Media Literacy Around the World

Robert Kubey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780765808547
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351292900
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, education about and through the media has become a worldwide phenomenon, and is playing an increasingly important role in educational reform. The theory and practice of media education have profited greatly from recent and intensive development and application of new information and telecommunications technologies. Consequently, the importance of media and information literacy is taking on an even greater urgency. With this in mind, the contributors to this volume survey what has taken place over the last decade in different parts of the world, examine the current state of theoretical, conceptual, and research development, and consider where media education is going and where it ought to go. With two-thirds of its 22 contributions coming from outside the United States, Media Literacy around the World is a genuine international effort, with many leading media and information educators in the world taking part. The work converts the notion of globalism from a slogan into a working hypothesis. The concerns in this volume are with literacy not just in computer technology, but as a broad concern of the educational process.

Part I

Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

1

A Rationale for Media Education

Len Masterman

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to provide teachers with a guide to the field of media education appropriate for the 1990s. Its starting point is the Council of Europe (1989) Resolution on Education in Media and the New Technologies (paragraph 5) adopted by European Ministers of Education at their Standing Conference in Istanbul in October, 1989. It is a statement that admirably summarizes the major developments in the field during the 1980s and sets an outline agenda for the 1990s:

Education in the new technologies and the media should play an empowering and liberating role, helping to prepare pupils for democratic citizenship and political awareness. Thus pupils should be given an understanding of the structures, mechanisms and messages of the mass media. In particular, pupils should develop the independent capacity to apply critical judgement to media content. One means to this end, and an objective in its own right, should be to encourage creative expression the construction of pupils’ own media messages, so that they are equipped to take advantage of opportunities for the expression of particular interests in the context of participation at local level.

Given the major role that media such as television, cinema, radio and the press play in children’s cultural experience, media education should begin as early as possible and continue throughout compulsory schooling. Nor should the role of parents in media education be overlooked. Further research is necessary to establish what media knowledge children bring to school, and the ways in which their media understanding, knowledge and skills may be developed by media education.

However, to ensure the value of this education, reflection on the ethics of communication and information is required. Educators must play a role in this questioning. For it is not only a question of adapting school to the world of the New Information and Communication Technologies but also of getting the world of the media to listen to the questions posed by educators about respect of men, women and young people in the broadcasting of information. (Council of Europe 1989)

This chapter is an elaboration of that statement, which itself represents a settlement of some of the major debates and developments which have taken place in Europe over the past forty years. Our objective has been to provide a guide through those debates as a way of understanding where we stand at the beginning of the 1990s and as a prelude to suggesting some possible agendas and ways forward for the future.

For if the 1980s was a decade of spectacular development for media education, the 1990s promises to be every bit as exciting. The motor which has driven the developments of the eighties—a period, let us not forget, generally characterized by educational retrenchment and conservatism—has been the determination of media teachers to ensure that an era of unprecedented expansion and technological development in the media has been matched by a commensurate expansion in the critical consciousness of students and pupils. It was that task which generated the motivation, the commitment and the creativity of many hundreds of European media teachers and their students during the past decade.

And simply keeping abreast of media developments in the nineties, and ensuring the relevance of what we teach to the life experiences of our students, will continue to provide a serious challenge to dominant notions of what constitutes effective teaching and learning in most European educational systems. The task of media teachers—making sense of the activities of one of society’s key set of institutions, industries, and cultural practices (the media) through the routines and practices of another (the educational system)—will remain exhilarating and important enough.

But whereas in the eighties the complex relationship between the media and educational systems developed in the context of a stable, knowable, and unproblematic “Europe,” in the nineties transformations in “Europe” itself are already running faster than our ability to comprehend, let alone respond adequately to, them. What is certain is that the major political, economic, social, and cultural changes currently taking place in Europe, whatever their final outcomes, are going to reverberate throughout the continent’s media and educational systems well beyond the next decade. Moreover, the commanding role played by the media themselves in the changes taking place in eastern Europe tangles even further the already complex web of cross influences and determinations of media/education/Europe relations.

When lives have been lost, and blood shed for a television station, then the democratic control of the mass media becomes both a matter of the widest public interest and debate, and a key marker in determining how democratic both established governments are and the “new” governments have become.

There is already evidence, as eastern European teachers begin the long process of educational reconstruction, of a great deal of interest in media education as it has developed in Western Europe. Key works are being translated and disseminated, teacher organizations in film and media education are being formed, and a host of personal contacts are being forged. It would be a mistake to regard this as a one-way traffic of ideas, the east catching up with the west’s more developed and sophisticated practice.

For in respect to the mass media the democratic aspirations of our eastern European colleagues are more far reaching than our own. “Democratic” is not the word which most readily springs to mind when one considers Western media; “plutocratic” certainly, “paternalistic” of course, and at best, in a handful of Western European countries, “pluralistic,” perhaps. But democratic power in Western European media remains almost exclusively concentrated at the point of consumption. The supreme sign of our democracies is choice—of media, as of toothpastes, hamburgers, or jeans. We exercise our power through what we do or do not choose to buy.

So, too, the most potent symbols of the failure of eastern European regimes to meet the needs of their citizens have always been the empty shop windows, and long queues, images ceaselessly purveyed to us down the decades by Western media. Those very media are now, of course, assuring us that, with the collapse of many of the old eastern European regimes, “our system has won.”

But the situation is marginally more complicated than this with consumption becoming a substitute for democracy. Emphasis upon choice at the point of consumption effectively masks the lack of choice, which too often exists at the point of production, the workplace, and the 1980s have seen in Western Europe significant erosions in the rights of employees in the face of increasingly authoritarian employers no less in the media industries than elsewhere. Events in eastern Europe have placed the question of the democratic control and accountability of their media somewhere close to the top of their political agendas.

It is a question which in the West we have scarcely begun to contemplate. When we do—as I hope we will in the 1990s—it is possible that we may have much to learn from our colleagues in eastern Europe. Our primary objective in this chapter has been to provide for teachers, educators, and policymakers in member countries of the Council of Europe a guide to the ways in which media education might develop in the 1990s. In undertaking this task we have risked a number of predictions and recommendations for future practice. But in order to try and make sense of the future we have found it necessary to clarify the nature of media education in Europe now, and to trace the major historical shifts and developments that continue to influence current developments.

The chapter, then, is divided into three main sections. In the first section we look at the major paradigms within which the media have been studied over the past fifty years. In the second, we describe some of the major principles informing the best European media education practice today. The third section looks to the future and presents our projections and recommendations for the 1990s.

We have not attempted in this chapter to provide a detailed nation-by-nation account of specific developments in member countries of the Council of Europe. These are available in The Information Society—A Challenge for Educational Policies? (National Reports, 1989). Len Masterman’s pamphlet, The Development of Media Education in Europe in the 1980s (Masterman, 1988) outlined some of the principal shifts and developments taking place in the theory and practice of media education during the 1980s. Narrower in scope than the present study, it contained an earlier elaboration of some of the themes and issues considered in more detail here.

Why Study Media? An Historical Review

Clarifying Objectives in Media Education

In this section we will be examining explanations as to why we should study or teach about the media. Different rationales for media education have produced very different kinds of practice, and it is evident that, before any effective teaching program can be devised, a great deal of consideration will need to be given to its ultimate purposes and objectives. This section, then, aims to present a historical review of the changing objectives of media education in order to help educators answer for themselves the question, “Why study or teach about the media?”

Nothing will affect the quality of the teaching and learning which takes place in the media studies class more than the clarity and precision of the teacher’s own objectives, and his/her ability to communicate these to the students. If there is a single difference between a successful and an unsuccessful media class, it lies in this fact: that in a successful class, teacher and students alike understand the connections which exist between this particular discussion or activity or exercise, and larger, shared objectives to which they are all committed. This is essentially what gives a “good” class its sense of purpose, motivation, and drive. In a poor class the kids are simply doing the exercises. The teacher has failed to deliver an answer to the question hanging silently over every student group, “Why should we do this?” and all of the potentiality of media education is lost. The subject becomes as pointless, depressing, and de-motivating for students and teachers alike, as any other.

So, the sine qua non of successful media teaching are:

• clear thinking about objectives by the teacher;

• careful discussion of these with students, with appropriate amendments in the light of their own comments, priorities, and enthusiasms;

• a regular check, review, and (if necessary) revision of objectives, however informally carried out, together with a more formal evaluation of both teacher and student objectives at the end of the course.

The necessary starting point for all media teachers, then, is to clarify for themselves their own purposes in teaching the subject. We come clean about our own objectives later on, but in order to help teachers clarify their own objectives we present a brief historical review of some of the major reasons for studying the media which have had currency in the past. If our account does nothing else it should certainly demonstrate how every aspect of one’s teaching—the selection of appropriate content, teaching styles, and methods of evaluation—is determined by one’s ultimate objectives. We should stress here that we are not advocating a narrow, mechanistic view of teaching: the setting of, and testing for a narrow range of attainable targets. Far from it. We believe that the objectives of media education should be ambitious, challenging, open ended, and liberating. But they must be precise. For we wish, above all, to promote rigorous teaching and learning about the media.

In the next section, we set out the precise principles which we believe should underpin an effective media education practice but, before that, it is necessary to demonstrate how these principles have evolved from nearly half a century of debate about the role and functions of the media, education, and media education.

Historically, it is possible to discuss three major approaches to teaching about the mass media, each making its own characteristic assumptions about the nature of the media, and each having a clear set of teaching objectives and attendant practices.

Inoculative Approaches: The Media as Agents of Cultural Decline

The dominant view of the mass media adopted by most educationalists has been one of deep-rooted mistrust. It is a tradition with a long history. A report on English education in 1938, for example, spoke of media corrupting a whole generation (The Spens Report, 1938, 222–23). This view of the media (even before the advent of television) as corrupting influences, or virulent diseases—rather like diphtheria or polio—which threatened the cultural and moral health of us all, particularly children, is perhaps best understood as part of an even longer tradition of respectable middle-class fears of the cheap and debased amusements of working people.

This view produced one of two responses from teachers. On the one hand, the media could be legitimately ignored as irrelevant, indeed antithetical to the proper processes and legitimate functions of schooling in inculcating and protecting cultural standards. And that is precisely the stance which most educationalists continue to adopt today. On the other hand, the increasing popularity and persuasiveness of the media led to a call for schools to adopt a more active role of cultural resistance to the shallow emotional responses which they were believed to encourage.

Herein lay the unpromising origins of media education, and of the attitudes which were to be characteristic of the first and longest phase in the subject’s development, lasting from the early 1930s to the early 1960s. It was from the outset, a defensive and paternalistic movement whose function was to introduce popular forms into the classroom only in order to dismiss them as commercial, manipulative, and derivative—the culture of the machine—in comparison with more traditional “high” cultural forms. Media education was, thus, in its earliest manifestation, education against the media; its function to encourage pupils to develop discrimination, fine judgement, and taste by grasping the basic differences between the timeless values of authentic “high” culture (in which teachers were themselves initiated) and the debased, anti-cultural values of largely commercial mass media (Leavis and Thompson, 1948).

This view of the media as agents of cultural decline produced its own classroom priorities for teachers, in terms of the media topics they considered. The study of advertising, for example, assumed particular importance because it typified all that was most dangerous about the media their manipulation of their audiences, their materialistic values, and their corrupting influence upon language. “Popular” literary forms such as pulp fiction, women’s magazine stories, and children’s comics also came under scrutiny since their use of predictable plots, stereotyped characters, and tired cliched language could be compared, to their detriment, with the creativity and vitality of literature.

It would be as foolish to underestimate the importance and significance of this tradition as to assume that it is now completely exhausted. For what was at stake in early media education was, for its practitioners, a matter of cultural life and death. The very future of society was deemed to hang upon, for example, the simple task of analyzing an advertisement. For what was involved in such an analysis was the capacity of children to stand back from the text, to reflect upon the motivations of those who produced it, to understand the ways in which it was working upon them and, crucially, to discriminate between authentic and unauthentic uses of languages.

This particular tradition, then, cast the teacher in a role of the greatest cultural significance. That, almost certainly, explains the commitment of its practitioners and its longevity as a movement. It is still far from exhausted. Though it would be very unusual at a meeting of media teachers anywhere in Europe today to find adherents of the view that the media are agents of cultural decline, it is an opinion which remains common enough amongst educators generally. Media teachers, indeed, could be said to constitute an important lobby against advertising, and stands as a reminder that “inoculative” media education has not yet had its day.

The Media as Popular Arts

It was not until the early 1960s that there was any significant movement away from “inoculative” media education. By then, however, a new generation of teachers was entering schools, teachers who actually liked popular cultural forms—particularly films—could see value in them, and were unwilling to discuss them as inevitably corrupting influences. It was this new generation of teachers which was to provide the impetus behind the second great phase of media education, the Popular Arts movement (Hall & Whannel, 1964). It was a movement which involved not so much an abandonment of “protectionist” approaches to media study as a modification and extension of them. Discrimination—the ability to make fine critical judgements—was still a primary objective. But discrimination now became ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction Media Education: Portraits of an Evolving Field
• PART I: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
• PART II: Theoretical and Conceptual Perspectives
• PART III: International Perspectives
• PART IV: Curricular and Research Perspectives
• PART V: Perspectives on Computer, Information, and “Museum” Literacy
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index