Media Education

Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture

David Buckingham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745628301, 9780745628295
• eBook ISBN: 9780745659411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines recent changes in media education and in young people's lives, and provides an accessible set of principles on which the media curriculum should be based, with a clear rationale for pedagogic practice.

• David Buckingham is one of the leading international experts in the field - he has more than twenty years' experience in media education as a teacher and researcher.
• This book takes account of recent changes both in the media and in young people's lives, and provides an accessible and cogent set of principles on which the media curriculum should be based.
• Introduces the aims and methods of media education or 'media literacy'.
• Includes descriptions of teaching strategies and summaries of relevant research on classroom practice.
• Covers issues relating to contemporary social, political and technological developments.

Part I

Rationales

Why should we teach and study the media? Part I explores the changing arguments for media education, and the assumptions on which they are based. Chapter 1 considers the history of the field, and its fundamental aims and principles. Chapter 2 looks at children’s changing media environment, and its implications for media educators. Chapter 3 addresses the notion of ‘media literacy’ and its uses and limitations in media teaching. Taken together, these three chapters set out to provide a comprehensive, contemporary rationale for media education.

1

Why Teach the Media?

What are media?

My dictionary defines a ‘medium’ as ‘an intervening means, instrument or agency’: it is a substance or a channel through which effects or information can be carried or transmitted. A medium is something we use when we want to communicate with people indirectly, rather than in person or by face-to-face contact. This dictionary definition tells us something fundamental about the media, which forms the basis of the media education curriculum. The media do not offer a transparent window on the world. They provide channels through which representations and images of the world can be communicated indirectly. The media intervene: they provide us with selective versions of the world, rather than direct access to it.

As I will use it in this book, the term ‘media’ includes the whole range of modern communications media: television, the cinema, video, radio, photography, advertising, newspapers and magazines, recorded music, computer games and the internet. Media texts are the programmes, films, images, web sites (and so on) that are carried by these different forms of communication. Many of these are often called ‘mass’ media, which implies that they reach large audiences; although of course some media are intended to reach only quite small or specialized audiences. And there is no reason why more traditional forms such as books cannot also be seen as ‘media’, since they too provide us with mediated versions or representations of the world.

In principle, the questions and approaches outlined in this book can be applied to the whole range of media – from big-budget blockbuster movies to the snapshot photographs that people take in their daily lives; and from the latest pop video or computer game to the best-known ‘classic’ films or literature. All these media are equally worthy of study, and there is no logical reason why they should be considered separately. The claim that we should study ‘literature’ in isolation from other kinds of printed texts, or films in isolation from other kinds of moving image media, clearly reflects broader social judgements about the value of these different forms – and while these judgements may be institutionalized within the curriculum, they are nevertheless increasingly questionable.

What is media education?

Media texts often combine several ‘languages’ or forms of communication – visual images (still or moving), audio (sound, music or speech) and written language. Media education therefore aims to develop a broad-based competence, not just in relation to print, but also in these other symbolic systems of images and sounds. This competence is frequently described as a form of literacy; and it is argued that, in the modern world, ‘media literacy’ is just as important for young people as the more traditional literacy of print.

Media education, then, is the process of teaching and learning about media; media literacy is the outcome – the knowledge and skills learners acquire. As I shall argue in more detail in chapter 3, media literacy necessarily involves ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ media. Media education therefore aims to develop both critical understanding and active participation. It enables young people to interpret and make informed judgements as consumers of media; but it also enables them to become producers of media in their own right. Media education is about developing young people’s critical and creative abilities.

Media education, therefore, is concerned with teaching and learning about the media. This should not be confused with teaching through or with the media – for example, the use of television or computers as means of teaching science or history. Of course, these educational media also provide versions or representations of the world; and, for that reason, media educators have often sought to challenge the instrumental use of media as ‘teaching aids’. This emphasis is particularly important in relation to the contemporary enthusiasm for new technologies in education, where media are frequently seen as neutral means of delivering ‘information’. Yet while it can have a fruitful critical dialogue with these areas, media education should not be confused with educational technology or with educational media.

Why media education?

Why should we be teaching young people about the media? Most rationales for media education tend to begin by documenting the statistical significance of the media in contemporary children’s lives. Surveys repeatedly show that, in most industrialized countries, children now spend more time watching television than they do in school, or indeed on any other activity apart from sleeping (e.g. Livingstone and Bovill, 2001; Rideout et al., 1999). If we add to this the time they devote to films, magazines, computer games and popular music, it is clear that the media constitute by far their most significant leisure-time pursuit.

These points often lead on to broader assertions 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 shape our view of reality. The media are undoubtedly 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 often argued, have now taken the place of the family, the church and the school as the major socializing influence in contemporary society.

Of course, this is not to imply that the media are all-powerful, or that they necessarily promote a singular and consistent view of the world. Yet it is to suggest that they are now ubiquitous and unavoidable. The media 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 (1999) 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.

In these terms, therefore, the argument for media education is essentially an argument for making the curriculum relevant to children’s lives outside school, and to the wider society. In practice, however, many rationales for media education adopt a much less neutral approach. Media education is typically regarded as a solution to a problem; and children’s relationship with the media is seen, not so much as a fact of modern life, but as a harmful and damaging phenomenon that educators must seek to confront. As we shall see, the reasons why that relationship is seen to represent a problem – and hence the nature of the solutions which are offered – are quite variable. For some, the central concern is about the media’s apparent lack of cultural value, as compared with the ‘classics’ of great art or literature; while for others, the problem is to do with the undesirable attitudes or forms of behaviour which they are seen to promote.

Like any other field of education, then, media education has been characterized by an ongoing debate about its fundamental aims and methods. Few teachers are initially trained in media education; and they therefore tend to approach it from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, and with diverse motivations. One way of tracing these different rationales and motivations is through a historical perspective. In the following sections, I will offer a brief account of the historical evolution of approaches to media education, specifically in the UK, although the broad lines of this development have been replicated elsewhere.

The evolution of media education in the UK

Recovering the history of educational change is not an easy undertaking. While it is possible to rely on published sources – for example, on ‘handbooks’ for teachers, on teaching materials and curriculum documents, and on professional journals – these can give only a limited insight into the realities of classroom practice. Yet on this basis at least, it is possible to divide the early history of media education in the UK into three broad phases (for more extensive accounts, see Alvarado and Boyd-Barrett, 1992; Alvarado, Gutch and Wollen, 1987; Masterman, 1985).

Discrimination

The most commonly quoted starting point in this history can be found in the work of the literary critic F. R. Leavis and his student Denys Thompson. Their book Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933) represented the first systematic set of proposals for teaching about the mass media in schools. The book, which was revised and reprinted a number of times over the following two decades, contains a series of classroom exercises using extracts from journalism, popular fiction and advertisements. This approach was subsequently promoted through journals like the Use of English, which Thompson edited, and found its way into several official reports on education.

The central mission for Leavis and his associates was the preservation of the literary heritage, and the language, the values and the health of the nation it was seen to embody and to represent. The media were seen here as a corrupting influence, offering superficial pleasures in place of the authentic values of great art and literature. The aim of teaching about popular culture, therefore, was to encourage students to ‘discriminate and resist’ – to arm themselves against the commercial manipulation of the mass media and hence to recognize the self-evident merits of ‘high’ culture.

This process of training students in ‘discrimination’ and ‘critical awareness’ has been described by subsequent critics as a form of ‘inoculation’ – in other words, as a means of protection against disease (Halloran and Jones, 1968; Masterman, 1980). What remains notable about it in educational terms is its extraordinary self-confidence. Leavis and Thompson sought to enable teachers to expose what they saw as the crude exploitation and the cheap emotional falsity of popular culture; and they took for granted that, once exposed, it would be recognized and condemned.

Cultural studies and the popular arts

The next phase in this brief history brings us forward to the late 1950s and early 1960s, and to the founding moment of ‘British Cultural Studies’. Most explicitly in the work of Raymond Williams (1958, 1961) and Richard Hoggart (1959), this approach offered a challenge to the Leavisite notion of ‘culture’. Culture was no longer seen here as a fixed set of privileged artefacts – an approved ‘canon’ of literary texts, for example – but as ‘a whole way of life’; and cultural expression was seen to take a whole range of forms, from the exalted to the everyday. This more inclusive approach thus began to challenge the distinctions between high culture and popular culture, and ultimately between art and lived experience.

The key text which sought to disseminate this approach to teachers in schools was The Popular Arts (1964) by Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, which offered an extensive range of suggestions for teaching about the media, and particularly about the cinema. This less obviously ‘inoculative’ approach to studying the media was also reflected in teaching materials and in official reports of the time. Graham Murdock and Guy Phelps (1973), in a research study of secondary schools, found that the Leavisite approach was steadily losing ground as younger teachers sought to recognize and to build upon their students’ everyday cultural experiences.

Nevertheless, this approach still sought to preserve fundamental cultural distinctions. Hoggart (1959), for example, clearly distinguished between the ‘living’ culture of the industrial working classes and the ‘processed’ culture which derived from Hollywood – striking a characteristically anti-American tone which was also apparent in the work of Leavis. Likewise, in Hall and Whannel (1964) and in the Newsom Report on English teaching which was published in the previous year (Department of Education and Science, 1963), distinctions between high culture and popular culture were not so much abolished as shifted. Thus, while teachers were now encouraged to consider films in the classroom – although preferably European or British films – the increasingly dominant medium of television remained quite beyond the pale.

Screen Education and demystification

In the 1970s, we can identify another paradigm shift, again deriving initially from the academy. The key development here was that of ‘Screen theory’, as expounded in the pages of the journals Screen and Screen Education. Screen was the most significant vehicle for new developments in semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralism, and Marxist theories of ideology. The difficult role of Screen Education was to suggest how these academic approaches might be applied to classrooms in schools – although this was a task that it addressed only intermittently (see Alvarado, Collins and Donald, 1993).

The most influential exponent of this approach was undoubtedly Len Masterman (1980, 1985). In fact, Masterman was highly critical of what he regarded as the academic elitism of Screen theory; yet his books Teaching about Television (1980) and Teaching the Media (1985) shared the central concerns of that theory with questions of language, ideology and representation. The fundamental aim here was to reveal the constructed nature of media texts, and thereby to show how media representations reinforced the ideologies of dominant groups within society.

Masterman strongly rejected what he saw as the middle-class, evaluative approach of Leavis and his inheritors – an approach which he suggested remained prevalent among teachers of English. By contrast, he promoted analytical methods drawn from semiology, which were seen to offer the promise of objectivity and analytical rigour. (These methods will be considered more fully in chapters 5 and 7.) These forms of analysis were to be combined with the detailed study of the economics of the media industries (Masterman, 1985). Students were urged to put aside their subjective responses and pleasures, and to engage in systematic forms of analysis which would expose the ‘hidden’ ideologies of the media – and thereby ‘liberate’ themselves from their influence. Discrimination on the grounds of cultural value was thus effectively replaced by a form of political or ideological demystification.

Democratization and defensiveness

This brief history inevitably neglects some of the complexities of these various positions, and the historical contexts in which they were formed. A fuller analysis of the evolution of media education would need to locate these approaches within the changing social and cultural climate of their times; and in particular to relate them to the ongoing struggles for control over educational policy-making.

With these qualifications in mind, however, it is possible to read this history in terms of two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the development of media education is part of a wider move towards democratization – a process whereby students’ out-of-school cultures are gradually recognized as valid and worthy of consideration in the school curriculum. In these terms, media education could be seen as one dimension of the ‘progressive’ educational strategies that began to gain widespread acceptance in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, students of English were increasingly encouraged to write about their everyday experiences; to discuss the poetry of popular songs; and to debate contemporary social issues. Such strategies attempted to ‘validate’ students’ cultures, and to build connections between the cultures of the school and those of the home and the peer group.

This move reflected the growing recognition that the traditional academic curriculum was inadequate for the large majority of students, and particularly for working-class students. Even in the work of Leavis and Thompson, one can detect an acknowledgement that teachers had to begin by working with the cultures that students brought with them into the classroom, rather than seeking merely to impose the values of ‘high’ culture. In more recent years, this democratization of the curriculum should also be seen as part of a wider political move, which is apparent in different ways in the work of Williams and in the project of Screen Education. The attempt to include popular culture within the curriculum represented a direct challenge to the elitism of established literary culture; and in this respect, it was implicitly informed by a wider class politics.

On the other hand, however, this history is also one of defensive-ness. It reflects a long-standing suspicion of the media and popular culture that might be seen as a defining characteristic of modern education systems (Lusted, 1985). Despite the growing inclusiveness of the curriculum, all these approaches seek in different ways to inoculate or protect students against what are assumed to be the negative effects of the media. Such an approach is implicitly premised on a notion of the media as an enormously powerful (and almost entirely negative) influence, and of children as particularly vulnerable to manipulation. Teaching children about the media – enabling them to analyse how media texts are constructed, and to understand the economic functions of the media industries – is seen as a way of ‘empowering’ them to resist such influences. In the process, it is argued, children will become rational consumers, able to view the media in a ‘critical’ and distanced way.

This defensiveness may have several motivations, which take on a different significance at different times and in different national and cultural contexts. Particularly in the work of Leavis and his followers, there is a powerful form of cultural defensiveness – that is, an attempt to protect children from the media on the grounds of their apparent lack of cultural value, and thereby to lead the children on to superior forms of art and literature. While they are now distinctly unfashionable in some circles, such motivations nevertheless often und...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part I Rationales
• Part II The State of the Art
• Part III Media Learning
• Part IV New Directions
• References
• Index
• Back Cover