculum for English pivoted on the pre-disclosed exam document that rolled out the usual list of canonical suspects. Shakespeare appeared in the form of Jacques’ speech from As You Like It. While my teaching colleagues both in the school and across the nation (Jenny Grahame will recall) bewailed the loss of volition in what to teach, I was happy to share my misgivings with the Year 9 students. What was interesting, I mused, was that the document didn’t say how we were to teach said texts (there was a Browning poem as well, I believe!).

My smuggling opportunity appeared as we were diligently reading through the dismembered text (Year 9 students didn’t have to read or know the actual play itself). What kept the students productively and critically busy for the next 3 weeks was the idea that they – first as individuals then in teams – were to write and present their own 20th century version of the ‘speech’. Open preliminary discussion set the stage of subsequent practical work: “Does it have to be a man?” asked one female student.  “No”, I answered, “and she doesn’t’ have to be white either” Once the communal AHA! moment was grasped the class walls were soon covered with written and visual examples (drawings, cartoons) of career arcs that often ironically subverted the socially assumed media representations of ‘success’ that the 13 years olds had already been used to. The project explored therein issues of gender, age, sex and class as these impinged upon assumed character arcs from birth to death. Registers that ranged from mockery to knowing social commentary exposed levels of informed self reflexive critique that neither I nor the then Secretary of State Chris Patten could have anticipated. Furthermore, I am convinced that the task even enhanced the student’s success at that year’s exam AND may have set the scene for further interest in both Shakespeare and drama in general.

Despite its questionable instrumental intent, then, the Back to Basics initiative of the-then Conservative government provided that rare leakage opportunity that Media Educationalists are born to grasp, critically explore, intellectually develop, and, dare I say, ruthlessly exploit with their students.

That early teaching experience confirmed for me that one shouldn’t look for the ideal teaching programme that will in of itself allow for ideal learning outcomes of the kind that the best in Media Education is expected to deliver.

Berlin, Germany.

Other examples of the kind elaborated upon here emerged later in, for example, the Free University of Berlin where I taught U.S film at the John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies. One aspect of being a foreigner is, of course, that we see the obvious almost too clearly. It dawned on me, for example, that aspects of actual educational theory seemed only to be explicitly covered in those courses that were specifically aimed at grooming educationalists. It seemed odd that the educational process itself wasn’t an intrinsic part of all courses. Students can spend twenty years ‘in’ education and not actually enquire about it (other than in terms of how to beat an examination or draft an essay). Education – in all its ideological assumptions and ramifications seemed, despite Borduieu, the usual given, not something to do with this course. It was from those ruminations (I dare not call them insights) that I drew up a semester course on how mainstream film represents – either explicitly (Dead Poets Society) or implicitly (American History) – the intrapersonal process of teaching and learning. The BA course provided American Studies students from geography, history, psychology, for example, inroads into the development of educational practice and theory as it emerged from the beginning of the 20th century in the United States (ie, from Dewey, Thorndike to Bandura). Cognitive and social theories of pedagogy informed the subject of the films chosen (The Blackboard Jungle was a good one here). It also provided those new to the actual analysis of film with a critical handle with which to further their interests in narrative and character development – on how films/screenwriters/directors themselves make similar pedagogic assumptions and assertions concerning their own notional audiences. (Once the point is made of course, one could appreciate how virtually all mainstream film and TV narratives feature characters that in one way or another must perforce learn new modes of thinking and doing in order to chart their way through Act 2. The one who does best – or who is mentored best! – survives as the winning hero).

South Africa

I am mindful of these early and recent experiences in my present role as Lecturer in Theory in what used to be the Pretoria Film School here in South Africa – and where theory (as such) is not even referred to in those elaborate Study Guides that have been in place for several years. Year 3 students, for example, are expected to explore the ‘Cinema of the Mavericks’ while post-graduates are heavily involved (for a whole year) on the ‘Cinema of the Independents’. There is no mention of ‘Auteur Theory’ in courses that are grounded in the obvious. One virtue, as you might gather, is the enormous wiggle room for maneuver that this absence allows for. Hence the B-tech/BA students – not so comfortable with essays – will be expected in a future assignment from me to undertake a 5 minute video production covering what they will consider to be a significant plot-point in the life of a key theorist (Levi-Strauss in the jungle? Walter Benjamin in Port Bou? Lacan meets Sylvia Bataille?). The production crew will thereby become an effective Research Group that will (it is hoped) engage them by gentle osmosis in the actual theories of their chosen Subjects – not the easiest of tasks for students ‘naturally’ focused almost exclusively on the assumed coming glories that the Red Carpet will have to offer.

Reference to current teaching practice in Africa provides now a short opportunity for insights that may be of interest to colleagues. As mentioned, I am currently at what is in effect South Africa’s most well-established film institution of its kind in Higher Education. From its inception in 1971 to 2004 it was, for both students and teaching staff, an all White institution. After 17 years of democratic rule we have now appointed our first black AND female full time lecturer.

I have of late (February 2011) taken the liberty to undertake an adhoc questionnaire intended to enquire about the (assumed) pre-university media education experience of our current 1st Year students. We should note that, however crude, the figures represents those students who have achieved sufficient matric exam successes to qualify for university entrance to what is, in effect, South Africa’s national film school (up to 300 interviews take place for 40 places each year and they are sharp and very eager cohort). The results – hopefully self explanatory – are as follows.

A demographic breakdown of the 24 students in terms of originating schools is as follows.

What might assist in reading the results is the fact that

-       the ONLY formal test in media literacy in South Africa is buried deep in the English metric examination paper.

-       When students mentioned ‘facilities’ these were in the form of technologies made available primarily for drama productions (lights)

-       There is a notable increase of film analysis in non-state schools where TV and video feedback facilities are more often available

-       That the high proportion of students who feel unprepared for the Film curriculum (22 out of 36) might explain the regular and significant drop out rate – that impacts mostly on the Black students – as the course unfurls.

If this snapshot insight is anything to go by, there is clearly much to forward here in South Africa when it comes to the future of Media Education. Three factors call for immediate attention: 1. the perceived role and lowly status of the educationalist in South Africa’s severely corporatized and consumer-led society; 2. the impoverished training of said educationalists in aspects of critical methodology. 3. the need for a richer, knowing curriculum that will more fully embrace and encourage such methodologies if and when they are to emerge.

In the light of inevitable changes soon to impact South Africa (and if the lingering legacies of Apartheid are to be fully replaced) the society and its variegated communities will urgently require a newly configured generation of teachers and students who can champion the kind of critical methodologies that the best of Media Education – from Canada, Australia and the UK – has always promoted and, with some satisfaction, often smuggled through.

What troubles me is from where – if not in the case of current film students – these teachers are to come from? Hence, future questionnaires will elaborate on the pivotal question, “…are you expecting to be a teacher in this highly specialized field? If not do you know a smuggler who is?”

Prof. Dr. Alan Taylor, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
Member, Oxford Education Society, a.taylor@balliol.oxon.org
See http://kinowords.wordpress.com

Daniels, H. 2001. Vygotsky and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge Falmer.

This online space has enabled a productive dialogue about aims, ethos and aspirations for media education. However, given the, at times, wilful misunderstanding of Media Studies and the misappropriation of media literacy, it also becomes necessary to pay attention to ‘whatever people say’ – that media education is a ‘soft’ option. Underlying the intractable tone of my title, also the name of the first Arctic Monkey’s album, referencing in turn the film ‘Saturday Night Sunday Morning,’ is the desire to be a little better understood.

In the context of the primary classroom, with some noticeable exceptions, media education remains peripheral and children’s participation in media cultures is often a cause for concern (Lambirth, 2004). To some it is alarming to consider that television programmes, popular music or console games might infiltrate classrooms in place of higher value texts. A traditional defence of the inclusion of popular culture has been that by doing so, we counter media saturation and arm children against influence. These arguments are well rehearsed, but for me, that is something else that media education is not.

Children engage with a ‘narrative web’ of popular culture texts and artefacts through which they explore identity and develop literacy (Marsh, 2005). By the time children go to school they have already built up a repertoire of ‘symbolic resources’ they use to enable talk and play (Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 1994; Pahl, 2006). Teachers too, live media rich lives and have developed tastes and preferences which contribute to their identities and orientation to literacy (Buckingham et al, 2010). At school children are taught to read, write, speak and listen through extensive use of narrative texts. However, for many children there is a disconnect between their home and school experiences of narrative (Parry, 2010). Contemporary policy, restricting the literacy curriculum and prescribing pedagogy result in the shared experiences of children and teachers being left outside the classroom door.

For some children then, everything they know about stories based on popular culture texts is not valued and is therefore not an asset to them. Given the centrality of narrative to literacy teaching, these children are likely to fail and are being failed by current practices relating to the teaching of literacy which rule out contemporary culture and place too much emphasis on writing skills. This is a missed opportunity. Children’s texts are complex, sophisticated and pleasurable narratives and children read them actively, collectively and culturally. If we do not pay attention to how they read media texts and how they might also proceed to make them, we lose the opportunity for them to engage with their own lived experience of literacy, privileging literary texts that are a comparatively small part of their experience.

Media education as a form of protectionism obscures the potential to acknowledge what Williams (1989) describes as the distinct importance of narrative to our culture. The affective, social, and cultural relationships children develop with media need to be valued as part of their experience of narrative. There is also an urgent need to enable children to draw on their experiences of media in order to make explicit their understandings of both narrative and the affordances of different multimodal forms. We still only have emerging models of learning progression for media literacy and limited understandings of effective pedagogy for media education.

The negative perception of media texts and media education obscures these questions and constrains important areas of research. There is a growing body of work however, within the paradigm of New Literacies which explores the relationship between children’s participation in contemporary media, and their emerging literacy and identity practices at home and at school. However, a stronger connection to the subject of Media Studies might also prove productive. Using Media Studies analytical framework, including a focus on media language, audiences, representation and institutions brings children in touch with challenging ideas which relate to their own experiences. As the different contributions to this site demonstrate, these are not (and cannot) be neatly packaged units of subject information, but instead demand critical, creative, independent and collaborative thinking and learning.

As the Developing Media Literacy: Towards a Model of Learning Progression 1 research has begun to demonstrate, it is not enough to value children’s experiences of media. Nor is it enough to develop media literacy in order to enhance school-based literacies. Children as young as six can understand and begin to apply new sets of questions to texts, and experiences which are clearly advancing their understandings of their own lived culture. Last week I observed a Y3 classroom in Croydon where children conducted, collated and analysed audience research, leading them to recognise that different audiences might interpret, make sense and meaning from texts in different ways. Last term I observed a Y5 class in Cambridge make radio news broadcasts, learning not only about the process of production but also about regulation, funding and news values. More broadly both groups of children were learning that texts are constructed, they represent the world in particular ways and audiences, including themselves, respond to them actively, socially and culturally.

As a result of productive pedagogy and the use of the Media Studies concepts the children were able to articulate understandings of abstract concepts such as modality, empathy, point of view, intertextuality; concepts more often left to much older students to grapple with. This leaves us with some interesting questions about teaching difficult, complex, ambiguous, open-ended ideas to students at both secondary and primary level that it will important to come back to and debate further. But to return to my title then, what is it that people say about media education? ‘ A soft option’ is also demonstrably what it is not.

References

Buckingham, D., Burn, A. Parry, B. and Powell, M. (2010) Minding the Gaps:

Teachers’ Cultures, Students’ Cultures in (Ed) Alvermann, D. Adolescents’ Online Literacies. New York, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford, Paul Lang p.183-199

Buckingham, D. and Sefton-Green, J. (1994) Cultural Studies Goes to School:

Reading And Teaching Popular Media. London, Taylor and Francis.

Lambirth, A. (2004) ‘They get enough of that at home’: Understanding aversion to

popular culture in schools. Children’s Literacy and Popular Culture ESRC funded seminar series. Seminar 6-11 February, 2004, University of Sheffield (Online http://wwwshef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/05/06/97/EG_11_2.pdf)

Lingard, B. (2005) Socially just pedagogies in changing times. In International

Studies in Sociology of Education, Volume 15, Number 2, July 2005 p.165-186(22)

Marsh, J . (2005) Ritual, Performance and Identity Construction: Young

Children’s Engagement with Popular Cultural and Media Texts. In Marsh,

J. (ed) Popular Culture, New Media and Digital Literacy in Early Childhood. Oxon, Routledge and Falmer p.28-50

Pahl, K. (2006) Children’s popular culture in the home: tracing children cultural practices in texts. In: Marsh, J. and Millard, E. (eds) Popular Literacies,

Childhood and Schooling. London, New York, Routledge Falmer p.29-53

Parry, B. (2010) Helping Children Tell the stories in their Heads. In Bazalgette, C.(ed)Teaching Media in Primary School. Los Angeles, London, New Dehli, Singapore,

Washington DC, Media Education Association / Sage p. 89-100

Williams, R. (1989) Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings. New York, Routledge

1 ESRC funded project link:  http://www.ioe.ac.uk/study/departments/lkl/21807.html

In Brazil, media literacy is taken as a core resource to strengthen our relatively young democracy, which is definitely not something trivial.

If one has a look at the relationship between media and politics in Brazil some very particular things will stand out: in our country, politicians surprisingly have their own TV and radio stations; our broadcast law has remained the same since 1964 (when TV was black & white and the political system was a dictatorship); there is absolutely no regulation on ownership and media concentration. Since 1988 politicians connected to labour movements have been trying to review the communications regulatory framework, but more conservative party members intend to keep the power over the media.

On the other hand, many NGOs have been engaged in projects related to media access since 1985, when the new constitutional law was written and approved. We have, for instance, the National Forum on Media Democratization, the Community Radio Movement, the  “Intervozes” (Inter Voices) Project, the National Network of Media Observatories. All of those groups work in several initiatives such as organizing and publishing data about media concentration, licensing processes, monitoring parliamentary actions and monitoring media content.

Amongst those groups there is the general public as a whole, who have the right to freedom of expression (which “includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but they are not aware of the rights taken away from them.

Hence, in our country, media literacy is being called upon to bridge the gap between politics and public demands on communications.

Personally, I believe that schools have a central role in this field, and my personal beliefs make me work hard to insert media education within the curriculum at the Federal University of Triângulo Mineiro, where I am a lecturer.

Media institutions, language and representation are particularly relevant subjects for us, because of the problems with concentration of power, whose side effect is the lack of diversity, plurality, and balance on media content. We have several studies on those side effects, but we have few teaching materials which adapt that data to educational spaces.

Perhaps we can explain our lack of experience with media education because, during the 60^s and 70^s (an important period for the development of the media education on an international level), we lived under a dictatorship which controlled freedom of expression, and, consequently, media content, the schools curriculum and its teaching materials. Now we have to develop our expertise in a short space of time.

Our advantage is that we can learn from other countries’ experiences and share our findings with international partners. Our very particular case could be useful to test the universal importance of the potential of media literacy to develop critical thinking and civic engagement.

Media education has a long tradition in the English speaking world, where the study of mass media was soon seen as a logical consequence of their presence and influence in students’ lives. When framed as media effects, the influence of media was considered negative. As a result, media education about mass media (press, radio and television) inherited the inoculative paradigm from film education, aimed at opposing harmful media influences.

Since the Seventies, media education was officially part of the national curriculum of British secondary schools. We cannot say the same for countries like Spain and most  of Latin America. In these countries, it is very clear that a manifesto for media education is needed; a manifesto for the integration of media in the school curriculum once and for all. At this time, media education depends on individual media educators who believe in its necessity.  Instead, we propose a manifestó that promotes media education in proportion to the role of media in the lives of students.

The advent of ICT and its obvious influence on the traditional mass media has brought (how could it be otherwise?) new approaches to media education.  Media education and media literacy are now associated with ICT, Internet, video games, social networks, web TV, interactive digital boards, etc. Since Gilster (1997) popularized the concept of “digital literacy”, there have been many others like:- “Multiliteracies” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Jenkins et al., 2006; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Robison, 2010); – “Multimedia Literacy” (The New Media Consortion, 2005. P. 12); – “New Literacies” (Jenkins et al., 2006), (Dussel, 2010); – “Media and Information Literacy” UNESCO (2008: 6); – “Media Literacy Education” (Alliance of Civilizations: http://www.aocmedialiteracy.org/).

This new situation has revived interest in media education in Spain. It is interesting to note how even the term “media education” is affected by this new situation: whereas “media education” formerly used to be translated as “educación para los medios”, now the most frequent translation is “educación mediática”, perhaps by similarity with “alfabetización mediática” (media literacy). The term “digital competence”, introduced by the European Union, as we shall see below, is to join this terminological confusion.

The European Commission for Education & Training has taken important initiatives regarding the relationship between education and media in the last decade. We will specifically refer here to the guidelines of the European Union on “digital literacy”, “digital competence”, “media literacy” and “media education”. With the considerations presented along these lines we do not intend to establish clear distinctions between the various terms. Our main goal is to join the manifesto for media education, to propose a global media literacy and education that includes both the key aspects of media education in past decades, to the extent they are applicable to new media, and also the basic principles of digital literacy that emerged around the Internet and ICT.

We consider it necessary to adopt this integrative approach to media education because paradoxically, the wide proliferation of new media and ICTs can be damaging to the critical component that is central to media literacy education.  The constant changes in digital devices may deviate more or less unconsciously, towards more technological and descriptive approaches of media education, to approaches that focus predominantly on the use and operation of that digital equipment.

Similarly, the importance and relevance that seems to have reached “digital competence” and “digital literacy” nowadays can be detrimental to the well-deserved priority for more critical and reflective media literacy and education.

The Chinese thinker Confucius said that “When the wise man points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger.”  We must not be so focused on the attractive and dazzling finger of ICT that we forget to notice where it “points,” that is, the social interests that media serve and the role they play in society are the main focus for media education.

1.- Digital Literacy and Digital Competence

One of the priorities of the European Union the last decade has been the promotion of “digital literacy.”  Digital literacy starts with the idea of considering the ability to use ICT and the Internet as a new form of literacy.  Digital literacy, according to the European Commission, is fast becoming a prerequisite for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship and without it citizens can neither participate fully in society nor acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to live in the 21^st century. Digital literacy has been understood in many different ways, from the most restrictive, such as the uses of computers, e-learning and Internet, to some other definitions that situate digital literacy near to a broader training and general preparation for life (literacy) in the age digital.

Martin (2005: 135), as the project leader of DigEuLit, gives us the following definition: “Digital Literacy is the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.” According to this author, “Digital literacy is broader than ICT literacy and will include elements drawn from several related “literacies”, such as information literacy, media literacy and visual literacy. (…) Digital literacy will involve acquiring and using knowledge, techniques, attitudes and personal qualities, and will include the ability to plan, execute and evaluate digital actions in the solution of life tasks, and the ability to reflect on one’s own digital literacy development.”

Media educators are so fond of talking about different literacies (informational, multimodal, multimedia, digital and media literacies, as well as verbal, mathematical, musical, emotional, etc.), that these concepts sometimes are seen as watertight compartments and even compete against each other for space in school curricula.  In other words, they seek to become the container or umbrella term from the rest of literacies. We prefer to consider the various “literacies” or “multiliteracies” as different dimensions complementing each other, or as key competencies in a multiple and global literacy.

The European Union’s concern for the basic training for Information Society has also brought together experts and policymakers to consider “digital competence” as one of the eight key competences that young people should have developed by the end of initial education and training to a level that equips them for adult life. The Commission has developed a European Reference Framework that sets out these eight key competences that should also be further developed, maintained and updated as part of lifelong learning: communication in the mother tongue; communication in the foreign languages; mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology; digital competence; learning to learn; interpersonal, intercultural and social competences and civic competence; entrepreneurship, and cultural expression. “Digital competence”, according to the EU Commission, “involves the confident and critical use of Information Society Technology (IST) for work, leisure and communication. It is underpinned by basic skills in ICT: the use of computers to retrieve, assess, store, produce, present and exchange information, and to communicate and participate in collaborative networks via the Internet”. (Commission of the European Communities (2005: 16)).

Digital competence is closely linked to information, how to search, collect, process and transmit it to communicate, and how to use the most popular computer programs: word processors, spreadsheets, databases, e-mail and the Internet. Although there are brief references to learning, research and knowledge, it seems that the priority for this competence is devoted to purely instrumental and technological contents and procedures. In the Spanish context for media education and digital literacy, however, the the focus on basic skill sets for the uses of digital devices fade into the background and priority is instead given to critical-reflexive contents.

It is clear that digital competency goes beyond the use of software and hardware, and even the use of information. In media education, basic technology skill only has value to the extent that the student is able to transform it into knowledge. To do this the student will require the basic command of specific languages (textual, iconic, visual, graphic and sound) and also of their decoding and transfer patterns. S/he also has to be able to apply the knowledge of the different types of information in different situations and contexts. Knowledge, for its part, has educational value when it contributes to personal development and social integration of the individual, to democratic participation and to improving society.

The consideration of digital competency as one of the “key competencies” by the European Commission seems to be a clear recognition of the importance of digital literacy. However the Commission’s concepts for “digital competence” or “digital literacy” in a broader sense should be considered only a part and never a substitute for the media education and critical literacy that media educators propose as basic preparation for life in the Information Society.

We would like to highlight two risks that we would face if we did not place digital competence in the rightful place and context across the curriculum. There is a danger of making these two serious mistakes:

- To reduce digital competence to its most technological and instrumental dimension, focusing on technical knowledge, on the procedures of using hardware and software, and forgetting about the content, about  how to “produce, present and exchange information, and to communicate and participate in collaborative networks” (with and without computers)

- To reduce media education to the development of digital competence. That is, to focus on the “Information Society Technologies” (IST) and ignore the social, economic and cultural implications of information and the media.the attitudes and values associated with the social uses of media. Here we consider “media education” as the concept with the broader meaning, which constitutes an advanced level of media literacy, and also includes digital literacy. Digital competence would be addressed from any kind of education and training for living in modern society.

There are many (perhaps too many) definitions of media education, media literacy, computer literacy, digital literacy and some other expressions in different languages. In this manifesto we wish to emphasize the need to join forces in search of a framework for literacy and education in which their grammatical modifiers (verbal, digital, multimedia, media, visual, digital, multimodal, computer, audiovisual, emotional, informational, communication, etc.) are more determined by models of the individual and society as our goal, rather than by semantic niceties that can end up dividing interests, efforts and resources, and even set them at loggerheads.

2.- Media Literacy and Media Education

Although in European educational systems media education may have lost ground to the study of information technology and digital literacy, perhaps the convergence of media (audiovisual, computer and networks), the integrations of modes and of languages, has set the stage to regain that lost ground with a new “media literacy”, “media education”, or whatever name it’s called—media / multimedia / multimodal / digital / etc. either education or literacy.

The term “literacy” is in its origins closely tied to the written verbal code, however, it can now be considered in its broadest sense as basic preparation for life, training that has existed even before the term “literacy” was coined. The generalization of the text made that at some point reading skills were included among the basic general education. Since the second half of last century, that basic education or literacy also includes the decoding of audiovisual language. At present the development of ICT has given rise to new forms of encoding information and structuring knowledge. Literacy is thus a term alive and constantly evolving. Its characteristics depend on the basic skills needed to face life with dignity in every era and for every generation. Without trying to be exclusive, we could say that literacy and education required In contemporary society must be: – multimodal and multimedia (due to the convergence of languages and media); – digital (for the predominant way of encoding information and communicate); – related to media (for the importance that media and ICT have acquired in the construction of knowledge).

In late 2008, the European Parliament “maintains that media education should be an element of formal education to which all children should have access and which should form part and parcel of the curriculum at every stage of schooling.” In a report adopted by the plenary, members of parliament also stress the need to improve school infrastructure so that all children have access to the Internet, and they propose promoting media literacy for adults, who influence how children develop media-use habits. (European Parliament, 2008)

The report recommends the integration of media education in schools and as a component of teacher training. It calls for media literacy to be made the ninth key competence in the European reference framework for lifelong learning. “It recommends that media education should, as far as possible, be geared to practical work and linked to economic, political, literary, social, artistic, and IT-related subjects, and suggests that the way forward lies in the creation of a specific subject – ‘Media Education’ – and in an interdisciplinary approach combined with out-of-school projects. The European Parliament report recommends that compulsory media education modules be incorporated into teacher training for all school levels, too.

“Media literacy” or, rather, “literacy” (without adjectives), due to their status as “media related”, should address all aspects, objectives, content, implications, etc. related to the presence and importance of media in our society. In some ways we are only remembering the key aspects of critical approaches to the “old” traditional media education, and see to what extent they can be also applied to new media, media literacy and media education.

The five basic skills on which, according to UNESCO (2008), media and information literacy focuses, (comprehension, critical thinking, creativity, cross-cultural awareness and citizenship) may be worthy heirs of the key aspects of media education within the context of new media. If we relate these basic skills to the eight key competencies included in the European Reference Framework developed by the European Commission, we could conclude that UNESCO’s five possible core competencies of media and information literacy are more related to “interpersonal, intercultural and social competences and civic competence” than to “digital competence”. The latter is undoubtedly the most related to media literacy, but we cannot limit media education to the development of digital competence in its strictest sense.

In many countries, like Spain, with little tradition in media education, this is the real danger to be avoided: that “media education” is identified with a new subject focused primarily on the use of digital technology, something like a new “computer literacy”. This contribution to the “Manifesto for Media Education” is a small step toward advocating a more substantial concept of media education.

References:

Commission of the European Communities (2005) Proposal for a recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council on key competences for lifelong learning. Retrieved 12-01-2011 from http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/2010/doc/keyrec_en.pdf

EUROPEAN PARLAMENT (2008). European Parliament resolution of 16 December 2008 on media literacy in a digital world”. Retrieved 01-03-2011 from: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TAHYPERLINK “http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2008-0598&language=EN&ring=A6-2008-0461″&HYPERLINK “http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2008-0598&language=EN&ring=A6-2008-0461″reference=P6-TA-2008-0598HYPERLINK “http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2008-0598&language=EN&ring=A6-2008-0461″&HYPERLINK “http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2008-0598&language=EN&ring=A6-2008-0461″language=ENHYPERLINK “http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2008-0598&language=EN&ring=A6-2008-0461″&HYPERLINK “http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P6-TA-2008-0598&language=EN&ring=A6-2008-0461″ring=A6-2008-0461,

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London: Routledge.

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (2009). ‘“Multiliteracies”: New Literacies, New Learning’,Pedagogies: An International Journal,4:3,164 — 195

Dussel, I. (2010). “Los nuevos alfabetismos en el siglo XXI: Desafíos para la escuela”. Retrieved 01-03-2011 from:

http://www.virtualeduca.info/Documentos/veBA09%20_confDussel.pdf.

GILSTER, P. (1997): Digital literacy. New York. Wiley & Sons, Inc..

Jenkins, H. et al. (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Retrieved 01-03-2011 from:

http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf.

Martin, A. (2005). DigEuLit – a European Framework for Digital Literacy: a Progress Report. Journal of eLiteracy, Vol 2 (2005). Retrieved 01-03-2011 from:

http://www.jelit.org/65/01/JeLit_Paper_31.pdf

Robison, A. (2010). “New Media Literacies By Design”. En Tyner (editor) (2010). Media Literacy. New Agendas in Communication. New York & London. Routledge.

THE NEW MEDIA CONSORTIUM (2005): A Global Imperative. The report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit. NMC. (California).

UNESCO (2008). Teacher Training Curricula for Media and information Literacy. Report of the International Expert Group Meeting. Paris. International UNESCO. Retrieved 01-03-2011 from:

http://portal.unesco.org/ci/fr/files/27508/12212271723Teacher-Training_Curriculum_for_MIL_-_final_report.doc/Teacher-Training%2BCurriculum%2Bfor%2BMIL%2B-%2Bfinal%2Breport.doc.

Let’s assume that media education is already embedded in the learning environment in a ubiquitous way.  In the past, media educators sought consensus by isolating the theories, pedagogies, key concepts and skill sets.  We debated discipline boundaries, integration strategies and the aims and purposes for media education. We worked for universal, networked access. We saw the integration of media education language into standards-based education models and policy documents as a victory for its acceptance and inclusion.

At least by now, most people assume that literacy in a global, mobile, digital world implies more than access to digital tools or the simple mastery of orality and alphabetic texts.  And so perhaps what we are really wrestling with here is a different animal entirely,  that is, the general malaise and anxiety about the role of free public education in society and our responsibility as media literacy educators to contribute to its redesign and sustainability. In the process, I want to suggest a more open and holistic view of media education as a key support for the redesign of public education.

The Sum of Its Parts

I come from a production background and so my own media learning curve began with media making.  Only later did I grasp the complexity of “meaning making.” In the 1990s I produced a short documentary about educational practices in schools on the Navajo Nation in Chinle, Arizona.  At the time, students there were immersed in bi-lingual learning of their native language of Navajo in a distance education program alongside the traditional English Language Arts curriculum.  In an interview with a sixth grade girl who spoke Navajo fluently, I asked her about her English class.  She sighed, “Ms. Tyner, why do Anglos always have to name everything?”

Initially, I had absolutely no idea what she meant.  Bi-lingual speakers likely grasped her frustration immediately, but I had no knowledge of the Navajo language and thought to myself, “What’s wrong with teaching vocabulary?  Why not name things in language learning?”  As it turns out, this simple question is deeply profound and philosophical and directed me to explore literacy outside my cultural comfort zone.  In particular, I began to think about the way that Western language emphasizes detailed taxonomies and definitions and how these structures and communication strategies are reflected in cultural and social practices. In the words of linguist Gary Witherspoon, a non-Navajo who lived with Navajo people, “Whether on the macro level or on the micro level, Western searches for causation and constitution seem to be mostly of a dissective nature.  The most lauded studies and writing are masterpieces of dissection…” (1995, p.2).  The implication here is that this bias toward taxonomies and definitions is reflected most obviously in media educators’ penchant for analysis through deconstruction.

In contrast, the Navajo language is rooted in orality and memory and more importantly, its focus is “not on the particle, or the individual, but on the whole and the links, the connections and relationships that unite the parts to the whole.  From the Navajo perspective, the fundamental reality is the whole, not the part.  In the Western ontological perspective, wholes are considered to be contingent and usually temporary arrangements of the parts.  In Navajo ontological perspective, the wholes are the primary reality and the parts are contingent and temporal” (p. 2).  In the Navajo language, verbs—not nouns—drive meaning and expression.  If I were to ask the translation for a thing like a belt or a bird for example, the response might be “it depends,” In order for the translation to make sense in Navajo, the verb reflects the animacy, the shape or the consistency of the object in transition and as it connects to a larger universe or system.

And so the implications of this simple question:  “Why do Anglos always have to name everything?” haunts me as I think about potential directions, systems and organizing principles for media education in a global, mobile world of ubiquitous, pervasive and accelerated communication.

Although the link between communication and culture is obvious to media educators, it is still a struggle to think past the assumptions of my own literacy patterns and to engage with the way that literacy reinforces ingrained social norms, power structures and pathways to social capital across cultures.  In policy circles, media educators still tend to focus on media education definitions, standards, assessments, key concepts and curricula.  These discussions are useful as snapshots of literacy in motion, although occasionally they play out as reiterative and tiresome turf battles. (Why do scholars always have to name everything?)  Rarely do they provide media educators with the cultural distance necessary to glimpse the whole array of literacy affordances (and limitations)—the sum of its parts. Instead, the focus on deconstruction, definitions and details may make it even more difficult to engage with the innovative and creative educational practices that connect us to contemporary literacy skills and practices.

The Multiliteracy Mandala

A few years ago, I played with my assumptions about the ontology of media literacy by creating a mandala, the ancient design used to meditate on the nature of the universe—in this case, the universe of literacy. The Multiliteracy Mandala plays with domains such as form, content, reception, production and context. The idea owes a lot to the New London Group’s ideas about multiliteracy and the way that design elements contribute to meaning.  Their graphic includes modes of meaning that are spatial, visual, gestural, audio and linguistic (New London Group, 1996, p.  83).

In the Multiliteracy Mandala, I explored the idea that people engage with literacy through different pathways, e.g., as producers, audience members, distributors, various cultural perspectives and that the more literacy attributes they have at their disposal, the deeper the meaning and the more opportunities they have to use their literacy skills for social capital as they switch discourses in the world outside the text.

The most important element for meaning creation for me is reflected in the contextual elements that frame the mandala’s attributes of literacy. In other words, we can deconstruct media endlessly, but will never grasp the deeper meaning of a text without consideration of the overarching historical, economic, cultural and social factors, as well as the environmental context of engagement with a text.

If only it were that simple!  Immediately, people who viewed the Multiliteracy Mandala took intense issue with every attribute and their arrangement.  This turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected and so I developed an online version for my students to make their own mandalas.  This reinforces old ideas that literacy has multiple pathways and that audiences interpret meaning from texts in different ways.  When they contribute their own version of the Mandala, they also critique the relationship between form and content, art and data.  They express their amazement and frustration at the fluid and flexible complexity of literacy.  As a result, my students also critique the definitions, standards and key concepts presented by scholars, policy makers and advocacy groups and situate these frameworks within broader theoretical, ideological and political contexts.

It is true that I am relying heavily on a Western  (Anglo) perspective of deconstruction by “naming everything” in the mandala.  However, the emphasis on contextual framing as the overarching principle for literacy attainment is meant to imply a more holistic philosophy for literacy and language learning and its relationship to changing and relative perspectives on the uses of literacy to gain social capital.  In the end, the Multiliteracy Mandala reinforces the observation of literacy scholar Harvey Graff (1987) that literacy is a labyrinth and that crafting a simple definition of media literacy is an exercise in futility.

In my own practice, I focus on the uses of multiliteracies across the curriculum as a way to design learning environments that layer the social and contextual relevance of media for problem-solving, critical discourse, simulations and project-based learning.  As it turns out, I can rely on my students to teach me about the latest apps and devices. In turn, my students can rely on me to bring lived experience and perspectives on relevant contextual knowledge as we discuss the meaning of texts, artistic movements, audience reception and the uses of literacy.  And so we engage in cross-generational understanding and debate. They learn where and how to research and connect the contexts that allow them to deeply analyze a text.  I learn about the social uses of new devices, apps and genre and in the process, I also gain understanding of new contexts for meaning.

Literacy for All

Even before the global markets crashed in 2008, public education was pushed to increase its efficiency through lean course offerings, large class sizes, packaged content delivery and standardized assessment.  This pressure for change with no clear directive offers both challenges and opportunities for media education. Media educators have been in advocacy mode for so many years that we might overlook the fact that the value of media literacy education is obvious to people with a stake in free public education.  I would argue that an expansive view of media education across the curriculum is central to the mission of free public education and that it is not that hard to sell this notion to students, teachers, parents and communities.  Accessible rhetoric for the broader public about the affordances and uses of “every day literacies” help to negotiate and anchor media education across the curriculum.

I want to clarify here that “broad” and “accessible” does not mean simplistic. Instead, I mean to imply that it is too early in the transition from print to digital to lock in and organize media education around narrow definitions, key concepts, or digital devices.  These may be useful for advocacy, field building and scholarly discourse, but the complexity of media education is its strength.  Then again, I have never envisioned media education as a unified and urgent movement.  Instead I see it as an essential, yet iterative process of knowledge sharing and social negotiation that no one faction can brand and control for long.

I’m also not saying that an expansive view of media education means that if everything counts, then nothing counts. Rigorous debates about the aims and purposes of media education are still an important topic and boundaries are welcome.  For example media education continues to be used in the service of moral panics and protectionist agendas as new forms of media diffuse across societies. In the name of coalition building, we have allowed histrionic agendas to define media education in ways that have little to do with its foundations in critical analysis, autonomous inquiry and individual expression. When positioned as a protectionist strategy, the credibility of media education is marginalized and consensus about its aims and purposes is confused and weakened.

Instead, I see the redesign of a moribund school system as a more rewarding opportunity for media educators to engage learners with common, pervasive and ubiquitous literacies for learning. I believe that our expertise in media education in both formal and informal learning environments is an asset in this regard. Instead of pushing media education as if it were a discipline, I look for opportunities to integrate multiple literacies into broader design elements like problem-solving, experiential learning, collaborative learning, scenarios, simulations, models and interdisciplinary education.

I am always pleased to find more venues to engage with a wide range of colleagues about media education, especially as it pertains to new media.  I am excited about this dynamic Manifesto for Media Education and see it as a place to provoke and stimulate dialogues of this type among practitioners across time, distance and circumstances.  Viva el Manifesto!

References

Graff, H.J.  (1987).  The labyrinths of literacy:  Reflections on literacy past and present. Philadelphia, PA:  Falmer Press, Taylor and Francis, Inc.

New London Group (1996).  A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.
Harvard Educational Review (Spring). 66:1.

Witherspoon, G. & Peterson, G. (1995).   Dynamic symmetry and holistic asymmetry in Navajo and Western art and cosmology. NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Because this is a manifesto I don’t feel the need to provide the exact references but hopefully all credit is duly acknowledged below…

At the outset I would also like to say that any debate about media education quickly leads to a debate about the purpose and scope of education more widely and moves further out into technology, pedagogy, culture, politics, economics, sociology, the future of humankind and beyond.  There are many eloquent examples all over the web and right here on the manifesto site. This one is mainly centred on classrooms, mainly on primary schools and is from an unreconstructed student-centred educator in England.

So here are 9 principles for that setting, beginning with the most obvious one:

1. Context and entitlement: let’s widen the conception of literacy in education

As is often pointed out, children and young people’s experience of lived culture is all consuming and it’s no longer tenable to restrict the educational experience to narrow versions of literacy and equally narrow versions of ICT.  We need media education from the earliest years of schooling.  We can begin, as the BFI and Mark Reid suggest, by “Reframing literacy” so that we think about the predominant modes of cultural production.  And if we do that then let’s address how children can, for example, learn about time-based texts, how the modes of gesture, image, speech and music can be made to produce specific meanings in these forms, from the earliest years.  In this, as we know from Jackie Marsh and others, we will be building on what they know from their consumption and re-appropriation of media from their early years in the play, their talk and, when they have the opportunity, their own media texts.

2. Let’s connect with learner lives and cultures

Another line of argument suggests we need media education because the skills and dispositions being developed by children and young people outside places of learning threaten to open up a chasm and fracture the relationship between home and school.  Some argue the inevitability of this fracturing from a techno-centric perspective because technological advances are seen to be largely unaccounted for in school systems; children and young people use games and social media outside the classroom to do amazing things they could never do in school. These arguments contain elements of undeniable truth which nevertheless have a tendency to lead their advocates towards a techno-romanticism which stifles any genuine engagement with lived culture and ultimately with curriculum development.  They only take you so far and so in the literature around ICT in Education we have thousands of studies that call out for more “curriculum integration” without any notion of how this might happen.  Technological determinism leads us nowhere in the end; however, thinking and learning about the media that gets made and distributed on those devices might.  For a further discussion of this issue see David Buckingham’s Beyond Technology.

We need to connect with the lives of learners in a curriculum based around the “what” and the “how” of the media that we make, share, consume, interpret and exhibit in lived culture. The Alexander review of primary education lists report after report which connects the kind of resulting breadth of curriculum experience with higher achievement.  And Ken Robinson reminds us in his presentations about essential connections with skills and dispositions (and lives) of learners now (and in a changing world).

3. Open up a dialogue with younger learners in shaping media education

Ask the learners themselves about school (as myself, Neil Selwyn and Sue Cranmer recently did in a research project) and you will find they are quite sanguine about the home and school, recognising that they are different social spaces. At the same time, they call for a freeing up of school structures to take account of their likes, preferences, skills and dispositions with gaming culture and social media.  What we need is a curriculum that understands the agency of children and young people as a factor in their successful learning. 

4. Open up a dialogue between teachers in different disciplines about existing media education practice where it is happening

In primary schools I would like to see some building on and recognition of the work of those teachers who ensure that some learning with and around media takes place.  Sometimes these are teachers who may have experienced media as part of an ICT course, sometimes these are colleagues who create media activities with a literacy (re)frame or under the label of the creative arts and humanities. These are starting points for a nascent media education in primary schools, where literacy (in its widest possible sense) and ICT meet, where the “what” and the “how” are discussed and negotiated. Too often, unfortunately, these activities are seen as peripheral, after the serious curriculum business has happened (high stakes league table subjects in the old primary core) . Instead, of course, they could be located at the heart of learning activity providing a “digital glue” to hold topics and subjects together with younger learners (see Tim Brook for what digital glue is!).  In any case, we need to get some of these people together: ICT co-ordinators, Literacy co-ordinators, Creativity co-ordinators, subject area co-ordinators and at least start talking to compare, contrast, and plan and to develop what media educators love to call the critical, the cultural and the creative. Speaking of which…

5. Restore some balance between creative and critical perspectives

Whilst the creative dimension is sometimes well developed in some activities and has been written about extensively (see Avril Loveless for an ICT perspective on this), the critical dimension is underdeveloped.  Certainly, as far as moving image work goes, the sense in which the specific properties and possibilities of a time-based text require understanding and experience of a range of forms to develop this critical capacity (see Cary Bazalgette’s work).  Watching and making and learning to critique to improve and refine and understand is important.  Once media texts are made, children know that they will be seen and judged. How will they respond and how do they critique others? How do take account of what viewers say?  How do you filter and find the most useful things that are said and written?  Can you find a genuine community of practice amongst the diatribes that clog up YouTube comment spaces for example?

6. Build an understanding of culture and empathy into a new media education

Culture – in the sense of seeing how cultures represent and are represented – is of huge importance.  When we allow sweeping and un-evidenced generalisation to dictate patterns of debate and policy we are in trouble (as we can see at the moment in England).  I’m thinking here of arguments made lazily and equally in the press and in various forums which announce: “all children do this” “ all children watch that” ‘all children play computer games”. How about some respect for the complexity of economic and social life as well as cultural difference?  I’m sure this could be layered into a new media education. One way would be to talk to learners about these issues.

7. Enough of media “projects”; it’s time to embed media education in regular recursive practice across the curriculum

Many media texts do get produced as a reward, or off-timetable activity or as part of a “project” which never gets revisited.  In an animation research project, which worked differently, Cary Bazalgette, Becky Parry and I have seen evidence of the benefits of repeated experiences across a year; the recursive nature of the practice has benefits for learning about time-based texts and the writing of poetry at the same time (see. amongst others, the fabulous work of Joy Simpson and her network of schools in Devon).  Each medium retains its distinctive features but supports the other.  So, as part of their entitlement, I would expect to see a curriculum structure which was broad enough to encompass film, animation, games and social media on a range of platforms alongside learning from and with older forms of expression.  How will we know where to set our expectations of engagement and production?  We can look for projects which genuinely connect teaching, learning and research in the field.  We can hopefully learn a lot from David Buckingham, Andrew Burn, Becky Parry and Mandy Powell’s ESRC study of media literacy and progression in the next few years.

8. Talking about safety is learning about safety

To some, the location of activity by younger learners in lived culture is problematic on the grounds of safety. As the social media habits develop earlier, media corporations are having to raise their game to provide safe new online playgrounds for the young proto-consumers (Moshi Monsters and so on).  New opportunities for access and expression also carry risk and this is best addressed and brought into the open. Spaces in which children can openly discuss their concerns and learn for themselves how to manage risk will potentially have the greatest effect.  Sometimes, as noted above, the learner voice is the last to be heard. So, why not talk about it?

9. Curatorship is a new literacy practice; think about how we can develop media education which recognises this

I would like to propose a fourth C word to sit alongside Creative, Cultural and Critical and that is Curatorship.  It was a useful metaphor for processes I uncovered in my PhD study around children’s video production.  One set of characteristics of new media is the way in which artefacts, social arrangements and the practices which grow up around them are altered (see Anna Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone). Certainly in regard to organisation and exhibition, children are growing up in a world in which the media that they collect and make can be organized, displayed and re-presented time and again in ways which were not possible before. Some of this will reflect their changing and multiple identities and affiliations as they grow but it is a qualitatively different experience to anything previously possible.  It’s a new form of cultural production which is pitched partway between making and sharing, creating temporary collections for specific purposes and then dismantling them again.

I am not simply talking about archiving, though this is a subset of the skills which go into the new curatorship. Neither is this simply about arranging and presenting the texts in a pleasing way. Fundamentally, it is about knowing how the reflexive project of the self with its anchored and transient identities gets made and unmade over time in the various spaces online and how we live with this and function in new media (See Guy Merchant’s work on identity in new media and Giddens on reflexivity).

Samuel Johnson wrote that the “two offices of memory are collection and distribution”.  Tweeting, Facebook and Blogging may be the current but ephemeral matches for these “offices” of centuries ago. But certainly we can now expand the first term to include “shared” and add  “exhibition” to complete an encapsulation of a genuinely new experience.   Let’s also imagine the use of the term “offices” has a vague match with “purpose or function” all of which might be caught by “aspects”, throw in media education and try this: “The three aspects of shared memory in new media are collection, distribution and exhibition.” And these are perhaps best in a new literacy practice of “curatorship”. We need a media education that recognises this is a new social and cultural practice.

Before addressing issues in media education, we need to ask a more fundamental question: what is education for? According to latter-day governments, education is inextricably linked to market forces and employability demands. Speaking last year at The Times CEO Summit, Education Secretary Michael Gove made his views on education (and media education) loud and clear:

“I do not think that in East Asia they are saying ‘isn’t it terrifying, the massive growth in the number of English students who have achieved mastery of media studies? Their sophisticated interpretation of the plot lines of Hollyoaks will ensure that they have economic power for the next 100 years that we will never be able to beat’” (cited in The Times, 1 July 2010).

The equation is simple enough: education equals economic and political power. Speak about public health in the same terms – and just imagine the outcry!

Of course, we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that education warrants immunity from the world of financial gain. But surely there’s something to be said for education as an end in itself, rather than a means to certain political ends. As F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson argued in their classic manifesto on the training of critical awareness, Culture and Environment (1933), education is – above all else – about bettering who we are socially, morally and intellectually. I believe I am a better person because of the prolonged education I enjoyed, more or less continuously, until my mid-twenties. And I’m not the only one who harbours that belief.

For Leavis and Thompson, education provided both a weapon and a tool-kit – a weapon to resist the whims of rampant consumerism; and a tool-kit to discriminate between, on the one hand, the quick-fix sensationalism of mass media and advertising, and on the other, the best of what has been written, shown or performed. Education was the answer to the debt-ridden years of the Depression. The honing of critical skills enabled individuals, families and communities to challenge a prevailing ideology “inducing people to buy what they do not want and to want what they should not buy”. Ring any bells these days?

The necessary key skill, they claimed, was discrimination: “if anything like a worthy idea of satisfactory living is to be saved, [the citizen] must be trained to discriminate and to resist”. Discrimination, in the sense of critical value-judgement, is a mostly forgotten art. The value-free postmodernist turn in media and cultural studies embraced popular culture in all its forms. It was considered perfectly OK, from about the early 1980s onwards, to study washing-powder commercials alongside truly valuable texts like My Beautiful Laundrette. Discrimination became associated with elitist academic snobbery. Discrimination became, in all its meanings, a dirty word.

And yet we discriminate, consciously or otherwise, all the time. We watch a TV drama and later talk about it with friends, along the lines of: did you like it? Was it entertaining? Will you watch the next instalment? It goes without saying that discrimination on the conversational level is not the same thing as the Leavisite-approved kind. Nonetheless, discrimination is a mainstay feature of the lived experience. The whole history of civilisation is a history of discriminating between what is good for humanity – and what is bad and disposable.

Media education needs discrimination more so than any other subject area. Each day the media, in all their multitudinous forms, bombard us with their messages. We need to train our media students in the art of discrimination, so that they can make their own, critically-informed judgements about what is valuable and valueless in the grander commercial scheme of things.

Here I outline five basic principles for an academically-challenging, critical media education. Some media education providers satisfy one or more of these principles quite sufficiently. The challenge is to fulfil them all.

Method: how often do we encourage our students to do focus groups? Or content analysis? Hampered by a compensation culture that causes research ethics committees to impose blanket restrictions on human-participant research of any description, we should nevertheless do the best we can to make students method-diverse. The critical breaking point occurs, in my experience, during final-year dissertations. Mention the words research and analysis, and prepare for a blank response.

Yet the fault lies not necessarily in our students, but in our selves. It appears a whole generation of media students go through school, college and at least two years of higher education without being taught how to do media studies.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule – and two excellent methods textbooks (Deacon et al., Bertrand and Hughes) should be stocked in the libraries of every institution that teaches our subject. But too often the assumption persists that studying media is all about some vague application of textual analysis along the lines of: ‘Read this film: what does it say about class?’

Students need to be equipped with an array of analytical tools: discourse analysis, content analysis, narrative analysis, semiotic analysis, intertextuality, iconography, psychoanalysis, frame analysis, conversation analysis. They also need skills in sampling and selecting. No need for specialist computer software – the best way to learn is to tally up, code, collate and categorise manually. First-hand engagement with data/source materials is – and should always be – part of the research process.

And as well as doing multimodal analysis of, say, a film (exploring characterisation, soundtrack, etc.), students should be encouraged to analyse the multi-mediated environment in which that film operates (how it synergises with publishing, merchandise, magazine and web campaigns, etc.). Media education is less effective in capturing the various mediated interactions emblematic of contemporary cultural consumption/production when it centres attention on just film, or just television, or just magazines, and so on.

No discussion of method, though, can ignore the pragmatic issue of assessment. Researching media constitutes one set of skills; writing about it involves another set entirely. Good written style – a fundamental academic requirement – is almost wholly deficient among the present-day student populace. Liberal voices profess to know the answer: let them blog, vlog, podcast, do anything other than write a properly referenced essay.

Blogging is fine on one account only – as a drafting platform for academic essay-writing. I couldn’t care less whether I’m reading a well-structured essay containing a sustained argument via WordPress, Word doc or any other format. Indeed, the interactivity of blogging can only be a good thing in the long run. But the next time I receive a txtspk s-a ripped from the pages of Wikipedia, then I’ll… who knows, perhaps I’ll start agreeing with Gove.

Internationality: one of the most ambiguous terms I stumble across in textbooks is ‘British Cultural Studies’. It’s British, despite being informed principally by French structuralism (semiology, ideology) and Italian Marxist thought (hegemony). On the other hand, placed in a wider context, there is much justification in distinguishing between the critical tradition of British/European cultural studies and the empirical tradition of North American communication studies.

In recent times, however, some fruitful attempts have been made to utilise the best of both traditions, and, beyond that, to de-westernise media education. Of course, the systematic study of media began in those countries first touched by mass communications, and the work of pioneering media thinkers like Lasswell, Angell and Lippmann should not be forgotten – this work still tells us much about the social and political impact of media old and new.

A truly international media education, then, can evolve – and is evolving – by applying current ideas to new contexts, and adjusting those ideas accordingly. Internationally-recognised media research, however, must always be recognised in our teaching too. Perhaps the most pressing issue remains social and technological exclusion. New media enthusiasts sound off about a networked, user-generated, interconnected, ever-more-equal world of broadband sweetness and mobile delight – a fairy-tale world that does not exist.

For new-media dreamers everywhere I recommend Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (2011) – an excellent attempt to dig beneath the hype and expose the impotence of Internet ‘slacktivism’. Even respected foreign correspondents utter uncritical remarks about ‘the twitter revolution’ in Egypt or ‘the collapse of traditional media’ in Libya – as if one hundred and forty characters triggered the domino effect.

Social media technologies, without doubt, added to the weaponry of those who brought about the recent uprisings in Arab societies. But massive public demonstrations in response to economic and political oppression – um, that had something to do with it too. That’s why internationality in media education, as in all disciplines, is actually about doing case studies of individual nation-states – before comparative analysis can identify transnational trends.

Theory: what I don’t mean by theory is – as it is often conceived – everything that is not production, practice, doing things. Theory should be, without exception, integral to practice; it should inform it and be informed by it. But theory, by which I mean critical and systematic thought, should be the key distinguishing factor between higher and pre-higher education.

This was my (relatively happy) experience of the school-to-university transition. Whereas A-Level English Literature honed close reading and interpretation of texts (Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc.), English Studies at degree level introduced me to ‘modern criticism’ – structuralism, Marxism, New Criticism, feminism and so on. The accusation that old theories no longer apply to new media cultures is all too easily thrown.

Semiotics, for instance, a focus of juvenile hostility among the Media Studies 2.0 fraternity, is far too seminal a perspective not to have survived the age of television, or the computer, or the Internet for that matter. The best theories stand the intellectual test of time; all the rest follow 2.0 down the road to oblivion.

History: we need better and more extensive historicising in media education. James Curran’s point about media history being the neglected grandparent of media studies – often thought about but rarely visited – is even truer of teaching than it is of research in our subject. Students need a better understanding of the wider social, political and economic contexts in which media technologies have emerged, evolved and (sometimes) declined.

Those all-too-familiar, historically blinkered clichés about media sexualisation or surveillance society or celebrity culture or 3D-virtual-reality-tv-living stem from profound ignorance about what has gone before. My favourite question to students: when was Nintendo founded? Replies range from about 1950-90. The answer? 1889. Of course, no one was playing Wii Sports in 1889, but the fundamental properties of video games were foreseen and developed long before mass-produced home consoles left the shelves.

As well as espousing the value of media history, we also need to reflect on the history of media studies. No longer in its infancy, there is no longer any excuse not to canonise a set of readings in the subject. Two major factors continue to hinder such a project. First, the use of bibliometrics in research assessment exercises gears scholarly attention predominantly towards up-to-date references and citations. And second, publishers are often reluctant to re-print works that appear – on the face of it – outdated and commercially unviable.

Thankfully, a recent example that goes against this grain was the re-issuing of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy by Penguin in 2009. Hoggart rightly deserves a place in the media/cultural studies canon, as does Williams, McLuhan, Barthes, Baudrillard and several other notables. But even these great intellectuals share in common a vulnerability to the whims of academic fashion. McLuhan, for instance, was almost forgotten about in the years following his death. And yet now, thanks in part to new media developments, McLuhan is back on the agenda – a prime illustration of historically-informed media education in practice.

Discrimination: nonetheless, seminal voices only stand the test of time when other voices – those that go after – reinterpret and re-evaluate their continuing contemporary significance. This is why canonisation should never become, if enough people contribute to the process, an exercise in academic snobbery. Discrimination, as discussed earlier, is the essence of critical judgement. To quote Leavis and Thompson again: “to train critical awareness of the cultural environment is to train in discrimination and to imply positive standards”.

Those positive standards of quality, whether in literature, drama, music, film, television, radio, in the press or on the web, remain constant. Rather than appealing to the lowest common denominator of mass appeal and sentimental melodrama, the best of popular culture captures something original and progressive about the social, political and moral attitudes of its time. That’s why we will always value Hitchcock over Hammer Horror, The Wire over Without a Trace, The Beatles over The Bee Gees, serious over citizen journalism.

To sum up: Method, Internationality, Theory, History, Discrimination. These five basic principles, taken together, put academic excellence back on the media education agenda. For recommended intake, visit my blog: www.danlaughey.com.

As part of a ‘Life Cycles’ project a reception infant class (4 and 5 years old) had made a collage frieze of a garden with coloured paper and junk.  A photograph was taken of the frieze and pan and zoom software was used to create a slow moving video of the image.  The video was projected onto a screen and children positioned between the projector and screen, making hand shadow butterflies that fluttered around the garden.  The shadow shows were videoed, edited together and the resulting movie shown to the whole class.  The subsequent discussion explored many questions, among them:
How hard was it to make the shadows go where you wanted?  How do butterflies find their way round?  Which sections of the film best portray the movement of butterflies and can we explain why?  What would make the movie better?

In addition the children chose the best butterfly music from a selection and added it to the movie.  Their words about how it might feel to be a butterfly flying round a sunny garden were recorded and added too.  Throughout the project groups of children were involved in the capture and editing of assets via the interactive whiteboard.  During the morning the children covered learning objectives from Science, Art, Music, PE, ICT and English.

The proportion of primary educators of the 500+ members of the MEA is low.  The number of primary teachers at MLC2010 was also low.  Does this mean that primary teachers are not interested in media education?  In a recent comment on my blog Joy Simpson, a Devon Literacy Consultant, who very actively promotes media as integral to Literacy, wrote,
I think in primary we just don’t see ourselves as media educators.  We see ourselves as educators of children and media may be one of the tools that we use to achieve this.  I have tried to get primary teachers to join the MEA but they just won’t…One told me they were too intimidated.  I don’t know what to do to overcome it.

Yet most Primary teachers do see themselves as literacy educators.

What are the obstacles to media education being considered an essential component in a balanced curriculum?  The unconvinced, with some justification, claim “It’s all very well for them – they don’t have to: plan a whole curriculum, put up with our rubbish equipment,  struggle with discipline / confined space / assessment…”  and a host of other objections that cannot lightly be dismissed.

The Primary Curriculum
A “delivery” model of education has been favoured by Governments for 20 or more years.  Primary schools are working with a curriculum divided into academic disciplines whose boundaries are unnatural.  It is very difficult to create an activity like the butterfly video by starting from a list of learning objectives from several subjects. The activity must come first.  The focus on SATs results, and the unbalancing this can cause, often dominate Years 5 and 6. The legacy of the Literacy Hour is with us still. The idea that doing less “Literacy” and spend time enriching learning, could actually bring better results is counter-intuitive for many teachers; though evidence from the Cambridge Primary Review suggests this is so.  Yet reducing curriculum content is politically difficult – witness the current debate on the Baccalaureate
Curriculum over-crowding militates against using one of the very tools that might bring some coherence; for when the question of media education arises it is perceived as “just one more thing to do”.  It was expedient for the BFI’s Reframing Literacy project to tie its colours to the mast of “improving reading and writing” but creating media virtually became an optional extra.  The Butterfly scenario makes it apparent that creative media education’s natural territory often lies in the cracks between subjects.

Many of the primary teachers I have met who use movie making as a teaching tool are ICT geeks.  We are the teachers prepared to jump the technical hurdles needed to video, edit and upload movies and are convinced it is worth the effort. We are, however, sometimes our own worst enemies: our enthusiasm can cause colleagues’ eyes to glaze over and our delight in wonders of ICT also makes us prone to rush on headlong to the latest and most amazing of the many Web 2.0 sites.  ‘New’ media offer exciting opportunities to pursue ideas, collaborate, reach new audiences and form new communities.  In the main, however, they work with fundamentally familiar teaching concepts – albeit with new conventions and with an important shift of emphasis.

On the other hand the century of movie history, culture and language are frequently less well understood by non-specialists. The fact that widespread popular participation in this culture was, until this century, limited to consuming and critiquing, might be a contributory factor in the slow pace of its acceptance as being worthy of study.  Perhaps an older generation of society have not yet appreciated that film is now a complete literacy; with its digital ‘books and libraries’ and with authoring and publishing easily accessible. Technologically, things are changing very fast indeed, with continuous refinement of the digital tools and materials, but educational ‘initiative overload’ overshadows efforts to understand the skills needed to surf this wave.

In creating media children can: find a voice, solve problems, communicate with a wide audience and learn to think and focus over an extended period – and be creative.  A wide range of learning styles can be catered for within the roles needed by a film crew.  Subject learning too, is enriched and deepened by a change of medium.  In working with others on a shared task children learn skills for collaboration.  As one Year 5 Child in the Worcestershire Persistence of Vision project observed, “I like sharing because you can put your ideas out – everybody can work off your ideas – and it lights a fuse and becomes a great big flame”. http://bit.ly/fqVyfN

So what needs to be done?

I am a teacher and have been for over thirty years. This means, of course, I have brilliant ideas about changing the entire educational system. While there are things I can do to make my feelings known, but I also know that ultimately they don’t amount to a hill of beans. I will leave it to others to argue for a more progressive education system. My suggestions for change are practical and could be realised relatively simply.

Excellent primary resources for the critical and cultural study of moving image media in schools are already available. Planned, regular use of BFI’s Primary film resources, Starting Stories and Story Shorts, would be a fine starting place. I believe that they continue to sell very well; so, even if some are ‘lost’ in the resource room, they are being used widely. In combination with resources from Film Education and others and using online video it is entirely possible to construct a really good film education curriculum – given the will and belief in its importance.

Critical viewing, worthwhile in itself, is also a resource to be drawn upon in creating media and in being used becomes more deeply understood.   Making movies needs to be made easier for the sceptical; for only then will they have the chance to observe the benefits at first hand. The technical hurdles of movie making in primary schools should be as low as possible. I have been using Movie Maker as my editor of choice for nearly 10 years because it is ubiquitous and free. I have found there is much that can be done by way of media making in the primary years when Movie Maker is used in combination with Audacity, PhotoStory and a little ingenuity.  However, although imperfect, it has now been supplanted by a considerably inferior “Live” replacement, which schools will be forced to use as HD video completely replaces the lower definitions that Movie Maker 2 uses.  Online video editors should be “the answer” but the quality is dependent on connection speed, so it is likely to be some time before they are as good as desktop editors and even then will be designed for the needs of adult users.  I am also well aware that in addition to the “suite” of programs mentioned above I also regularly use, Sqirlz, Pivot, Camstudio and a raft of additional effects and transitions for Movie Maker. Whilst all these are free, they also require sufficient enthusiasm to expend the time and patience finding, installing and learning to use them and, for maximum effect, to use them together. So an intuitive, configurable Media suite is sorely needed. It would use a common interface to capture, edit and render live action, animations, rostrum camera effects and sound. A generous helping of useful effects for stills, video and sound would also be included. It would have been extensively trialled on older, slower machines.  Context help in the form of brief video tutorials would be part of the package, freeing the teacher to focus on students’ ideas.

There is plenty of advice available on making full-scale movies. But time-consuming and ambitious film making can only happen once a term at most, and, more likely, once a year. A few years ago, in a project funded by the Historical Association, we used digital storytelling to completely replace the written element in a QCA History scheme of work, losing none of the History-specific learning objectives. http://bit.ly/gUbOrw

Currently, my students are working on a project where everyone in the class is making their own, complete one-minute narrative movie in three, one-hour lessons.  Using screen capture software and webcams, they need not leave their seat. http://bit.ly/eIJSXk.  But a range of even shorter, simple movie making activities need to be made available,  that can replace or support some of the conventional approaches in subject-based activities.

• Make a webcam advert – It’s a Man’s Life in the Legion.
• Animate a multiplication table using multilink.
• Use two images, text, movement and sound to explain the concept of inequality.

If well planned, the skills thus acquired will be utilised in larger scale projects. Primary teachers and learners need a well-resourced and publicised movie making website. It would have a wide-ranging core of quick and medium length movie-making activities with: clear guidance for students, specific curricular links, built in assessment materials and illustrative videos.  Crowd-sourcing further ideas from teachers and pupils would provide activities rooted in classroom practice.

A group of our Gifted and Talented History students recently attended a History Day at a local High School. A sixth-form assistant was heard to remark with astonishment and admiration on the video-editing skill of one of our Year 7 students. The (entirely unsolicited) response?  “Oh we learn that at school”. If facility in movie-making were developed throughout the primary school, what could its potential be for communication and learning in the secondary years and beyond?

@magiclanternman

In March 2009, important German institutions and organisations for media education from the fields of science and pedagogical practice founded the initiative “No Education Without Media!” They also published a Manifesto on Media Education. Amongst the first to sign the manifesto were:

• • The Commission for Media Education within the German Society for Educational Science (Kommission Medienpädagogik in der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft, DGfE); www.dgfe.de/sektionen/sektion-12-medienpaedagogik.html
• • The Expert Group for Media Education within the German Society for Media Studies and Communication Science (Fachgruppe Medienpädagogik in der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, DGPuK); www.dgpuk.de/index.cfm?id=3759
• • The Society for Media Education and Communication Culture (Gesellschaft für Medienpädagogik und Kommunikationskultur, GMK); www.gmk-net.de/
• • Board of the JFF – Adolescents, Movie, Television e.V. (JFF – Jugend, Film, Fernsehen e.V.), Munich; www.jff.de
  Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Hamburg; www.hans-bredow-institut.de

The Manifesto is based on a common judgement about the situation of media education in Germany and calls for comprehensive and sustainable promotion of media education within science and research, and at all levels of educational practice. In order to achieve these objectives, the initiative strives for a broad social alliance to promote media literacy amongst children, adolescents and adults. The initiative seeks to contribute to enhanced networking and raised awareness amongst those involved in the diverse areas of activity.

Some extracts from the Manifesto:

“Being media literate requires a person to have a sound knowledge of the different media, including knowledge of technical codes and aesthetic forms, of the conditions and forms of media production and distribution in society, and an awareness of the cultural and communicative, economical, and political importance that these media have in globalised societies. Media literacy is a capacity for sensible, considered, and responsible media use. This includes the ability to make considered choices, to understand and interpret media codes, and to make careful use of media during our leisure time, at school and in our professions. Active and creative design using the media for self expression, for articulating subjects which interest us, for contact and communication is another core area of media literacy. Finally, media education promotes media criticism, which refers both to media development in society, as well as to our own (self-reflective) media use and media creations (…)

The social and cultural effects of globalised media environments, and the development of society towards an all-encompassing information and media society challenge the education sector as a whole, thus including media education, in new ways. A comprehensive promotion of media education in science and research, as well as on all levels of educational practice is needed. This requires not only programmatic considerations, as well as strategic planning over several years, but in particular it requires investments in staff, infrastructure and finance at Federal Lander and Federal State level. All educational areas and their institutions, as well as out-of-school work with children and adolescents, professional training and further education schemes, and adult, family, and senior citizen education programmes must be included”.

The initiators of the Manifesto view the following demands as matters of urgency:

• In order to give all children and adolescents the possibility to enhance their media literacy, programmes for media education need to be reinforced, especially in institutions for elementary education, as well as in education for adolescents, families, and parents.

• Media education as a multi-disciplinary task for all subjects has not yet been incorporated into everyday school life. In the present debate on school reform (e.g. all-day schools), educational standards on media literacy must be agreed for all school forms, and the integration of appropriate media education contents into the curricula must be binding. This process must be supported by evaluation studies and programmes on quality assurance, as well as with sustainable training measures for all teaching staff and educational personnel.

• Educational initiatives for adolescents with immigrant or educationally deprived backgrounds, as well as programmes for gender-sensitive activities form a special focus. With this in mind, extra-curricular work with children and adolescents must be included much more than before. An intensification of media projects in this area must be secured by improved infrastructure and staffing levels, as well as through continuous public funding. Media education within the context of cultural education must be promoted considerably more.

• In the vocational training of child care workers, teachers, adult-education teachers, and social workers, the basics of media education as a compulsory element of educational training must be reinforced. Moreover, specific training on media education in the form of Master’s degrees and as elective subjects on other courses must be offered. A requirement here would be the significant expansion of professorships and chairs in media education with infrastructure at the universities.

• While there are several studies on quantitative media use, there still is a lack of in depth studies which analyse media use in social contexts with differentiated and process oriented approaches, also in terms of basic research. Significant expansion is above all needed in media socialisation research and concomitant and practical media education research.

www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/Manifesto-on-Media-Education.pdf

By now, more than 1,200 individuals and institutions from all areas of society have signed the Manifesto on Media Education.

Conference on Media Education on the 24th /25th March 2011 in Berlin

In order to add authority to the demands of the Manifesto on Media Education a national conference on Media Education will take place on the 24th/25th March 2011 at the Technische Universität Berlin. The aims of the conference are:

• Raising the public’s awareness of the necessity for the widescale promotion of media literacy in different areas of activity.

• Discussion and substantiation of the proposals and demands made in the Manifesto on Media Education with all interested stakeholders from diverse areas of society.

• Dialogue with responsible parties from the fields of Education Politics and Education Administration on the central tasks and measures to be taken to reinforce media literacy promotion at a sustainable level within all educational areas.

On the 24th March 2011 there will be discussions on this theme in 13 work groups. The results of the discussions will be debated on the 25th March 2011 in two rounds of dialogues with representatives from education politics, administration, and other areas.

More than 400 individuals have signed up for the conference within a short period of time. Such a strong response clearly indicates the urgency of the core demands as outlined in the Manifesto on Media Education: No Education Without Media!

We expect that the congress will be an important milestone to reinforce media education and media literacy in Germany and to sustain networking among people and institutions in different social fields.

For the past 35 years, the English and Media Centre, where I work, has engaged with ideas about media education, taught, trained and published resources about it, evangelised about its role, and defended its position in the curriculum. Yet, at a time when we know that its future is more important than ever before, it seems no longer possible to be entirely confident about what media education is, could be or should be, nor what possibilities and challenges the next generation needs to take on. So I want to start with some personal assumptions I thought I had, and take a look through my own diary for the first four weeks of this term, to help me audit what I do now think about media education at this moment in time, and how our own recent EMC experience reflects or challenges this.

Some assumptions, in no particular order: Media education should be

. . . at the heart of how children learn, and how we teach them

. . . an entitlement for all learners – an inclusive, empowering pedagogy

. . . an interdisciplinary underpinning for the whole curriculum

. .. a fully integrated aspect of literacy with the potential to transform subject English and the wider curriculum

. . . about more than Media Studies

So how do these ideals shape up in practice? Where does the rhetoric end and the real world begin? And how can we ensure that the rhetoric and practice converge and interact?

An interdisciplinary underpinning for the whole curriculum

I’m part of a cross-curricular project advising on an online resource to commemorate a major global news event, generously funded by an anonymous private benefactor of unclear provenance. Co-ordinated by a major commercial educational resources provider in conjunction with an HE institution, a diverse range of subject specialists spend the day brainstorming the concepts and principles which should underpin the website, and the learning outcomes each subject might contribute. It is immediately clear that the common thread which runs through each group’s discussion is the role played by the media in constructing representations of, and responses to, global events. It is exciting to imagine that this might become the focus of the project – a rare opportunity for genuinely cross-curricular media education; but there is a risk that the proposed wireframe for the site might not allow for the kind of holistic media-centred approach that would have been possible in the past. I grappled with precisely this issue when trying to develop a Whole-school Curriculum for Media Education; despite the rhetoric and a literally new world of communicative practices and technologies, there is little evidence that things have changed.

An entitlement for all learners – an inclusive, empowering pedagogy

My Centre is working with a school on a short-term project to raise the aspirations and attainment of Year 7 pupils on free school meals – the current target group for addressing under-achievement. 25 diverse, demanding and delightfully mouthy 11-year-olds are developing video resources for the school intranet to encourage their peers to consider higher education as an entitlement. They’ve researched the benefits, social and economic implications of HE, visited a university campus, interviewed alumni and undergraduates. Ideally the processes of research, information retrieval, interview and documenting the visit with podcasts and video should generate purposeful analysis, editorial decisions, PLTSs and problem-solving skills, as well as a ‘finished’ media product of which the pupils would be proud.  But funding for the project has come from a budget for ‘narrowing the gap’ and, inevitably the focus is not so much on media skills as on improving talk and raising expectations. As a result, there is not time for the students themselves to be fully engaged in the producton process, and the media ‘writing’ skills  involved in producing and editing the video will be undertaken by staff and technicians. Is this media education by way of Speaking and Listening skills – or, more accurately, vice versa? Or does the media element of this project function in the service of other laudable but rather different aims?  And does it matter? If it does, my dilemma is how to reframe the project to restore media to the heart of this process as the powerful stimulus for talk skills I believe it to be.

A fully integrated aspect of literacy with the potential to transform subject English and the wider curriculum

The media education work that EMC has celebrated for 35 years has been increasingly challenged both by the encroachment of the aggressive marketing strategies of Awarding Bodies and educational publishing conglomerates, and by assessment requirements that reduce the spirit of the National Curriculum programnes of study and opportunities for creative exploration to paper-based outcomes. The massive expansion of access to free online resources – in itself of course a tremendous potential asset –together with changing funding priorities and new financial arrangements in schools have inevitably impacted on our training and publications. To take just four examples from my diary:

i)  I take a group of English and Media PGCE students through four classroom media activities on Shakespeare, oracy and writing which go down a storm and revive their flagging spirits. There is the potential for a world of imaginative media work around literature, poetry, non-fiction, and talk across the secondary English curriculum; but at EMC, as elsewhere, we can no longer recruit enough qualified teachers to our media-related CPD courses, even where they are sufficiently disguised by buzz-word box-ticking titles. The word ‘media’ is now replaced by ‘multimodal’ Teachers’ spirits would be willing; but the  need to ‘measure outcomes’ makes the flesh of Senior Management weak. Yet creative media education and improved attainment are clearly not incompatible; the challenge here is how to demonstrate this.

ii)  Meanwhile I’m preparing a training day on storyboarding and no-tech production for English and Media teachers in a consortium of schools. Until recently this sort of work was my bread and butter; it comes most often now from schools which previously neglected media education, but now under pressure to hit GCSE targets, acknowledge its relevance and appeal for under-achieving boys and recalcitrant writers. Given that I know I will be expected to promote storyboarding as a substitute for creative production experiences, am I promoting a defecit model of media education? How can this perceived need be built on to make it a good news story rather than a token gesture?

iii)  I’m developing ‘multimodal resources’ to support Creative Writing for Key Stage 3 and 4 English. My centre is committed to the idea that ‘Media writing’ and production should be at the heart of the process, but despite lip-service to the importance of relevant and engaging textual experiences, in practice the ‘GCSE English’ definition of the term ‘writing’ rarely extends beyond the conventional meaning of putting words down on a page. The ‘creative’ part, in this context, varies according to different awarding bodies, and might include anything from argument, editorial and factual prose, to personal writing, original fiction or poetry. The titles for set assessment tasks include  ‘Writing From the Moving Image’, and on paper encourage ‘multimodal approaches’, but I sense that my proposed exercises – researching and making a video narrative, screenplay, electronic storyboard or moving image montage, as the springboard for a piece of writing – may be too time-consuming, scary, or tangential to be useful preparation for the demands of the assessment process. And there is a widespread assumption that if it isn’t assessed, it won’t get taught. Again, the challenge is how to demonstrate to English teachers that engagement with media production can not only meet the demands of conventional controlled assessments, but also be the pedagogy through which students’ writing can be developed.

iv)  At EMC we’re trialling new ways of supporting teachers and new publishing formats. I’m writing a downloadable resouce on Talent TV which might cross-over between English and Media Studies at Key Stage 4. Familiar rich territory for both English and Media, where examples, critique and clips are easy to find for the initiated; but the copyright and financial constraints of providing accompanying digital resources for less experienced teachers are crippling. This may become a resource which appeals to media specialists but feels too risky for a broader cohort of English teachers. Yet these are the very people we should be encouraging to see freely available online material as accessible, rather than overwhelming, and supporting to ensure that their technology is up to it – another challenge for MEA perhaps?

About more than Media Studies

I’m editing two issues of MediaMagazine – a journal targeting 16+ students of Media and Film Studies – back to back this term. I want both to raise ‘Bigger Picture’ ideas, as well as sign-posted resources which will support student work in various A level contexts. The submissions for our ‘Culture’ issue – which I’d expected to include a diverse range of sub-cultural articles on aspects of youth, music, style  and popular culture – seem surprisingly heavyweight and dominated by debates about High and Low Culture, why there is no Media Canon (actually I rather think there is, judging by recurrent references to New Wave cinema, horror and Tarantino) and where these ideas have come from. The ‘Collaboration’ theme, intended to foreground digital participation, is providing a different set of perspectives; but as editor I’m feeling uncomfortably stretched between competing pre and post 2.0 models of Media and Film Studies, and unsure what this tells me about the state of the nation’s media education and the schisms opening up between different versions of the subject. I am also torn between wanting to offer as open a platform as possible for young people’s voices in the magazine, and the more teacherly aim of well-modelled, clearly argued articles which extend students’ repertoire and introduce them to new texts and ideas – aims which are not always entirely compatible.

At the heart of how children learn, and how we teach them

OK, after all these conscience-wrestling dilemmas and challenges to the next generation, here’s the good bit. I have spent several challenging days developing resources for use in the Media Literacy and Learning Progression project led by David Buckingham at the Institute of Education. The work so far has adopted standard classroom practice derived from media studies, much of it from our EMC back catalogue, within the conventional conceptual framework of media languages, audiences, representations and institutions, to accommodate both the wide variations in expertise of the teachers on the project, and the logistics of constructing open-ended research activities that will work with children from Year 2 to Year 11, in institutional contexts wildly diverse in terms of social class, expectations and ethos. For the first time we start looking longitudinally at the outcomes. We do this backwards: starting with evidence of institutional understanding from outcomes of the news simulation researched last term, and linking it backwards to the previous unit on representation and the construction of celebrity identity, and further back still to explorations of narrative and media language. This process reminds me of why I call myself a media educator, and why my own Centre’s work is so important; for the first time in months I am able to focus exclusively on the actual processes of teaching and learning, trashing a whole range of pedagogic assumptions about ages, stages and the accessibility of particular concepts – and realising how little we know not only about the ways children learn about media over time, but also about the tried and tested strategies and interventions we have adopted over the last 3 decades.

So what price my media education assumptions now? Ever the optimist, I think they’re still worth holding on to. This manifesto needs patience, to ride out the long dark Coalition winter; more research, to keep teaching and learning at the heart of it; advocacy for a different kind of English curriculum; lobbying against the stranglehold of restrictive assessment practices; and perhaps an awareness that, as Cary Bazalgette suggests, it may ultimately be less about rethinking Media education, and more about rethinking Education. Not much to do then….

The views expressed in this manifesto are my own.

People who were infants in the late 1980s and early 1990s now run media studies departments and the young adults I work with in the New Zealand Broadcasting School go to ‘just in time’ contract jobs in a post-neoliberal and digital media environment. Many can teach baby-boomers a thing or two!
In this media environment it becomes harder to tell media professionals from other media users because everyone who has access and chooses to is able to tell, share and respond to stories. We are, indeed, at an interesting crossroads in media education.

So, my question is: What is ‘media education’ for? It is fair to say that over the last 30 years it has become a capacious basket into which a motley assortment of educational rationales, pedagogies and media practices have been thrown.  Just take media education in secondary schools as an example. Media education has been claimed to be variously: a prophylactic against violent/naughty/exploitive media content – a celebration of popular culture – a preparation for good citizenship – a radical pedagogy that unmasks the role of media within capitalist power structures – craft training for the new lightweight digital audio-visual economy.

As we explore ‘what is media education for’ has another dimension: ‘who is media education for?’ I suspect that debate will have generational and geographic (north/south) cultural dimensions.

This is why I think it is so useful to have a website rather than a publication. It offers a chance to explore contributions outside the published ‘centres’ of media education debate. It embraces tiny places like New Zealand, an early adopter of secondary school media education, as well as inspirational places like Bhutan where media education pioneers are constructing media literacy curriculum materials at the same time as the first telecommunications network is rolled out.

My creds

I come from New Zealand. Geoff Lealand has already eloquently outlined the growth of standalone secondary school Media studies in New Zealand and how it has grown into a subject area that students are proud to put on their CVs. I have been involved in developments on both sides of ‘the ditch’, first in Australia during the 1970s (we developed super 8 films in black bags after class because we believed in the praxis of media making informing media understanding). And then in New Zealand (from the intoxicating moment when portapaks arrived and ruled). Both sides of the antipodean ditch, it is fair to say, has drawn on UK media education frameworks published by the likes of Masterman, Alvarado and Cary Bazalgette at the BFI (though its film focus caused heated debate as television, and even comics moved into the mix).  We ‘magpied’ resources from around Australia (Robyn Quinn for example) and drew on those created by Canadian John Pungente, where there always seemed to be money for media education.

Before I go on to explore some critical issues around another critical aspect of media education (community media education) I want to reflect on Geoff Lealand’s NZ secondary school story briefly because it will help me draw my comments together better at the end of this piece.

First: there is a continuing unresolved (and creative) tension between teachers who want media studies to remain an outlier zone of joyous fandom and media making (a challenge to the very structure of modern schooling) and those who want to see it gain respectability ‘within the fold’ of assessed subjects. It has been pragmatic to appeal to educational stakeholders, politicians and parents. The pitch that sells is that media education enables students to become informed consumers and active citizens who can navigate an increasingly mediated world. But, from my observation, media studies  continues to be a subversive pedagogy: at its best it fosters creative joy and ways of viewing the mainstream media from outlier web 2.0 perspectives.

Second: Coursework around Information and Computer Technology has now developed as a separate silo within New Zealand schools. It has its own supporters, structures and funding lines. It appeals to politicians because of its instrumental focus. It can say that it equips children to work within digital industries. But it fosters a rather limited view of media literacy.

These silos of media education and ICT literacy are a problem. They make less and less sense. Kids in New Zealand no longer relate to just ‘a medium’ (computer, television). As Jenkins puts it, they use ICT, telecommunications and media content within web participatory culture. It is a key challenge for us to bring them together.

Thirdly: I want to put in a plug for librarians in New Zealand. Some of them are visionaries who design libraries to bridge between in-school and out of school access to ICT technology. Computer drop-in centres enable access to rich ICT/media. Librarians consider themselves as experts in information literacy. Librarians form a key bridge between leisure use and secondary schools. Critically they provide resources for digitally deprived young people.

Now to some thoughts on the thorny problems facing ‘community media education’ in NZ.

This is an area close to my heart and it is an area which raises awkward questions around sustainability in New Zealand. The work on the ground is chaotic and marginal, even though charged with democratic idealism.

A brief background

During the 1980s Media Women , a brainchild of practising journalists and tertiary media teachers, was created to offer ‘just in time’ media education for the community. We hoped that powerless voices (eg NGOS and community groups) would learn how to counter the increasingly well groomed PR coming out of corporate institutions during a period of radical deregulation. We ran workshops which had sessions like ‘know your media’, ‘write your press release’, ‘how to be interviewed’. It folded when voluntary energy ran out.

In 1987 a group of parents, teachers, researchers (including Geoff Lealand) and children’s producers founded The Children’s Television Foundation(CTF) as the dire implications of media deregulation for local children’s media funding and programming became clear. CTF wrote letters, press releases and submissions to select committees around kitchen tables. We taught each other what we thought and knew about local media (I am told these days that this is seen as tertiary ‘knowledge transfer’). At the time it was very effective multi-point media education between producers, creatives, funders, parents and audience researchers. It was at its best when it argued fiercely about its role (say between parents wanting safe nostalgia and audience researchers wanting to give children their own voices). We didn’t realise what an effective gadfly it had been at the time with the broadcasting industries and politicians until after the voluntary committee grew tired and disbanded itself.

In its place a couple of us, rather ambitiously, decided to design a ‘media clearinghouse’ for New Zealand  We deposited CTFs fount of knowledge about the complex NZ media system, including research sources, informed opinion and viewpoint for anyone to explore or add to. We designed learning objects. We invited New Zealanders (regulators, producers, advertisers, parents, lobbyists, children) to contribute to the clearinghouse. Anyone could search for (or deposit) information, research and opinion about our mediascape. It was to become a low cost one stop shop for a small nation. The objective was to foster more informed local media debate (there is little informed media commentary and criticism in New Zealand). Mediascape (www.mediascape.ac.nz) was launched in March 2006 with a small grants from regulators and the NZ Digital Strategy fund. Alas, what timing! It launched into the explosion Youtube in 2005, local specialized blogging sites in 2006 and Facebook in 2007.  Students still find it a valuable source about our media industry but the commercial media stakeholders have expressed no interest in ongoing funds for something designed to stir up informed media debate! It will be archived in 2011 due to lack of sponsors…not lack of possible directions.

In summary:

Community media education initiatives are turned down by Education Ministries because media education ‘stops at the school gate’. There is no traction to obtaining funding from the self-regulated industry. This is in stark contrast to the Canadian industry funded model for Media Awareness. Canadian telecommunications and media industries sponsor this as part of their corporate social responsibility (see http://www.media-awareness.ca). Nor has media ‘literacy’ been picked up as a part of national digital media policy, as exemplified by OFCOM (to date at least) and the Nordic region. Statutory regulatory websites offer elements of media education, but these target secondary schools. Netsafe, narrowly designed to help parents with the dangers of the internet, finds funders.

New Zealand has few resources for community media education, despite it being a first world nation in the UN charts. It is a double whammy: it is a tiny economy that has very limited local funding sources
at the same time
it is not eligible for first world funds from the likes of Google or the Soros foundation charities which, quite rightly, go to nations like South Africa or Sri Lanka.

So where from here?

2010 was the year in which many bits of the puzzle came together for me. A key trigger was hearing two members of the Unesco Media and Information Literacy (MIL) writing group addressing radically different constituencies.

First I heard Unesco’s Alton Grizzle at the 5^th World Congress on Children, Youth and Media in May in Karlstad Sweden (http://www.wskarlstad2010.se/). He presented a new model for ‘Media and Information Literacy’ that seemed to bring all the silos under one umbrella. It seemed to bridge the efforts of Media educators, ICT facilitators as well as the information literacy spear-headed by librarians (were there any at Karlstad?). It also bridged generations.

Then, in November I heard Ramon Tuazon (President of the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication), who was also part of the Media and Information Literacy writing group, speak about Media and Information Literacy model. This time it was at the 5^th Asia-Pacific Information Network (APIN) and ICT Literacy Workshop in Manila. I attended this as a representative of New Zealand’s Unesco Communications Committee. This time there was a very different mix of stakeholders: ICT engineers involved in digital roll out, regulators and information access librarians from around the region. Ramon and I were the only self-declared media educators attending (although Tshering Dendip from the Bhutanese department of Information and Media of the Ministry of Information and Communication presented an impressive media literacy curriculum to the group on the last day!).

The place of transnational initiatives:

Transnational agreements are attempting to position media education firmly within a larger set of civic rights across the world, not just in the first world. These agreements include media related principles in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989),The UN Alliance of Civilizations media education initiatives (2009) and Unesco’s Media and Information Literacy initiatives (2010). They each have the goal of extending the rights to media education beyond the hubs in North America, Europe and even the Antipodes.  Again we need to guard against each becoming its own institutional and funding silo. They work best amplifying each other.

There seems to be agreement that we now have both top down (telecoms, ICT, broadcasting and newspapers) and bottom up (social networking, Youtube and community access) media production. These key trends are at their most startling in the emerging nations that are leapfrogging over one way broadcasting and telecommunications technology straight into digital interactive media.  This is, critically, happening in regions with very young demographics. In Africa, parts of Asia and South America young are moving straight from radios to mobile phones.

This is a fantastic moment to grasp. It is something that those of us living in ‘mature’ (and increasingly elderly) media environments need to appreciate. It turns our top down media pedagogy on its head. It creates new learning objects and objectives.

As Mr Faaig Umar from the Maldives put it eloquently at the APIN meeting in Manila when he said: we want media and information literacy NOW but on our terms. Why? The Maldives has moved straight to mobile 3G and now has two complementary problems. Yes, there is the familiar challenges of sudden access to global corporate media and social networks and the cultural pleasures and anxieties that prompts. But this process is being paralleled by the new abilities of citizens to participate in government. Mr Faaig Umar told us that there is an urgent new problem to solve: the over participation of citizens in e-government! Ease of access to government has gummed up the digital works.

The battle for infrastructure (telecommunications roll out and access to computers) is ongoing for many nations (including New Zealand) BUT the desire for media and information literacy increasingly runs in parallel with these developments.

Our debate is larger than secondary school media education, where much of the pioneering work focused. It must embrace out of school opportunities for media and information literacy across older generations, as well as young.

Are you a lucky person?
If you are, go straight into the industry,
because it’s all about determination. If you’re not,
film school fills that gap.

Mamoun Hassan (2008), former Head of producing, editing and directing at the NFTS

Through my practice as film producer, I have learned that well-reflected viewing experiences play an essential role for media professionals. They form the basis for evaluation of movies as well as other media texts and are actively used to develop, decide and articulate the aims, structure, characterisation and style of one’s own films.

Addressing much wider concerns, Umberto Eco pointed to the double-edged nature of media communication when he wrote that “a democratic civilisation will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for reflection, and not an invitation for hypnosis” (1979). Applying the reflective approaches I learned as filmmaker in the context of the complex and increasingly iterative relationship between filmmakers and audience, my approach aims to support this shift from mass media “hypnosis” and towards a more critical reflection of all media content, and thus towards reconciling practical with theoretical approaches in the teaching of film and associated media.

Students are given opportunities to acquire the skills that enable them to take responsibility for their own learning materials. The resulting awareness of their individual relationship to cinematic, artistic or theoretical traditions enhances not just their voices as emerging filmmakers, but the increased environment awareness allows them to adapt their skills to a great variety of media and industry contexts.

Therefore, I hereby swear to submit to the following set of rules

1. View all films, TV shows, DVDs, streams and Quicktime movies we used to watch for pleasure as homework. We ask: Why do we laugh? Why are we scared? Why are we moved? Why are we not engaged? Which techniques did the filmmakers use to achieve these effects? How can we apply their solutions to our problems when making a film? Why are some stories getting production finance while others cannot? Which films are being seen? Why are which audiences watching what films? How do films resonate with them? The learning process is about becoming a participant in creative, technical, economic and social relationships of both film industry and culture, or as one of my students called it in her research thesis: “To demystify our fascination.”
2. Evolve, as teachers, into annoying 3 year olds who never stop enquiring to satisfy their endless curiosity. Such educational minimalism relies on the power of the Socratic ‘Why’? Students learn to use other filmmaker’s work to improve their own, just as Scorsese admits: ‘I am often asked by younger filmmakers: why do I need to look at old movies? The only response I can give them is: I still consider myself a student … The more pictures I make the more I realise I don’t know. I’m always looking for something or someone I can learn from.’ (1999)
3. Move from the usual curricular canon of films accepted for study to develop individual student playlists. Take students’ interests seriously. Excellence will take care of itself. Ultimately students discover ‘quality’, part of the quest in Higher Education is the learning how to define it for themselves and demonstrate it in their own work.
4. Do a Morpheus (when he says in The Matrix, 1999) to clarify responsibility for learning: “I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”
5. Revise classes with a discussion on how course content has been applied in films and TV programmes students have seen outside the classroom. Besides reworking curricular content, this allows to articulate spontaneous assessments of new work and current industry affairs, just as industry professionals do when getting to know each other. To paraphrase Renoir, leave the door to the lecture hall open.
6. Encourage individual case study choices and idiosyncratic responses to film texts in blogs and class.
7. Understand filmmaking as a process that begins in the mind. Michelangelo emphasizes the need to train the imagination “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” It is still about making films, even if there is no camera in the classroom, there are no colourful editing keyboard buttons to press, or even if a film is not being screened but instead we are discussing a book, an article or interview. Aside from exercising creativity, this process also prepares emerging filmmakers for the months and sometimes years’ development they may face in industry practice.
8. Select and design academic study materials towards getting a job, make a film, make a better film, or define what a better film is: “The end aimed at is not knowledge but action” (Aristotle).



9. Replace curricular paradigms and frameworks with a need-to-know methodology playlist. Abstract concepts need to support the process of making sense of an abundance of data, analysis and theories. For emerging filmmakers theories may be limited to those that can be used in real time and real conditions. As one of my students put it in her thesis on film education: ‘By concentrating upon film theory, we can end up losing sight of the cinematic practice that we are studying.’
10. Explore with students the ethic spectrum of their own education within their individual contexts, their emerging voices as artists and unfolding career goals: “Socrates taught me that knowledge would set me free; Peter Mandelson tells me that its modern function is to make employers rich” (Coffield 2001)
11. Recognise that whatever we do (writing, shooting, distributing, watching or teaching films), we are part of a tradition. The exiting journey is about discovering the various approaches and communities of filmmaking practice, how they originate and how we can explore and challenge them to participate in their further technical, business and creative development.
12. Acknowledge lousy films as a great teaching resource: As Fritz Lang shows us: When I looked at the good films […] I lived with the film. I enjoyed it. It was an adventure. My interest was so full in the film that when I saw a lousy film which I didn’t like, there was something that made me say, ‘wait a moment, this is not good, this I would have done differently.’ (quoted in Sherman 1976)
13. Develop and apply critical thinking as resource for curiosity, the artistic voice and truly creative work in film and TV. As Ricky Gervais admits: That’s what you do as an artist, really, even if it’s such a lowly art as TV, you’ve got to get stuff off your chest, because that’s what makes something different and original, your particular take on stuff. […] It’s a dig at easy comedy, it’s a dig at compromise, it’s a dig at fame, it’s a dig at the press – it’s a dig.” (quoted in Gordon 2007)
14. Examine all the different stages of filmmaking, the procedures and responsibilities and how they help to determine the audience experience: scriptwriting, production, distribution, marketing (creative, technical, social, economical, political, psychological factors).
15. Allow constructivism to happen. Make time for students talking about current film industry and cultural issues: How do we tell a story that is fresh and surprising, but can be understood in the context of expectations that rely on sediment built up from thousands of other stories? How can I make a film in the face of Hollywood competition? What is a good film? What is a film? Where does it happen?
16. Learn how to analyse, and speak about, the quality and the shortcomings of your own work. It’s the hardest task even for experienced filmmakers, but it is at the heart of the creative process.
17. Try to square the circle: Master the contradiction of talking about the pre-verbal nature of cinema.



18. Prepare to learn at least until I stop working. Part of the influence of digital technology on filmmaking and life beyond is that we work in an ever-changing environment. A degree qualification is only the beginning…
19. Foster self-directed learning. By far most of the learning in the film industry does not happen in the classroom, lecture theatre or seminar, but is self-directed (Mackendrick 2004, Skillset 2008). My teaching is about building procedures to act on this responsibility.
20. Make myself superfluous: try not to teach my own, my films’, or my institution’s, own importance. Increase opportunities for off-campus credits where students get the opportunity to immerse themselves in the professional communities they seek to join.
21. Prepare for a future that is same yet strange. Self-directed learning in conjunction with a much expanded availability of films and texts through online collections, and accessibility of experts, learning networks, communities of practice as well as audiences through social networking, is rapidly changing the way education is being delivered. My heart swelled with pride when I had the opportunity to screen my graduation film at a film festival 20 years ago and thus double its total lifetime audience. Last year one of my students achieved 20,000 views for his short film over a month, and developed a series for which he claims a million views. In this context, student curiosity becomes the main driver towards learners taking a role in the moving images of the future.

References

Coffield, F. (2001) ‘Breaking the Consensus: Lifelong learning  as social control’. British Educational Research Journal, Vol 29, issue 2

Eco, U. (1979), “Can Television Teach?” Screen Education No. 31.

Gordon, S. (2007), Interview Ricky Gervais. A.V. Club [Online] Available at www.avclub.com/content/node/57393 (Accessed 15 January 2007)

Hassan M. quoted in Thompson, A. (2008), ‘More than just a way into the reel thing’. The Times Higher Education. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=203933 (Accessed 18 June 2008)

Mackendrick, A. (2004), On Filmmaking, New York: Faber & Faber

Scorsese, M. (1999), A Personal Journey Through American Movies, New York & London: Faber and Faber

Sherman, E. (1976), Directing the Film, L.A.: AFI

Skillset (2008) Skillset/UK Film Council Feature Film Production Workforce Survey 2008. publications.skillset.org/index.php?id=9&page=10 (Accessed 23 November 2008)

Wachowski A. & L. (1999), The Matrix, Los Angeles: Warner Brothers

To be honest at the outset, I’m not sure that a manifesto for Media Education (capitals intentional) is possible or even advisable, although I believe in the value, socially, personally and, yes, economically of media education (lack of capitals equally intentional) – otherwise I wouldn’t be teaching it. But the reason I can teach it (post-16 at any rate) isn’t that it needs teaching, it’s that students want to do the courses.

I find it surprising how many new undergraduates on the foundation degree I run don’t actually know what they are doing here or what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Some of them expect to be making ‘films’, some want to ‘do animation’, others just don’t know. But still, something brings them there.

At last year’s Media Education Summit, Marc Prensky asked, “Where are the students?” There is a lot of talk about students being more media-literate, media-engaged and digitally-native than we are as educators but there seems to be very little engagement of students in debates about media education.

So, given that this manifesto project can’t just be about defending our assaulted grants, departments, jobs and self-esteem and it must really be about working out how to better develop the personal and social capital of those we educate, I thought they should see what was being said about their subject.

I gave my first-years a morning to read and discuss the site and then to get together and talk about what they wanted out of the course, why they thought media education was good for them and why they did it. They pulled out some broad categories they agreed on and got together to produce this response. In total, including discussion and planning time, they had about 6 hours.

I think what the result shows is that they have as many varied ideas about how media education is good for them as the contributors to the site do. I think reading the contributions gave some of them new ideas about what the value of their education could be, so I hope it’s been a positive little exercise for them. I also hope that it shows the value of engaging students in the media education debate.

There has been a lot of rhetoric in recent years about the failure of schools. Successive political parties several countries have based their manifestos largely around educational reform. All political parties consider that this is probably what the public wants to hear. The‘No child left behind’ and ‘Every child matters’ agendas epitomise the view that education has been something of a political punch bag, yet not a lot seems to have changed, and if there are changes, most are far from radical. Other initiatives have been proposed to reach distributed and impoverished populations of young people. The ‘One Laptop per Child’ project was a classic example of this kind of technologically driven effort. If any substantial change is proposed however, it is often resisted by teachers, school leadership, parents. Sometimes the resistance is overt, more often than not, it is tacit. Whatever form the resistance takes, there is often inertia in the state funded education systems of the world. If we are to turn around our failing schools and make a long lasting impact however, perhaps we need to apply some radical, or even outrageous solutions.

So let’s think about it. What is the most outrageous alternative education scenario you could possibly imagine? How about children not attending a school at all, but instead learning from home? Well, this is not so outrageous, nor is it particularly new, because it’s happening somewhere in the world right now. Distance education in the remote outback regions of Australia and in the hard to reach rural areas of other large area countries has been alive and thriving for years. So too has the home schooling movement in all its shades and colours. Both are successful methods, but both also suffer from a number of drawbacks.

OK. So what about no school at all then – let children learn through ‘life experience’, with no formal schooling at all? This would result in children going straight to work as soon as they could talk. Well, the sweat shops in the Far East can easily lay claim to that one. And of course, in Europe in the last century but one, this was a common experience for every child except those privileged to be born into affluent families. It may be a radical approach, but anyone who advocates no school whatsoever, deserves a size 12 boot up their backside.

OK, what about children taking control of the curriculum, controlling discipline, and deciding what the teachers should teach them? No, sorry – that is completely passe. That was done by schools such as Summerhill School and a number of other progressive, humanist schools in the 1960s in England and elsewhere.

How about something a little less radical then? The teacher stepping back out of the way, so that the child can take the centre stage and learning is focused on their personal development rather than simply on facts and knowledge? No again – the Montessori schools have been taking the approach for years.

How about a more balanced curriculum then, where academic topics are weighted equally alongside artistic, aesthetic and social skills? Close, but no cigar – the Rudolf Steiner school movement has cornered ‘head, hearts and hands’ education for some time. Are we running out of alternatives? Is there any radical approach that has not been tried and tested? Are we doomed to continue with a rusty, creaking, increasingly outmoded and bloated national curriculum which every day becomes more and more irrelevant to the needs of the modern, fast changing, digitally-rich world of the information society? Are we?

Well, there is ‘deschooling’ of course. Deschooling in the sense that the anarchist philosopher Ivan Illich proposed in the early 70s. There’s no need to panic. It’s not doing away with schools, as most people think when they hear the phrase ‘deschooling’. Deschooling is not to be confused with the ‘unschooling’ we discussed earlier in this article. No, it’s more a philosophy premised on the assumption that universal education is simply not possible, nor is it desirable. We don’t all need to know the same stuff, therefore why should we all sit together in the same room, at great public expense, for so many thousand hours of our young lives, to be forced to learn it all? Why should we, in the sage words of Sir Ken Robinson, be ‘batch processed’ by age groups, in an industrialised instruction machine. Children all develop at different rates, so age categorisation is a false measure based on economic and management expediencies rather than because of any consideration for the learning experiences of individual children. Illich rejected these processes as unsound and unsustainable. He was also concerned that we should do away with what he called the ‘funnels’ of the schooling systems. His alternative were ‘learning webs’ that enabled every child (and indeed every adult in the context of lifelong learning) to learn what they personally needed to survive, thrive, care and share in their communities and societies. His idea of ‘peer matching’ was indeed very radical for his time:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity. (Illich, 1971)

Impossible then? Yes probably. Impossible now? Under the current funding regimes of mass state funded education, and in the present ethos of rigid curricula and control freakery of Western governments, trying to formalise something like this would be extremely difficult. But when we consider that 80 per cent of what we learn is achieved primarily outside the school gates, I am sure we might be able to agree that there are some potential loopholes just begging to be exploited. Add into the mix some positive deviancy from a few disruptive activists within the teaching ranks, and we may be able to make some progress toward transformation of the state funded school system.

So let’s see – how radical can we get with education? What if every child had their own device to connect to the world of knowledge and what if it was actually engaging and fun. What if children could search for any topic they wanted to know about and find complete high quality resources on it in seconds, on a screen right in front of them? What if kids could match their interests and knowledge needs with other kids whom they could link with around the globe? What if children could learn from each other within an online global community, using social networks and massively online role playing games? What if each child could create his own personal learning environment from a huge choice of tools that were free, scalable and open for all to use without any concerns about personal safety? What if this kind of learning was formally accredited in such a way that employers would recognise it? What if the learning webs that Illich dreamed of were actually a reality and a way to democratise knowledge? What if all of this could be brought to us through easy to use personal devices, connected anytime, any place, and totally free to use?

So why aren’t we doing it?

In my former life as head of the media pedagogy department in the Austrian Ministry of Education, the Arts and Culture manifestos, formal declarations, ordinances and the like used to play an important part in my effort to establish media education as an everyday practice and indispensible part of formal education. I am not going to repeat the content-rationale(s), which my colleagues have already integrated into their contributions. It goes without saying that I agree with most of what has been said. A direct link to my contribution is Cary Bazalgette’s mention of how closely media education is embedded in the evolution of educational paradigms. This is why I would rather address educational policy decision makers with arguments used in the series of documents from the past 25 years:

My motto for the manifesto goes back to the Austrian ordinance on media education, version  2001. The same idea is used as the appeal of the Manifesto on media education published in Germany 2009.  (http://www.medienpaed.com/manifest_2009.pdf)

School as the institution for formal education which all children (at least in our hemispheres)  attend is committed to equip them with the skills/competences needed in the so called information society. These skills should be taught and trained on both curricular and transcurricular levels.

MEDIA EDUCATION TRANSCENDING THE CURRICULUM

In the information or knowledge society there is no education which is not, at the same time, media education, be it education through media and/or education about media. This means that beside the cross-curricular practice media education is, or rather should be, a transcurricular approach which transcends and challenges the traditional  borders between the disciplines in school. In the same way it is a link between school and life worlds of children and young people outside school – we all know there is a divide between the two which we should attempt to bridge. Media education should train  competences/abilities, which prove useful and productive for lifelong learning. Raising contents and above all principles of media education onto the transcurricular level means that media education is an agent of change and sustainability.

UNESCO has proclaimed the decade 2005-2015 the decade of sustainability, 10 years, in which special emphasis should be laid on awakening and raising the awareness of children and young people on how important it is to reflect the significance of particular fields of problems which affect our lives and sometimes also the lives of our descendants. These fields are usually associated with environment, climate and energy resources, areas which are essential for the survival of mankind and should definitely be integrated into education.

The segment on sustainability in education provides for people committed to media education an impressive déjà-vu experience:

literacy, aesthetic appreciation and creativity, communication and collaboration, information management, responsible citizenship, personal life skills, values and actions

are the components of sustainable education in R. McKewon’s Toolkit.

In other words, what I mean in this context is a change of paradigm of education, of pedagogy in the epistemological sense.

We need the ability to deal with a multitude of diverging standpoints, which, in turn, requires the skill to deconstruct and reconstruct the standpoints of others. In this way problem-solving capacities are trained, just as at the same time students can experience themselves as active constructors in a social context.

Understanding is not merely reproducing content, it is critical questioning of conditions and motivations as a basis for acquiring knowledge autonomously.

We increasingly need methods such as dialogue, co-operation, considering creative affective elements as equal partners alongside the cognitive aspects: Media education also means pleasure and enjoyment!

Transcurricular considerations naturally require a great deal of re-thinking both at the organisational and the teacher training level. Anne Sliwka calls this vertical and horizontal coherence. Ideally the principles should be put into place from primary education up to the final grades. This in turn needs teachers of all disciplines who are aware and trained in the strategies and principles mentioned.

References

Mc Keown, Rosalynn: Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit in: http://www.esdtoolkit.org/esd_toolkit_v2.pdf)

SLIWKA, Anne: Citizenship Education as the Responsibility of an Entire School: Structural and Cultural Implications. In:G.Himmelmann/D. Lange (eds.):Demokratiekompetenz. Beiträge aus Politikwissenschaft, Pädagogik und politischer Bildung. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften Wiesbaden 2005, 184-194.)

Susanne Krucsay worked as a teacher at a grammar school in Vienna for 16 years before becoming head of the media department, with special emphasis on media literacy in the Austrian Ministry of Education. She is the Arts and Culture; editor-in-chief of the quarterly MEDIENIMPULSE – now (www.medienimpulse.at ) and the website www.mediamanual.at. She is a lecturer in teacher training in German, English, Media Education and member of the Experts Group for Media Literacy at the EU Commission

Though there is increasing interest to guide education towards sustainability issues, so far there are very few examples of green approaches to media education. In spirit, though, many of the goals and aspirations of media education are in perfect alignment with the cause of sustainability. As John Blewitt argues, media literacy and environmental education have in common the goals of participation, action and critical engagement.

But in order to truly green media education there needs to be a radical rethinking of many underlying premises that have lead to a deficit in sustainability discourse among media education advocates (for example, take a look at the tag cloud of this Website). Part of the problem has been the lack of a sufficient bridge between ecoliteracy and media education. In important ways their approaches are epistemologically different. For example, the traditional divide between the biological sciences and the social sciences and humanities is well-reflected in the history of media studies. With the exception of Raymond Williams and the newly emerging field of environmental communication, the problems of the environment generally have not been linked to the other social justice issues taken on by media studies and cultural studies. So though racism, sexism, homophobia and postcolonialism have been tackled by media education, the environment has not received similar attention.

Another part of the problem is the assumption that environmental education is “nature”-based and is outside the task of media education. The critique of technology, which should be a primary job of media educators, is generally assumed to be the territory of so-called Neo-Luddites. I concur with Jaron Lanier who recently argued that media users, engineers and producers should be allowed to discuss the merits of media technology without being ostracized by digital utopians. It’s possible to be a media user and a critic simultaneously, as Ivan Illich’s discussion of tools for conviviality shows. He argues that there is an appropriate human scale and application for communications technology while also recognizing their limits.

While experiential nature initiatives certainly remain an important aspect of ecoliteracy, the environmental crisis, in particular climate instability, is primarily a cultural crisis. As eco-educator David Orr has argued, “all education is environmental education,” meaning our cultural attitudes and beliefs about ecology are embedded into education in the same way they are integral to economics, in particular non-sustainable beliefs. The problem is that rarely do fields like education or economics acknowledge the ecological dimension of their models of reality. Same goes for media studies. So riffing on Orr, by extension we can argue that all media are environmental education, picking up on the critical pedagogists who talk of media as a kind of cultural pedagogy, but then expanding this notion to promote a green critique.

Part of the solution is for social sciences, humanities, and media studies to take seriously the environmental implications of their work. Remaining silent about the role of culture as a primary aspect of global ecology will only further the ecological crisis. But it’s not merely a matter of changing the information. In other words, simply applying traditional media literacy tactics to environmental issues won’t be sufficient, like doing discourse analysis of news coverage of climate science or policy. Of course approaches like these are very important, but they are incomplete.

Rather, there are fundamental shifts that need to take place concerning how we engage the world. As Gregory Bateson argued, trying to solve problems with the thinking that created them results in double binds, or what CA Bowers calls the colonization of the present by the past. In this regard, media education is not immune. For instance, there is a major epistemological difference between what Bowers refers to as “ecological intelligence” and standard mechanistic educational approaches derived from Enlightenment thinking. Whereas Bateson defines a person as not simply an autonomous “self” but part of an interconnected “thinking system,” a lot of media studies still assumes the Cartesian model of the mind. The Cartesian view regards the mind as a repository of symbolic representations based on a machine metaphor: representations move through space from person to person, and as a result individuals construct an individualistic identity that is disconnected from living systems.

An example of mechanistic thinking is the magic bullet or syringe theory of communication derived from Shannon-Weaver. Though this model has been widely discredited, in my review of media education literature, there is still a large body of thought that has internalized the assumption of media effects that presumes media program human minds. They are exemplified by many of the “content analysis” approaches that assume that media literacy is a matter of changing and improving information through the deconstruction of media texts. Theories of the public sphere and democracy retain this concept of rational communication between autonomous beings, and are central to many media education strategies.

The concepts of “memes” and media “viruses” are another way mechanistic thinking enters into media education. Though the definition of a meme is contested, it is largely based on a biological view of information that assumes that ideas and concepts are like DNA: they can be copied and replicated between people. What this approach leaves out is how ideas grow from a cultural commons that draws on intergenerational dialog, specificities of place, and intercultural diversity. Moreover, as James Carey argued, thoughts are not private, but are public. Language, which comprises thoughts, is organic. Our culture is based on a complex feedback system, not the isolated musings of an autonomous character in an Ayn Rand novel.

In contrast, Bateson argues that the mind is a thinking system, eminent in the environment. A rough parallel of this concept is the theory of intertextuality, which approaches texts as communicative “utterances” that make sense based not on the meaning of a specific work, but how they dialog with other cultural artifacts. Their meanings are connected to various cultural contexts that comprise a larger “thinking system.”

The classical concept of communication has been critiqued by Carey who differentiated between a “ritual” and “transmission” view of communication. The transmission metaphor, he argued, derives from the 19th century notion that communication is moving things through space, whereas ritual places communication in real time within a cultural setting.,/p>

Mechanistic thinking—or a machine model of the mind—leads to what Bateson called an “ecology of bad ideas,” in which techno-scientific progress is viewed as part of a linear path of history, and that whatever the autonomous thinking self can invent is independent of its consequence on the environment. Consider how this has played out in terms of our communications technology. Though there is considerable evidence about the danger concerning electromagnetic pollution from our wireless devices, there is very little discussion or debate for how the use of these gadgets impacts living systems (humans included). I imagine that some reading this are prepared to dismiss this concern as irrelevant to the purpose of media education which is supposed to celebrate the creative uses of media. However, this doesn’t mean we should eschew such a critical and important discussion. After all, if the culture at large won’t engage in this discussion, who will?

There are signs that a new paradigm is emerging. The cultural studies model of the “circuit of culture,” which views media production and consumption as an interrelated circuit of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation, is a step towards a systems approach to media. Why not extend that model to incorporate a green perspective? So if we take the example of the “Story of the Sony Walkman” and green it, perhaps updating it to look at the Blackberry or the iPhone, we’d want to include as part of the inquiry those aspects that directly concern the environment, such as the production and waste cycle of electronics, social justice issues related to resource extraction, the relationship between consumerism and the ideology of growth, and the political economy of globalization. On this last point it will be necessary to challenge the assumption that our communication technologies are necessarily a form of progress. Not all communications approaches are appropriate for all cultural contexts (ditto media literacy). Here I like to draw on Vandana Shiva’s concept of monoculture versus biocultural diversity in which she argues that many cultural attitudes emanating from the global economy are actually provincial and evolved within a specific cultural and historical context that is not applicable to many cultures in the world. Think Avatar.

Additionally, it would be important to look at the phenomenological experience of electronic gadgets and how they impact our perception of time and space. Finally, it would mean a close examination of language and concepts that emerged from the Industrial Revolution, and how they continue to carry over through the metaphors we use to describe communication and cognition today.

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller has begun tackling some of these issues through his discussion of green cultural citizenship. My hope is that as advocates for media education that we don’t relegate sustainability for other educators to tackle. I would like to see media education be green to the core so as to not force yet again another division that makes “sustainable” or “green” approaches mere specialities or subfields. The danger is that if we simply change the object of study without challenging the double bind thinking that has brought us to our ecological crisis, then we will simply be “green washing” our field.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Blewitt, John. 2009. The new media literacy: Communication for sustainability. In The handbook of sustainability literacy : Skills for a changing world., ed. Arran Stibbe, 220. Totnes, UK: Green Books.

Bowers, C. A. 2009. The language of ecological intelligence. Language & Ecology 3 (1): 1-24, http://www.ecoling.net/bowers4.pdf.

Carey, James T. 2009. Communication as culture, revised edition: Essays on media and society (communication as culture)Routledge.

Cox, Robert. 2009. Environmental communication and the public sphere. Second Edition ed.Sage Publications, Inc.

Du Gay, Paul. 1997. Doing cultural studies: The story of the sony walkman. London : Sage, in association with The Open University.

Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for conviviality. Open forum. London: Calder and Boyars.

Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You are not a gadget : A manifesto. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2009. Talking rubbish: Green citizenship, media and the environment. In Climate change and the media (global crises and the media)., eds. Justin Lewis, Tammy Boyce, 17-27. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Orr, David W. 1994. Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Shiva, Vandana, and Third World Network. 1993. Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. London; Penang, Malaysia: Zed Books; Third World Network.

Antonio Lopez is an independent researcher, educator and writer based in Rome. He is the author of Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the Twenty-first Century. You can reach him at http://mediacology.com

Sometimes, as we struggle for resources and for progress in a parsimonious, post banking-debacle economy, with our cross-platform screens filled by conflict and disengagement, it is all too easy to forget that learning has the potential to do so much that might mend a broken world. And the world is really very broken. The World Bank’s data is bleak: more than a billion people unable to read a book or sign their names, great swathes of Africa with literacy rates below 50%, gender parity indices showing girls missing out too often in too many places. Around 50 million children excluded from education because they live in war zones. We see completely collapsed economies in Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In Liberia 75% of the population is under 25 and 75% of them are apparently in gun toting militias. More than half the armed conflicts worldwide use children under 15 as fighters. The data isn’t just bleak, it is relentless. Every day children are hurting.

Traditional educational practice has, perhaps unsurprisingly, made little impact on resolving this hurt. Even in our already developed economies traditional approaches have been characterised by too much disaffection, have too many coasting kids, and have found that a world of managerialism and incrementalism has delivered a disappointing plateau across a range of key variables. If traditional educational practice isn’t working here, it might be a bit ambitious to expect the same model of cells and bells structures, with kill and drill, stand and deliver pedagogies, to work in far more challenging circumstances. Lorry loads of second hand textbooks, or brave charitably funded teachers, or donated chalk boards have not made, cannot make, enough difference, however heroic and welcome those myriad efforts might be. It isn’t that children the world over don’t want to learn. They do, and in many places the indicative graphs are mostly moving in the right directions, but the progress they chart is not urgent enough for the current generation of under ten year olds born and living within the 21st century. Their needs outstrip their opportunities. Every decade of glacial progress, another generation misses out. Eventually, perhaps sooner than expected, their collective patience will be exhausted.

If the old factory model of 20th century learning is not working well enough, we do know that in other sectors new and emerging technologies are capable of demonstrating real alternatives with huge impacts, in particular within new and emerging economies: the Bank Rakyat of Indonesia with its 21 million mobile phone based savers, or the Equity Bank in Kenya with its 3.9 million micro-bankers – one in ten – reinvigorating economies and empowering farmers. The Afridoctor virtual health clinic in Cape Town, offering a “snapdiagnosis” service, where patients can send phone pictures of their ailments to a panel of doctors. Same Language Subtitling (SLS) of Bollywood movies in Gujarat state hugely transforming literacy rates through some form of visual osmosis, and much more elsewhere. ALternative approaches can be remarkably effective.

But what has this to do with Media Education, that bête noire of the new Govian english curriculum? Media Education is uniquely placed to make a contribution far and beyond its humble impact on domestic social processes, on our critical analysis of communication, on our interpretation and analysis of political events, on our scholarship of media. Media Education has the potential to be a disruptive catalyst transporting learning into the 3rd millennium – it could not be more needed that it is now. It has a history steeped in change and has been adept at responding to change. It has narrated and interpreted, embraced and critiqued that substantial change in its short life. It has deconstructed it. It has helped us to see the cues and clues to the next change, even as we make sense of the current ones. We are in a world where substantial change characterises much of our collective experience. There is something about new technology that allows us to exist precariously, Icarus like, flying close too to the margins: deeper oil wells in the ocean, more planes in the air than ever before, tighter margins on banks’ capital. And inevitably at the margins, things go wrong: oil leaks we don’t know how to cap, a volcanic ash cloud shutting down airspace, economic collapse. These unexpected events impact disproportionally on the weakest economically. So, how do we prepare our least prepared for this unstable world? We look to see who has a track record of having coped; media education has coped, and coped well, with the certainty of uncertainty, the constancy of change. We expect to be astonished; that is our life.

Media Education has always been underpinned by evolving technological delivery. The evolution has been chaotic. There has been no equilibrium: the balance of production contribution has swung to include the user; cross media have muddied our definitional waters; we have seen screen sizes shrink to our pockets, grow into iMax, fatten into 3D; we’ve seen markets stutter, shrink, grow exponentially and vanish; seen culture clashes soothed; seen cartels shattered and individuals empowered; seen aggregated social voices raised, amplified and heard. Media Education above all else helps us to be agile in our scholarship; we’ve had to be. It anoints its students with the necessary survival skills for a life in the turbulent creative industries. But it can be so much more than that. If we are to solve the global and local inequality of educational provision within the shrinking resources of a post-crash world our toolkit must necessarily include the ability to make learning fleet of foot, ready for anything, seductive, engaging, agile, full of ingenuity and unashamedly relevant to today’s world. Media Education can be all that.

Furthermore, Media Education has a remarkable track record of engaging the disengaged, mainstreaming the marginalised, accelerating the coasting, embracing the rejected. Our professional lives are filled with powerful anecdotes about access successes. Where the narrow corridors of educational structures and strictures limit, and delimit, what learners might do, or who leaners might be, Media Educators have collectively widened the pathways to success. We bask in the learner journeys we have enabled for our remarkable students. That matters.

Bluntly, Media Education has the opportunity to pioneer and evidence those new approaches to learning that have the potential to mend a broken world. Together, we have the experience to show how to engage the disengaged, give voice to the unheard, empower the disenfranchised, transcend notational literacy. The danger though, is that Media Education eschews this meta-purpose. For many in Media Education the fight has been for simple local survival. Under-represented on education policy bodies, marginalised institutionally, assaulted by the disdain of the very media we research, tech-rich but resource poor, it has been all too tempting to see ourselves in the manner of a pedagogic proletariat, shackled by systems, with little control over our destiny, and aspiring simply to move on up in respectability and esteem. To focus on that parochial fight would be to betray the opportunity presented and to selfishly abandon the millions who might be helped. If Media Education has a manifesto then surely it should be headlined by a wish to push within all our institutions for ambitious change, to overturn moribund models of practice, to challenge ossified pedagogy, to be the engine of change, to apply what we know.

Media Education is one of only a few things that can help mend the world. Because we can, surely we should?

Image http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662358/the-end-of-education-is-the-dawn-of-learning

I live and teach in a small  South Pacific nation (4.2 million) where, with surprising ease, Media Studies has found a valuable and valued place in the national curriculum.  The war is over and the battle has been won but these may be the wrong metaphors to employ as various approaches to media teaching have been in New Zealand schools since the 1970s and we have had more allies than enemies along the way.  We  now we have Media Studies as a specific area of study in  the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA); the portfolio of qualifications most New Zealand students  leave school with.  During their school years, students can opt to do three years of Media Studies (Years 11 to 13), as a blend of theoretical or analytical courses (or Achievement Standards) such as ‘Demonstrate understanding of the relationship between a media product and its audience ‘ (AS 2.1) or ‘Examine the media representation of an aspect of New Zealand culture or society’ (AS 3.3), and production-oriented courses such as ‘Produce a design and plan for a developed media product, using a range of conventions’ (AS 2.5) or ‘Write developed media texts for a specific target audience’ (AS 2.8).  The best students can also go on to do Scholarship in Media Studies,.

Once they leave school, students can go on to a proliferation of tertiary-level media  degrees  or training courses, or take the  analytical and practical skills they have learnt in secondary level Media Studies into other areas of study or employment.  It is quite possible now that all this activity is leading to a significant slice of young New Zealanders becoming media literate and media confident and this is particularly significant  for the general health of a nation which has earned the dubious distinction of having one of the least regulated, overly-commercial broadcasting environments in the world.   It is equally important that such media-literate students play a role in the nation’s life, as it increasingly re-shapes itself as a multi-cultural society but also holds to the moral and legal obligations of the country’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi.

So, New Zealand media teachers their role as multi-faceted: most of them teach media because they  love their subject but also because it allows an engagement with the enthusiasms and prior knowledge of students.  It is education as it should be: teachers come with a specialist knowledge, but match and mingle it with the knowledge students bring to the classroom or the editing suite. Teachers also find that media teaching can motivate and excite the reluctant or difficult  learner, and students learn to work cooperatively, in addition to acquiring the analytical and problem-solving skills so desired in the modern workplace.

But media teaching (Media Studies in particular) also has political implications and, quite rightfully, warrants a Manifesto.   A great deal of analysis critiques the status quo and taken-for-granted (the ‘conventions’) of the media; from issues around media ownership (the concentration of ownership into global corporates),  placing a value on the local in an increasingly globalised economy,  to issues of media representation (such as gender and ethnicity), to issues  around media ethics (privacy issues in social media, for example), to issues around marketing (the targeting of children by fast food advertising).   But media analysis is not  about conspiracy theories nor about consumer helplessness;  it is about understanding processes, revealing structures below the surface, and developing strategies for resistance (if that is needed) and change.

It is this fear of political agenda which prompts the popular press and populist politicians (especially in the UK) to periodically go on the attack against  Media Studies—as David Buckingham and others have noted here.  A common taunt is that it is a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject.  But of course it is; any media teacher worth his/her salt will study Mickey Mouse as a cultural icon, Disney Corporation as a prime example of a global media corporate, the role of Disneyland as a dominant leisure activity, the tie-ins between Disney movies and toy marketing etc etc.

Media teaching in New Zealand is in good health in New Zealand, firmly imbedded in schools and continuing to find support from higher authorities (such as the Ministry of Education and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority). We rely less on the imported models of teaching and content rationales  (such as the British Film Institute framework or the Ontario Association for Media Literacy model), which prevailed in the early days.  New Zealand teachers and academics have developed their own approaches and teaching resources , and a growing self-confidence about the importance of the task.   Burt this is not the say that they don’t continue to share a sense of comradeship  with media teachers in other countries and other circumstances, for increasing student knowledge about the media,  providing them with a language for analysis, giving them with opportunities to create their own media, boosting their optimism and acknowledging their media pleasures and ultimately making the world a better place is an international cause.

Why media education?   Because it is there, at the centre of our lives, and like all important things in our lives, we need to understand it, be fully-informed about its ways and meanings, and have the language to describe what we see and hear.

As David Buckingham suggests, most of us could rehearse these and other reasons in our sleep.  The trick is in finding the perfect balance between over-estimating the power of the media (and thus fall into the practice of protectionism) and under-estimating its power (and aligning ourselves with who argue that media is not a fit topic for education).   Another  objective is finding the right mix between practice and analysis ( or between theory and production, as some put it). I am a mind that you can’t separate the two and although I am drawn to David Gauntlett’s  arguments for DIY, ‘creative’ engagement, my experience also tells me that students don’t get very far unless they have a good knowledge of how things have been done in the past, and how the majority of media is made now.   I am also mindful of the fact that even though students may have technical proficiency, that don’t always have much to say with it, for they lack the life experiences which allow them to move beyond their familiar reference points.

They often need to be given guidance in constructing interesting media products and stories for audiences wider than themselves and their friends.  This implies developing and pitching ideas, rather merely creating stuff.  As Cary Bazalgette suggests, this should begin at the earliest stages of education, when children are often more open to new ideas and inventive ways of seeing the world ; at a point in their lives when, as Albert Einstein  declared,

“Imagination is more important than knowledge’.  Obviously such early intervention will have implications for teacher training but we should put more effort into this area.

Lastly, for the sake of clarity and for an united front when we go out and promote our subject, we need to have a clearer idea about the ways we refer to it.  I prefer to speak of Media Studies, which is a dynamic and ever-growing discipline of research, writing and teaching (and  one which justifies an upper case status).  There is also media education, which implies teaching about media or using media components across a wide range of other subjects, and is also a noble endeavour.  But now we have media literacy, which is favoured in North America but is a concept which lacks a clear, unequivocal definition.  To me it suggests that we are teaching literacy to the illiterate, which  is really the wrong approach. I am all for Henry Jenkins’ call to ‘complicate things’ but let ‘s not make it too complicated.

“It’s a transmitter, a radio for speaking to God….” Belloq, Raiders of the Lost Ark

When we talk about a manifesto for Media Education, it’s tremendously encouraging to me that so many people feel an enthusiasm for the power of media education to change people’s lives. Teachers, lecturers and academics may shy away from that statement , but the Belloq-like enthusiasm with which they talk, write and think about the subject betrays a belief in its Ark-like properties. I’m only being half serious here of course, but stay with me for a moment. When people like Julian Sefton-Green say that Media Education wont change the world, they are of course, in one sense, correct. It  can’t stop wars,  cure disease – and it certainly wont stop bankers being paid more money. But in some senses it can change the world; by changing the life experiences of individual young people, and consequently the world they inhabit. I would want to make the case that the vitality of media education lies in its ability to change students’ experiences of education and the subsequent lives they lead.

For the past four years it has been my privilege to work in a school where I have been given the opportunity and freedom to attempt to use Media Education to address some of the fundamental problems of an economically deprived area. That area – characterised by low levels of social mobility, geographical isolation and high unemployment – saw its High school in quite a negative light. When the school became a Specialist Visual and Media Arts College in 2007 it was given the opportunity to change that image, by putting Media Education at the centre of its work and subsequently, the school at the centre of its community. This was done in two key ways; firstly, by developing a curriculum that harnessed the power of media education wherever it could in order to raise achievement across the school, and secondly by undertaking a number of community initiatives that sat squarely in the media education tradition but looked to develop various community and social groups as well as students.

When talking about what we have done in the school, I always use the metaphor of the hand grenade. In my experience as a teacher and media educator in London across the last 15 years I have come to see media education as the hand grenade that frequently blows open the doors to learning for many students. I have actively encouraged the idea that media education is a way into not only literacy, which is it is, but also numeracy, oracy, citizenry, rationalism, scepticism, politics, reason and religion (amongst other things). The opportunity to start where students are at, which is presented to us frequently in media education, is something that allows us to build a bridge from what they do know into what they don’t know. This has been my experience with even the most disaffected and hard to reach students. However, it has also been my experience that the most able students have grown in their engagement with Literature, History, Art and Science through their study of the Media. I wonder what Michael Gove would think about that?

So what did we do here? Well, we opened up to other people across the school – teachers, students, support staff – the methods that have worked so well for us in Media Education. The use of  still image analysis in Maths, moving image production in PE and History and blogging in Art have all contributed in their own small way to raising attainment across the school. In the last four years the school has improved on all the standard government measures. You might be sitting there thinking “Great. Good for you. But you can’t really prove that it was Media Education that did that” and in some ways you would be right. We haven’t conducted any major research studies into the way individual students have responded to individual techniques. But then I’m not sure we have to. You can see the proof of it when you walk through the door and see more engaged students, excited to go to lessons and talking enthusiastically about their learning.

And what about the local community? We’ve done some great work here, taking our particular view of media education on the road. Photography exhibitions with local disabled groups, video game workshops for the local youth service, animation projects with single fathers and  Primary schools. The list is a long one. We could be accused of spreading ourselves too thin at times, but two things are really evident when we talk to the people of our community about what we do. Firstly, that they are engaged with what we are doing; interested in the ideas and possibilities of media education. Secondly, that they are motivated to go on learning about and through the media. This in turn, motivates us to carry on doing what we are doing and keep spreading the ideas. Now our community is becoming known as a place where media education is alive and kicking throughout our area and even nationally. Our involvement in the “Media Literacy: Towards a Model of Progression” research project has seen us work with a range of media education professionals from other parts of the country. These experiences make us even more convinced that media education is vital for allowing young people to access opportunities that they may be denied through their social and economic situation.
The really important thing is that we are not the only ones who think this. Recently, I was invited to speak at the “Animation4Life”  Conference about a project that we had done that brought together Primary students from  across our area to make a collaborative animated film. I have to admit that  I  was completely unprepared for the people that I met there; Grief counsellors using production work to deal with people’s bereavement; Probation officers using moving image analysis to help young offenders; Occupational Therapists using animation as a means of tackling the long term effects of brain injury. All these people were as convinced as I was as the importance of  media literacy in promoting social inclusion.

I’m not suggesting that Media education is a panacea for societies ills. It isn’t, but it does have a role to play in how we deal with some of the problems that our young people (and others) face on a day to day basis in the way they access education for example. I’m quite prepared to accept that some media educators might not want media education to do this. It’s not what they signed on for, and they might not be in a position to use the tool of media education in the way that I’m suggesting. They might not even consider what I am talking about here as media education. However, all media educators should realise that “this thing they do” is very powerful, and as someone related to the guy in the red and blue suit said “With great power comes great responsibility”.

Harold Adams Innis (1894 – 1952) knew that the university as a culturally beneficial and intellectually necessary environment was not perfect, in fact, far from it. He devoted much of his life to establishing and improving the higher education system of Canada. Among Innis’ many contributions is the clarification that borrowing from the past cultural milieu toward the new must be a rather selective process in order to avoid an over abundance of unneeded cultural baggage which simultaneously leaves a conditional void or a type of intellectual incompleteness. This progressive absence is necessary so that there is always a culturally perceived need for new ideas, and so that there is room for these innovative ideas to enter and flourish. Without this necessary incompleteness, the sense of a need for new ideas and innovation is aborted. Innis came to the conclusion that it is an effect of modern mediated communication, with its ever-increasing attribute of flawless efficiency and quantity of content (the record of cultural baggage), that rather senselessly and somewhat automatically fills this void and, in a sense, renders the incomplete complete, but in an insignificant way. For Innis this was a great crisis for the West, and a sign of its eventual downfall.

Twenty years ago if a person would have made a public statement that the human activity surrounding the act of consumption has ascended to the level of effectively altering the Earth’s atmosphere, they would not have been taken very seriously in most circles, and certainly would have generated a few scoffs in others. However, the American lead culture of mass consumption has done just this. The economic system, over many years, has changed the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, buying has affected the way the Earth functions. We’ve extracted, moved, burned, shipped, and consumed fossil fuels to an alarming degree, raising the percentage of carbon in the atmosphere. For starters, this has a direct effect on the weather around the world. Adding carbon changes the weather, this process alters the ways people see and experience the world around them first hand. The world around the consumer is a system, or a series of systems interlinked. It is in a similar manner that the amount of information that we’ve produced, consumed, processed at increasing rates of bits and bytes per second, that we have effectively altered our sense of reality: the ways in which we see ourselves playing apart in the world around us. Like adding an overabundance of carbon atoms into the atmosphere fundamentally changes that environment, introducing a profusion of information in the form of messages makes cardinal edits to human psychology. In this case the system that our human behavior has altered is not the Earth’s atmosphere, but is the sense of what we refer to as reality. Reality has been changed by the messages of mass media and the information they contain. It is our obligation to live with these messages surrounding us every day.

The human being is engulfed by narrative. In the mass media (i.e. Internet) world, it is arguably true that most of what people discuss and concern themselves with on a daily basis is known from their surrounding narrative. At the very least, there is much more narrative knowledge to sift through with the advent of the various static, mobile, dynamic, syndicated communication technologies, not to mention the force of the active audience.

Everything is information. The good news is that in the current information age people have convenient, fingertip access to continual, global content. The bad news is that in the current information age people have this same convenient, fingertip access to continual, global content. At first the free flow of information seems convenient, empowering, and endlessly beneficial for those world citizens with access to it. Industry takes great pains to bridge the social agency and access digital divides. Companies are continuously inventing and marketing smaller pocket-sized devices with which can communicate instantaneously and in a variety of ways. Contemporary culture spends vast amounts of money every day for more connections, faster networks, and ubiquitous wifi. There is a current industry determined pseudo-narrative in place claiming that all of this informational access can only be a good thing. Upon a closer look, one has to wonder if more content can ever be too much content.

Historically, information production and distribution has always equaled a certain amount of power for those in control of these processes. In the one-to-many relationship of mass media producers control what the inactive viewers see, hear, and read. It has been shown that through the event of broadcast, news outlets have had the power to shape the relative importance a viewer may apply to certain content. This process can even influence which issues are thought to be most serious and most important to the viewing public. This historic imbalance between the agencies of media producers and those of media consumers is changing as a result of the available media communication technology, creating a new type of media consumer: the active viewer. As a result of this influx, as media consumers in the Internet age, populations and the individual are in need of a critical regiment to control and understand what they choose to digest as part of a media diet. Through experience it is known that too much of anything is not a good thing. As with the over-consumption of sugar, fat, cholesterol, and salt for the human body, today, as media consumers, individuals have the responsibility of their media diets and in dealing with the potential for an easy, cheap, convenient diet of fast food, always with an eye of awareness toward information glut.

Further, there is a media outlet available for nearly every point of view that exists.

Certainly with a single Google search, for example, a blog entry or forum post, no matter how well or otherwise written and no matter the language, can be located on just about any topic, including posts that fall on both sides (or any side) of any story. However, how does the information consumer know where to find the facts that the news media are supposed to transparently provide in order that users become and remain informed, knowledgeable citizens? Where is the objectification that the media is supposed to promote in order that viewers and readers make informed decisions on their own or within their local critical social circles? There is any number of bloggers out there, but which one is correct, if any? CNN, the BBC, and Der Spiegel run their content distribution twenty-four hours a day, but is what they are pouring into millions of living rooms, computers, cell phones really important for the average citizen to know? If not all of it, how much of it? Today, in the Internet age, these are the questions that can only be answered by each individual as a living member of planet Earth. Gone are the days of the “good” informed citizen needing only to subscribe and read the local newspaper each morning, and the evening edition at night. In the current information epoch users have many more decisions to make, and the power to make the right ones. With a little thoughtfulness and effort, users can do this to the benefit of themselves and their communities. The bad news is that in the information age there is continual, global information content at the user’s fingertips. The good news is that in the information age there is continual, global content available at the user’s fingertips.

In the contemporary media-rich world, there is now, more than ever, the need for an applicable theoretical and quantitative investigation on these questions which involve the ideas of working academics, writers whose work on the nature of media, power, information, human psychology, and mass movements contribute to an advanced academic foundation in media theory and can help viewers to understand the effects of the prevailing condition of the world today.

The present social, economic, political, and cultural conditions, as they are, certainly are difficult to effectively navigate. In the postmodern, as individuals in a larger community, media consumers can no longer rely on the grand narratives they once could to show them the way. When the nuclear family has broken up, where do young people turn for guidance? When the religions cause wars and endless controversy where do we turn for spiritual guidance? When community leaders, politicians, and industry CEOs spend more time defending themselves from fraudulent charges and prison sentences who can we trust? When a daily avalanche of consumerist messages point viewers toward consumption as the way to happiness from where do people find the strength to resist if they chose to do so? How do they even know that they can?

Sut Jhally very clearly points out that “today’s hyper-consumerism is driven by ever more sophisticated advertising and public relations techniques. The specific product is secondary. What they’re really selling is lifestyle (and) ideology.” It is essential for viewers in these investigations to look at the wide potential for acceptance of the messages of mass media texts. It is equally important to inquire into how, as a culture, users have the potential, consciously or otherwise, to allow these mediated messages to actually, in many ways, become at least part of the significance of the daily existence, and to keep in mind that ultimately it is the individual citizen who needs to remain in control of the information they access, how they react to it, and what they consider to be significant and true. One might warn the audience member to do their best to think critically on every topic they consider and do their best not to be swayed in any way by beautiful actors, big budgets, slick graphics, or political agendas: a task that is much easier said than done to be sure.

These reasons only scratch the surface as to why media education is so important, probably more so today than ever. The constant and pressing messages emphasizing the self, image, and self-image, the rhetoric of politics, and the desires imagined by an economics that fosters created wants all speak to the need for media education. The identity construction of every individual and group counts on it. Media education not only needs to be primary in every educational system, but needs to start at the elementary school level. Most beneficially, media education needs to start at home as soon as any child reaches the age where they are old enough to find interest in their first book or cartoon. This is something that everyone can agree upon. Let us become more aware.

What is media education for? At the school level, we hope that it can help students to deal with the vast array of media messages, services and tools which they encounter every day. It can help them to understand the context in which these things have been developed, who offers them, and why; and can encourage students to use the services and tools in adventurous ways.

At university level, media courses are often oriented towards ‘getting a job in the media’. This is less straightforward than it used to be, compounded by the fact that media employers often say that they don’t necessarily want someone who has ‘only’ studied the media, and would be happier with a specialist in History, English Literature, or Physics – someone who ‘knows something about something’.

Furthermore, ‘the media’ is not so easily identified these days. This can be to our students’ benefit, as media production is no longer simply about a job in TV or newspapers, but might involve being employed by a charity to create online games or videos to raise awareness of an issue, or by a museum to make an engaging, educational app for a mobile phone, or – the list could go on indefinitely – a very wide range of other possibilities.

So we can encourage students to develop their media production skills, and to critically understand the context in which those skills might be deployed; and we should cater, equally, to those who may not be doing hands-on production but might be involved in media development, analysis, or strategy. Personally I’m not necessarily convinced that an undergraduate degree is the ideal container for such activity; studying Sociology, Philosophy, or Economics might be better for you, in terms of stretching your learning, thinking, and understanding of the world. The media skills and analysis you can learn yourself, or perhaps do an MA later. But let’s leave that aside for now, since Media courses not only exist, but are in demand. How can we make them work best for our students?

Here are six suggestions.

1: Hands-on, Do It Yourself learning

I believe that people most often enjoy themselves, make connections, and therefore learn, when they are doing things. This learning can grow with reflection, discussion, and writing, but it begins with the doing. This was confirmed by the research I did for my book Making is Connecting (2011), which shows that through the process of making things, we arrive at understandings which are not just about the apparent ‘subject matter’ of the production, but are about one’s own feelings and reflections. Making things leads to insights into the creative process, and the ways in which created things become situated in the context of the world. Even more importantly, perhaps, making things enables people to make connections with each other, and to feel more engaged in their own learning process.

This means that traditional lectures, seminars, and essays don’t work very well. The teaching events tend to be rather isolated and do not require great amounts of participation; and when we ask for, say, two 3,000 word essays, this tends to drive attention towards two particular topics for two quite brief periods, rather than inviting a sustained engagement with learning every week.

It would be better, I think, if students were expected to regularly create artefacts – such as YouTube videos and blog posts – that they place on a kind of virtual landscape, in response to issues and questions raised in workshops and other learning events, and by each others’ tweets, blogs, videos, and ideas. One ‘view’ of this landscape, for assessment purposes, would consist of their individual works, but the more common ‘view’ would be the collaborative work of each student cohort – a much more rich dialogue than the brief, weekly seminar. By representing learning as an ongoing and evolving process, with regular interaction and collaboration, rather than as an input–output machine which leads to two essay products, we can make learning more rich, engaging, and meaningful.

2: Creativity as the core

Creativity has to be the most important element in every part of a media course or degree. An eye for quality and professionalism is important, too, but not at the expense of ideas, innovation and character. The culture of Web 2.0 prompts a return to the ethos of the Victorian philosopher and critic John Ruskin, who argued that the roughly-made and non-professional things made by everyday people were the most valuable and meaningful elements of our culture, as they embody a kind of celebration of humanity’s imperfections: the very fact that we are not machines.

Ruskin argued that human creativity should be unleashed, and must dare to risk failure and shame, so that the richness of humanity can be properly expressed. Today we have the tools to easily experiment, and to share our haphazard innovations with others. We should push ourselves in the direction of diverse and unusual experimentation, rather than the risk-averse version of ‘professionalism’ which prefers bland competence.

Of course, our students must know how to make things well, but then should want to push harder towards the innovative and unfamiliar. Media Studies courses cannot just show how to make a video, website or article of acceptable quality; rather they should be asking how we can rethink entertainment or information experiences to make them more useful, stimulating, and engaging.

3: Social engagement

These days, many people find that they can make media, without too much trouble or expense, and do it just because they can. Learning in Media Studies therefore needs to stretch students well above this baseline, so that they can produce work which has greater quality, thoughtfulness and style, and in particular that is meaningful. Work that has a point. If a media course is to ‘add value’ to the learning and experience of students, it must include a social and ethical dimension.

Students should be encouraged to think about the meanings of everything that they do. We must ask: What do we want to do in the world? What kind of things would we like to stimulate? What unintended consequences might there be?

A focus on the meaningful and sociological side of Media Studies also means that we are required to discourage the self-indulgent and pointless textual analysis which was once central to the average Media Studies textbook. Occasionally some commentators do manage to make interesting observations about the composition or meaning of a particular culturally significant text. But requiring our students to make pretentious statements about trivial aspects of unimportant bits of media content was always a silly idea, and bound to draw sharp and reasonable attacks from critics of the discipline. The defence that this activity is parallel to what they do in literature studies was correct, but it’s often a waste of time there too. Our students should at least have the ambition to be on the front line of creative activity – not following along behind, making comments to an audience of no one.

4: Critical but intelligent

Students should be encouraged to be intelligently critical, which means that they should be judicious: sharply critical, where relevant, but also able to see the positive or appealing side of things, where relevant. The academic fashion for believing that the ‘correct’ diagnosis of any phenomenon is the most disapproving one does not help anybody: being intelligently critical is more-or-less the opposite of being automatically miserable.

In order to be intelligently critical, it is not necessarily the case that students need to be able to do an impersonation of the jargon-laden and usually rather banal tools of Cultural Studies. To be in a position to make genuinely insightful critiques, students need to gain a good understanding of how things work: partly from having the experience of making and sharing media themselves, and partly from learning – through their own research – about how companies like Google, Facebook and the BBC operate. How are these organisations funded, and how does this affect what they do? What are their aims, and why, for example, do they do some things which lose money? How do they really see the people who use their products – as individuals or a mass, as advertising sales or potential subscribers, as consumers or participants? And what difference does this make?

5: The return of ideas

Media courses today have often de-emphasised ‘theory’, and even renamed those former areas of the course as ‘analysis’ or ‘contextual studies’, to indicate this shift. This is typically a response to the excesses of Cultural Studies-type theory of the 1980s and 1990s, as indicated above, which tended to have little connection with the experiences of actual media users or producers.

Meanwhile, however, ideas about media and communication are on the public agenda like never before. Online connectivity and social media has led to a significant surge of interest in what we can do with media, now that electronic media is suddenly something that lots of people can do something with. This can be seen in several best-selling books – those by Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater, for instance – as well as conversations that can be seen every day on Twitter.

The best discussions of the implications of new technologies and new kinds of media occur, for obvious reasons, when participants really know what they are talking about. This reinforces the previous point: sharp conceptual insights need to be built on a concrete understanding of how things work. That’s why, for example, Jaron Lanier’s critique of Web 2.0 in You Are Not a Gadget (2010) is so provocative – whether you agree with him or not – because he is one of the internet pioneers, with a thorough understanding of how technology works and what it can do, allied with a philosopher’s eye for substantial concepts about identity and personhood.

By encouraging our students to engage with ideas – about human creativity, individuality and community – as well as a keen critical perspective and a thorough understanding of how things work in media technologies and industries, we can truly equip them for thinking intelligently about the present and the future.

6: Tools for thinking and making

Ultimately, Media Studies should encourage creative thinking and creative making. It is at its best when it is about encouraging people to think (and, correspondingly, at its worst when it tries to tell people what to think).

Media Studies should give people the tools – or help them to invent the tools – which will foster creative exchange between individuals and groups. The ability to express ourselves, and to make our mark on the world, is crucial to a healthy society. Our students, then, need to be able to do this for themselves, but it should not be exclusive to them: they must also be able to foster this in others.

As Ivan Illich wrote in Tools for Conviviality (1973), ‘People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others’.  As electronic media moves well beyond the consumer ‘have what you’re given’ model of the twentieth century, towards a much healthier ecosystem where media-making is just as much a part of everyday life as media-receiving, Media Studies has to be about understanding the tools, using the tools, and making new tools, for meaningful personal and community purposes.

Some Reading

Baym, Nancy K. (2010), Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Cambridge: Polity.

Burgess, Jean, & Green, Joshua (2009), YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Cambridge: Polity.

Gauntlett, David (2011), Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, Cambridge: Polity.

Illich, Ivan (1973), Tools for Conviviality, London: Calder & Boyars.

Lanier, Jaron (2010), You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, London: Allen Lane.

Leadbeater, Charles (2008), We Think: Mass Innovation not Mass Production, London: Profile Books.

Shirky, Clay (2008), Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations, London: Allen Lane.

Shirky, Clay (2010), Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, London: Allen Lane.

http://www.makingisconnecting.org/

As media educators, we have spent so long campaigning for our field that most of us could probably rehearse the basic rationale in our sleep. Why should we be teaching young people about the media? Well, most of us would probably begin with assertions about the statistical significance of the media in children’s lives. Back in 1980, Len Masterman pointed out that children were spending more time watching television than they were spending in school – and in fact that claim was probably true twenty years earlier. Surveys repeatedly show that, in most industrialised countries, children now spend significantly more time engaging with the media than on any other activity apart from sleeping. This in itself might appear to suffice, at least if we believe that schooling ought to be relevant to children’s lives outside school.

However, we might want to go on to make some broader claims about the economic, social and cultural importance of the media in modern societies. The media are major industries, generating profit and employment; they provide us with most of our information about the political process; and they offer us ideas, images and representations (both factual and fictional) that inevitably inform and shape our view of reality. The media are the major contemporary means of cultural expression and communication: to become an active participant in public life necessarily involves making use of the modern media. The media, it is argued, have now taken the place of the family, the church and the school as the major socialising influence in contemporary society.

Of course, there are some problems with these kinds of claims. There is a danger here of implying that the media are all-powerful, or that they necessarily promote a singular and consistent view of the world. The notion that the media ‘socialise’ or ‘influence’ children can easily slide over into a view of children as passive recipients of media effects – and the idea that it is the responsibility of educators somehow to resist those effects. Researchers – and indeed many media teachers – have spent considerable effort over the years in challenging such simplistic accounts of media influence.

Yet we can suggest that the media are a centrally important fact of modern life without implying that people are somehow inevitably enslaved or ideologically mesmerised by them. The media are now ubiquitous and unavoidable. They are embedded in the textures and routines of everyday life, and they provide many of the ‘symbolic resources’ we use to conduct and interpret our relationships and to define our identities. As Roger Silverstone has argued, the media are now ‘at the core of experience, at the heart of our capacity or incapacity to make sense of the world in which we live’. And, as he suggests, it is for this reason that we should study them.

From my perspective, all these arguments are truisms. They seem so self-evident that they run the risk of banality. However, we should beware of taking them for granted – particularly at a point where public attacks on the teaching of Media Studies in schools are enjoying one of their periodic resurgences. Our current education minister is well-known for his opposition to so-called ‘soft’ subjects, and for his enthusiasm for the prehistoric educational philosophy of Matthew Arnold. Once again, Media Studies seems to have become a shorthand for the ‘dumbing down’ that is apparently afflicting our education system. It is, hilariously, a Mickey Mouse subject – and yet it is also condemned for being insufficiently vocational. Of course, we can challenge these arguments on the grounds of their inaccuracy and inconsistency, and the narrow-minded prejudices on which they based. But we also need to have more positive arguments as well.

However, arguments in favour of media education tend to be framed within the public debate in quite limited ways. If people can see a purpose for media education, they often conceive of it in fundamentally protectionist terms. Indeed, there is a long history of such protectionism, in which educators have been urged to confront the harmful and damaging nature of children’s relationships with media. In the UK, this concern has historically tended to focus on the media’s apparent lack of cultural value, as compared with the ‘classics’ of great art or literature, and (more recently) on the false attitudes or ideologies they are seen to promote. In the United States, by contrast, media education is often seen as a means of counteracting particular moral values or forms of undesirable behaviour – typically relating to drugs, sex and violence, and most recently obesity. Teach children to be critical of media representations of these things, and (so the argument goes) they will be free of them.

These kinds of arguments have resurfaced recently in the context of debates about internet safety, and the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. Indeed, it’s notable that the high-level official endorsement of media education (or rather ‘media literacy’) in the UK in recent years has come not from educational policy-makers, but from Ofcom, the media regulator. Ofcom’s own position is not protectionist, but the ways in which the argument for media literacy is framed within the public debate – and the functions it serves – certainly tend to present it as a matter of people learning to protect themselves from ‘harmful’ content.

In response to these arguments, we do still need to defend media education from its ignorant and misguided critics. Media literacy education is no more about protecting children from harmful media than literacy education is about protecting them from harmful books. It is not a covert means of censorship, or a form of behaviour modification. It does not seek to teach children what is wrong with popular culture, or to lead them on to ‘better things’. It does not seek to neutralise the pleasures of popular culture through rationalistic analysis. Nor indeed is it an excuse for under-achieving kids to sit about watching telly or mucking about with computers.

Yet in addition to rejecting the negatives, we also need to assert the positives – and in ways that go beyond the bland truisms with which I began. Personally, I find this hard – and for this reason I am probably one of the world’s worst manifesto writers. I have always felt that media education suffers from an excess of grandiose rhetoric. We have all heard far too many assertions about how media education can change the world, save democracy or empower the powerless. As a classroom teacher, I was always painfully aware of the gap between this sort of rhetoric and the messy realities of my own practice (and I don’t think that was just about being a useless teacher). While it can be morale-boosting in the short term, this overblown rhetoric does not serve teachers very well: we need to cast a more dispassionate eye on what really happens in the classroom, however awkward or even painful that might feel.

In my view, we can make the case much more effectively by showing in concrete ways what and how children can learn about media. Most of the critics of media education do not have even the faintest idea of what it actually looks like in practice. Media education can be intellectually challenging; it can involve intense and rigorous forms of creativity; and it can engage learners in ways that many other school subjects do not. Even experienced teachers can be positively surprised by the quality and sophistication of students’ thinking as they engage in media education activities – and by the forms of oral and written work that result from it. Like any other school subject, media education can also be undemanding and boring, and it can result in pointless ‘busywork’. I am not calling here for rose-tinted accounts of ‘good practice’, of the kind that most teachers tend to find somewhat implausible. Rather, we need to come up with evidence that media education actually works – that it can engage, challenge and motivate young people, as well as enabling them to understand and to participate more fully in the media culture that surrounds them.

We are living at a time of significant cultural change. In many Western countries, the shift towards a ‘post-industrial’ consumer society has destabilised existing patterns of employment, settlement and social life. Established social institutions, the rules of conduct of civil society and traditional conceptions of citizenship are increasingly being called into question. The relations between the global and the local are being profoundly reconfigured; and the majority of young people today are growing up in increasingly heterogeneous, multicultural societies, in which very different conceptions of morality and very different cultural traditions exist side-by-side. However one interprets these phenomena, there is little doubt about the central role of the media – and of consumer culture more broadly – in the continuing transformation of modern societies. The proliferation of media technologies, the commercialisation and globalisation of media markets, the fragmentation of mass audiences and the rise of ‘interactivity’ are all fundamentally changing young people’s everyday social experiences. In this context, it is hard to imagine a more imperative issue for education to address.

www.childrenyouthandmedia.org

The media studies that I like have some or all of the following features, and they share these features with most of the contemporary writing I like.

A sensitivity to change and an interest in it, but a refusal to parade one’s immer- sion in the new in order to grab the attention of publishers, grant givers, and the lower echelons of political power.

A deep skepticism toward moralizing, but a clear desire to forefront and explain the normative positions on which they are grounded, in the interests of transparency and dialogue.

An underlying sense of shock and awe at the political defeats of the past thirty years.

An awareness that simplistic invocations of terms such as neoliberalism will be insufficient to explain those political defeats and that neoliberalism is a necessary component of any historical understanding of them.

A willingness to try and do something to reverse those defeats, without making it sound as though everyone else is just sitting on their arses (U.S.:asses) doing nothing.

A deep sense of the value of beauty and truth in art,journalism,and symbol making.

Elegant writing—or at least well-constructed sentences.

An internationalist understanding of the importance of nation.

A tussle with the remarkable legacy of poststructuralism.

A respect for science and analytical philosophy,and a total unwillingness to make sweeping statements about the effects of Enlightenment or about Cartesian dualism.

The odd joke or witty comment here and there.

An awareness of the injuries of class, and an amazement at how hidden these sometimes injuries seem to be, when they should be so clearly apparent to anyone with eyes and ears.

Analysis that combines the social with the subjective, the public with the private, the political with the affective.

A teacherly sense that what we take for granted needs most clearly explaining, even at the risk of seeming simplistic to those who equate opacity with depth.

A knowledge that the media are a key feature of modern life but not the whole show.

A pleasure in abstraction, but an ability to keep it under control.

A nerdish interest in historical detail, but a sense of overarching narrative or argument.

A secularist understanding of why religion is so important to people.

Outrage at the state of democracy, but also some sadness too.

A bit of anger and passion, but directed appropriately.

A liking for Foucault and Deleuze, and a suspicion of Foucauldians and Deleuzians.

A vivid that marketization and bad populism are enemies of beauty and of truth and of critical academic work.

A very limited number of references to the author’s own previous work.

A willingness to believe that there is something called capitalism and that addressing economic factors is not in itself an act of economic reductionism.

Proper proofreading.

A sense of the importance of public policy and yet also a sense that it usually isn’t as important as some policy makers believe.

A view that serious discussion of methods is not a positivistic fetish but a necessary basis for the craft of enquiry.

Evidence of a love of books and of a life beyond them.

A fascination with empirical material based on how strange and sometimes disturbing the media can be.

A determination not to make accusations of ethnocentrism without a really good basis—precisely because it’s such an important accusation to make.

A strong sense of humans as social and embodied creatures, without ever using the phrase “the body.”

A repulsion against violence, even that of the relatively powerless.

Statistics that actually prove something.

A respect for labor, but a knowledge that some labor serves humans badly.

A good bibliography (available here).

This piece originally appeared as a short article in Television and New Media vol. 10, no. 1, 2009 in response to a call by the journal’s editor at the time, Toby Miller, to 50 media studies academics to write a short article on ‘My media studies’. To my surprise, several people contacted me asking for the ‘good bibliography’ referred to, and the list is what I came up with in response.

If media education is worth having, then everyone should have it. That’s my starting-point for advocacy, and I admit it’s an ambitious one.

To start considering media education as a general entitlement for every learner, from their earliest days of schooling, changes everything. The starting-point cannot possibly be the formal curricular content of the 14-19 sector or the disciplinary boundaries of higher education. We have to take into account what very young children might be capable of understanding, and what might be politically feasible, when our ambition is to ensure that every primary school can offer media education, and that a huge sector of the teaching profession could be trained to provide it.

Faced with such demands, a common response from specialist media teachers is that such an enterprise would have to be all about dilution and compromise: the key concepts of media education would have to be “made easier” and the classroom strategies of the A Level teacher would have to be “watered down”.  It would be assumed that entrants to “proper” media courses would have to be tediously re-educated to rid them of the half-baked notions they’d acquired in their primary and lower secondary years. Such is the sad state of our divided and embattled profession.

So the “general entitlement” project is even bigger than I have suggested so far. It has to encompass new thinking about pedagogy and professionalism, about disciplinary and age cohort boundaries, about career paths and the comparative value of different kinds of knowledge. In sort, it can only succeed if we are all ready to conceive of all education – not just media education – as centred on the learner’s needs, capabilities and aspirations.

Ever the optimist, I’m prepared to believe that we may now be at the kind of historical conjuncture that could allow and indeed encourage such thinking. We’re far enough away now from the 70s not to assume that any switch away from a top-down, target-driven educational bureaucracy must involve a return to the “anything goes” culture, which may have produced some brilliant work but it also allowed appalling abuses to flourish. We have enough respect now (I hope) for high-quality classroom research that gives us insights, many unexpected, on teaching and learning. And increasing numbers of people now recognise that the authoritarian policies of the last 20 years have not got us to where they were supposed to get us. Despite being in the most frequently tested pupil population in Europe, many UK children and young people are still failing; many of those who do not fail still perceive their education to have been irrelevant to life in the real world; and employers still complain that school-leavers don’t have the imagination, flexibility and enthusiasm that they’re looking for.

So this could be a good time to be making a manifesto for media education, but only if it avoids chewing over the debates of the last thirty years and arriving at a compromise so vague and generalised that nobody could disagree with it. If we want a manifesto for media education then it has to chime with the most progressive current thinking in education as a whole and to foster alliances with others thinking along the same lines. With a resurgence of fundamentalist (we might also say “simplistic”) views in the religious, political and scientific fields, we have an important basis for a common cause with other educators.

In trying to resolve the differences over what media education is really about and what it is for, two understandable impulses threaten to overturn the project from the outset. Firstly, there’s the apparent need to “brand” what is still – unfortunately – perceived as a new subject. Is it all about challenging the high culture-popular culture divide? Is it all about protecting young people from, or arming them against, the media’s endemic violence, sexuality, moral turpitude, cultural superficiality or ideological conspiracies? Is it more about vocational training to encourage talent and sustain our creative industries? Or is it now just all about getting on top of the new digital technologies and learning how to use them effectively? My response here is to ask: why shouldn’t media education do all of these? Good teaching in any subject should enable these outcomes to emerge, but on their own they would not suffice to define any subject. We need to come up with something a bit more substantial if we want to define the purposes of an educational provision that everyone would be entitled to.

Secondly, there’s the impulse to stake out the curricular ground, to make sure that all the “key concepts” are addressed and the relevant theoretical underpinnings are in place. I’m sympathetic to this impulse, but approaching  it as though we were writing a syllabus or colonising a territory ends up with a manifesto that no policy-maker, primary school teacher or parent is ever going to read, let alone understand. The answer to this is not, as is often assumed, to abandon theory, but to consider theory more rigorously: to “boil it down” until we can get back to the tough questions that form its irreducible core. We will then find that most if not all of these questions are already being asked, in some form, by children as soon as they can talk – which probably means that they have been thinking about them before they could talk.

To take one example: we all know that the questions “is this true?” or “is this real?” can lead us into all sorts of philosophical mazes and traps. But this is not a reason for not asking them, or for dismissing them as “too simple”. Indeed, at one level or another we all spend a good deal of our thinking and discussion time in figuring out whether things are true or not, or often, more interestingly, assessing how true – or how real – they are. The pre-verbal toddler, recognising a face in a photograph and looking from the person to the photographic image and back again, is not wondering whether the photo is the same as the person.  But she is comparing the two, and considering the similarities and differences. Like all of us, she is intrigued by the phenomenon of representation – perhaps the most important concept in media education.

And yet “representation” as a concept is not a teaching requirement in primary schools. Instead, teachers are burdened with the injunction to ensure that children learn to make the distinction between fact and fantasy. Dickens famously pilloried this injunction in Hard Times, but it’s still widely accepted as one of life’s moral certainties: if we can’t tell the difference between fact and fantasy, then dreadful consequences will ensue. Admittedly, in the case of, for example, Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, this proved unfortunately true: but that is hardly an argument for quashing the theoretical reflections of four-year-olds. If all children were asked to explore the interesting and subtly inflected ways in which we can make judgements about how real or true texts are meant to be, and to return to these explorations regularly through their schooldays, media teaching for 14 or 16 year olds might be a lot more interesting and challenging, and future “dodgy dossiers” might not have such an easy ride. And those who are campaigning for philosophy teaching in the primary school would be our enthusiastic collaborators.

One of the findings that is starting to emerge from recent research on learning progression in media education, is that children are capable of addressing some of the key theoretical questions in media education at much earlier ages than had previously been assumed. Representation, narrative, authorship and audience are all concepts that very young children can start to explore when they are given the opportunity to do so through serious engagement with the types of text they already know: visual images, films and games. The implications are exciting – or alarming, if you are in charge of training budgets or PR at the Department of Education. If children have learned to understand complex media texts by the age of six, surely we owe it to them to take that learning further? And are we unfairly “failing” some children because we don’t recognise or develop their talents with non-print media?

These questions also have profound implications for those who may be seeking to produce a manifesto for media education based largely on what is already taught to young people of 14 and older. While I agree that there’s plenty of room for change in how specialist media courses for the 14+ sectors are conceptualised and examined, these would be forced to change if children were getting high quality media education throughout their primary years. But that’s not the only thing that would look different. By undertaking media education from Early Years/Foundation Stage onwards, we would be acknowledging that our textual environment has changed, and that as a consequence, our definition of what it now means to be literate must also change.

This is why I would have limited enthusiasm for a campaign aimed merely at establishing the importance of media education, if it were to compete with other progressive campaigns. Lack of attention to media education is a symptom of a much larger malaise in our education system: its failure to take account of children’s and young people’s lives as they are lived now, and may be in the future. Media education won’t save the world, as Julian Sefton-Green said (to the great irritation of many of our comrades) at the 2004 Media Education in Europe Conference. But a radically reformed education system just might.

http://themea.org/

Manifestos are not what they used to be. In the UK context, it has become a pedestrian discursive exercise to explain away pledges on which elections are campaigned in terms of ‘what we know now’. Nevertheless, this project calls for us be explicit about the purpose of media education.  Along with the arrival of the Media Education Research Journal, it’s timely. But it’s hard to respond to such well-intentioned pragmatics without being awkward.

When the first edition of ‘The Media Teacher’s Book’ (McDougall and Potamitis, 2010) was published, the question of politics came up several times – the denial of any teacher-driven political project for Media education was seen as a ‘disavowal’.  The book’s thesis was that our  ‘subject’ is always political in the sense that we are always-already concerned with discourse and ‘claims to truth’ competing with one another in our engagement with media but that the central distinction between the potentially radical ‘spirit’ of media education  compared to it’s more conservative cousin – English – is lost if we allow ourselves the luxury of transmitting any authoritative sense of value to students. If media education  stops bearing witness to the conditions of its own possibility, then any ‘progressive’ energy is undermined by conservative institutional practices. Then came web 2.0 (and maybe Media 2.0 – but that’s another argument) and a lot has changed. It’s apparent that a ‘new politics’ for media education have come more sharply into focus.

Straightforwardly, we can observe that research-based thinking has moved on from viewing new digital media as entertainment and new digital learning as separate things. A group of academics are suggesting that new digital media present us with new ways of learning (rather than just new contexts for learning or new kinds of access to learning) and that these claims raise important psychological and philosophical issues that we can relate to existing and accepted theories of learning from these two disciplines. And one implication of these claims is that the educational institution, as currently configured, is threatened in the near future. This is not simply due to economic imperatives (why have buildings and teachers when you can provide education online in peoples’ homes) but more importantly because it is suggested that the physical structure and temporal configuration of the institution will no longer be able to provide learning for a generation of people who are ‘digital natives’, not simply because of what they prefer (eg screens rather than books) but more fundamentally because of how they think.

For media education specifically, we can map out a genealogy of sorts, in three phases. From the ‘relevance boom’ of the 1980s – during which time eager Media students (like me) found their excitement at getting access to (very big) cameras and edit suites met with a compulsion to challenge the ‘dominant ideology’ – which itself became, of course, a grand narrative – to the variably defined era of ‘creativity’ (with its attendant economic and skills modality) to the contemporary landscape of ‘media literacy’ it’s clear that the navel gazing of practitioners (me included, for sure) and policy-makers has been largely ignored by (usually) young people who have merrily got on with the job of making interesting stuff and relating it (“critically”, we have hoped)  to concepts of one kind or another. We’ve moved away from emancipation of one kind (through critical reading of the big bad media – a liberal / humanities conceit) to another, equally patronising version (digital creativity for employment in a non-sector in which (such as it can be pinned down) the qualifications we provide afford those who hold them with little, if any capital.

So its paramount that we identify our purpose without recourse to these ideal versions of our subject identity.  To do this, we need to transfer the ‘hurt’ of which the creators of this manifesto speak, from the students to the teachers. We need to ‘hurt ourselves today, to see if we still feel’ by taking “the media” out of media education. To this end, In After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21^st Century (Bennett, Kendall and McDougall, 2011), we argue that Media education has been a distortion, that the ‘project’ of making popular culture a legitimate object of study has started from the wrong place, and that the problem has been our belief in the idea of ‘the media’ and its separation from ourselves, just as the category of literature imposes an alienating model of reading. As an alternative, we develop the idea of a ‘pedagogy of the inexpert’ to take the place of the horizontal discourse imposed by the conceptual framework (genre, narrative, representation, audience, ideology), still hanging together by a thread.

The history of the present of media education is the genealogy of a discourse – the idea of ‘the media’ as an object that qualifies for an educational response. The departure of cultural studies from its starting point is bound up with the notion of ‘the media’ and the uneasy relationship between popular culture as a category, understandable only in its insulation from art, literature, theatre and classical music, which were already ‘catered for’ in the curriculum, and ‘the media’ as an idea. What is different about media education is that it has never been coherently defined by practices or any vertical discourse of such, so the identity of a media student set against an artist or actor has been much less clearly defined – for teachers, students and the public. At the same time, the consensus in popular discourse that ‘the media’ are powerful, and as such it is worth educating people to protect them from the media (through critical thinking) and prepare them for employment in the sector, has been used in confusion, with advocates of the subject oscillating between these two positions in the quest for legitimation.

Furthermore, the contemporary media teacher is charged with a paradoxical task – teaching about “the media” after it has ceased to be a meaningful idea.  Whilst orthodox power structures still hold, the majority of media exchange is shot through with / by the “audience”. The binary opposition that has held firm, at least in the minds of Media teachers, for decades – that there is a ‘mass media’ that students can look at and that students are part of ‘the audience’, is really problematic now. The notion of a text – with boundaries around it – that we can ‘deconstruct’ is also straining to hold against the tidal wave of multimodal, fluid and ‘hyperdiegetic’ (Hills, 2010) cultural exchange. ‘Texts’ only exist when the ‘audience’ engage with them. And here is the crucial point – that is nothing new. But we haven’t seen it so clearly until broadband internet made it more visible –as interpretation and engagement is semantically archived in every keystroke. So thinking about teaching Media ‘after the media’ doesn’t take its premise from an idea of a temporal change – that was then, this is now – but instead it borrows from the postmodern (Lyotard, 1992) – thinking differently about culture, trying to avoid recourse to the reductive idea of ‘the media’, thinking more seriously about what people do with (and in) culture.

We need to explore the idea of practising democracy in another way. The binaries between ‘Big Ideology’ (Zizek, 1999) and freedom have been appropriated fully by subject media which, unlike English, does not in itself have to be part of the reproductive technology. The media student sits in between the idea of ‘the media’ and the project of her liberal educator with only marginal space with which to be fully participative in culture. Suspending the political project is essential. Pedagogy of the inexpert, in which students are given voice to be textual agents on their own terms, will surely lead to a more political praxis in the fullness of time? Caught between the protectionist and innoculatory constraints of the academic modality with its latest incarnation in ‘media literacy’ and the performativity of the vocational modality, the student in subject media is trapped in the traverse between the regulatory principles of education and ‘audience’ – subjects and objects, a traverse between two constructions in which she cannot live at the same time.

‘We mean ‘after the media’ as an ethics. Our objective is to begin the project of thinking through pedagogy for cultural analysis, and indeed for Media education  (renamed or not) ‘after the media’. For example, in rethinking the subject to pay attention to cultural events, as opposed to texts, we will tentatively imagine some different concepts. We may or may not have a need for genre and representation but we will dispense with ‘audience’.  Identity becomes central along with power and with  reading (formerly described as narrative). We replace the ‘text’ with the ‘event’, and consider students as agents. And we deal with discourse, frivolity, exchange and para-diegetic activity – hitherto part of the language of ‘fan studies’ (see Hills, 2002 and Jenkins, 2006) – at the heart of media education. Students, in this context, are required to oscillate between ‘peripheral and full participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) but the apprenticeship they serve is not craft or skill determined. Rather they are apprentices in theorising their culture. Media education is here to facilitate ‘mastery’ in a meta-language which gives voice to reflexive negotiation of identity – a kind of ‘culture literacy’.

References

Bennett, P, Kendall, A and McDougall, J, 2011. After the Media; Culture and Identity in the 21^st Century. London: Routledge.

Hills, M. (2002) Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.

Hills, M. (2010) Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who for the Twenty-First Century. London: I. B. Taurus.

Jenkins, J, 2006. Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York; New York University Press.

Lave, J and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lyotard, J. (1992) The Postmodern Explained to Children. London: Turnaround Books.

McDougall, J and Potamitis, N, 2010. The Media Teacher’s Book. London: Hodder.

Zizek, S. (1999) ’The spectre of ideology’, in E. Wright and E. Wright (eds), The Zizek Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.