The Media Teacher's Handbook

Elaine Scarratt, Jon Davison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136594281
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

The Media Teacher's Handbook is an indispensible guide for all teachers, both specialist and non-specialist, delivering Media Studies and media education in secondary schools and colleges.

It is the first text to draw together the three key elements of secondary sector teaching in relation to media study - the theoretical, the practical and the professional - in order to support media teachers throughout their careers:

• Section One: Contexts explores the history of, rationale for, and justification of studying the media from 1900 to the present day, and considers the tensions implicit in the subject caused by opposing views of culture.
• Section Two: Curriculum comprises seven chapters that focus on studying the media from Key Stages 3 and 4 in English, through GCSE and A Level Media Studies. It also explores approaches to teaching the Creative and Media Diploma, media and citizenship, and practical media production.
• Section Three: Career Development is designed to support those establishing and leading Media Studies departments and those who are charged with the initial preparation and professional development of teachers.

Written by experts involved in the teaching, training and examination of Media Studies, this one-stop resource is packed with illustrative case studies and exemplar schemes of work which can be easily adapted for your own needs. Suggested Reading and Recommended Resources sections at the end of each chapter list additional books, films, DVDs, groups, agencies, organisations, contact details, websites and other materials which will support your teaching even further.

The Media Teacher's Handbook is an essential guide to the theory, pedagogy, and practice of media education that will enable you to teach your subject expertly and with confidence.

Section Two

Curriculum

Chapter 5

Media education and English in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4

Jenny Grahame

Introduction

Since its inception in the late 1980s, few aspects of the National Curriculum for England and Wales have been as contentiously debated or as politically sensitive as the English curriculum for Key Stage 3 and 4 students. This strategically important transitional phase between primary education and the formalised assessment of the GCSE courses has suffered collateral damage from the consistent intervention of successive governments, from the ‘Back to Basics’ campaigns of the early ‘90s and subsequent brutal curriculum revisions, through the introduction, critiques and ultimate acceptance of SATs, the New Labour Literacy Strategy and Framework years, to the recent opening up of the Revised ‘Big Picture’ National Curriculum in 2007.

Throughout this same period, the media landscape has changed beyond recognition in terms of its products, the technologies and platforms through which they are accessed, and the opportunities for audiences to interact with and generate them. Equally importantly, there has been a major shift in the perceived significance of the Media and cultural industries to the British economy. How are these changes experienced by young people in schools at Key Stages 3 and 4? At the time of writing, English teaching is redefining itself with a revised curriculum and the introduction of a new and radically different suite of English GCSE specifications, which is likely to impact dramatically on classroom practice, and may transform the ways in which media is integrated into Programmes of Study (PoS). How far is an increasingly mediated English curriculum enabling them to understand and fully participate in the changing digital world of the twenty-first century?

This chapter will attempt to offer a broad overview of the state of play for media education for students aged 11–16 in the English curriculum. Its starting point is the relationship between the two subjects, the ways in which they have accommodated each other, and the compromises required in incorporating media teaching into English. It will explore the new opportunities opening up for media study, and practical strategies for exploiting them to develop media skills both within and despite the constraints of the English PoS. A selection of classroom practices will suggest a variety of approaches, consider the longer-term impact of new technologies and new forms of assessment on teaching and learning in English, and briefly explore some classroom activities that demonstrate the ways Media Studies practice might inform, inspire and re-engage students in an English curriculum for the twenty-first century.

Media Education in English – The Back-story

In 1991, in the early pre-SATs years of the then ‘new’ National Curriculum, the English and Media Centre published a teacher’s handbook (The English Curriculum: Media Years 7–9) on ways of integrating media education into KS3 English teaching. Revisiting the book in the course of researching this chapter, I was struck by how little the field appears to have changed. While the case no longer needs to be made for the importance of media literacy and its inclusion as part of Subject English, much of the classroom practice described in the book has developed remarkably little. It explored generous conceptual interpretations of the seemingly reluctant inclusion of media in the then Programmes of Study (PoS) for English; considered the different ways in which media texts could enhance and extend conventional approaches to literary study, generate engaged and purposeful talk, and scaffold different types of writing; attempted to map where and how differently the Media might be studied in other subject disciplines, in the primary curriculum and in specialist Media Studies; and puzzled over the problems of developing a workable framework of progression for media learning in a then largely undocumented field.

Nearly 20 years on, its examples of hands-on classroom activities, schemes of work and models of delivery are still recognisable in much current departmental practice; the obstacles to cross-curricular and whole-school approaches are still largely unbroached despite the innovative inroads of specialist schools; we still know relatively little about how children learn about the media – with the exception of the 2011 report of the ESRC project led by the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media.

This stasis is perhaps unsurprising given the recent dominance of the National Literacy Strategy, which many would argue has exercised a particularly instrumental and deadening influence over much teaching and learning in English, restricting the range of permitted text types, opportunities for creativity, and dialogic debates about the purposes and philosophies of the curriculum, and imposing uncomfortable compromises for teachers committed to Media education. Similarly, the pressures of accountability exemplified by the limited repertoire assessed in KS3 SATs has, for over a decade, militated against risk-taking and curriculum innovation in all but the most visionary or well-resourced of institutions. However, this period has also seen some significant changes, both despite and in resistance to, the incursions of the Literacy Framework. Most obviously, the range of media, platforms, modalities and learning technologies with which young people now engage has grown exponentially with digitisation, both in and out of school. The digitised delivery of the curriculum in classrooms increasingly needs to be addressed and has been formally acknowledged in the re-thinking strategy that has informed the 2007 revised English curriculum.

Multimodal English – A New Phase?

While previous versions of the National Curriculum for English focused on a detailed and prescriptive framework of learning experiences, increasingly circumscribed by the National Literacy Strategy, the revised 2007 curriculum has become more ‘friendly’ to media education in a number of ways:

• It is underpinned formally for the first time by a series of four key concepts: Competence, Creativity, Cultural Understanding and Critical Understanding. Interestingly these concepts have for some time circulated, although in a different combination, within media education; indeed, Film Education’s annual conference is entitled ‘CP3: Critical Practice, Creative Process, Cultural Perspectives’. While they are framed rhetorically rather than practically, there is no doubt that their openness and flexibility invite a broader definition of appropriate study texts, and a more inclusive approach to the development of literacy skills.
• There has been a loosening of the structural prescriptions and at times mechanistic micro-objectives of the Literacy Framework, which if followed to the letter exercised a disproportionate impact on teaching and learning, and were considered by many to be inimical to media education.
• This strongly skills-based curriculum has formally acknowledged the range of literacy skills required for citizens of the twenty-first century in its many references to ‘multimodal’ texts. A somewhat uninspiring term – why not simply ‘media’? – multimodality can however become the semantic loophole through which, for example, to develop Speaking and Listening. A popular TV show can be legitimately discussed as a multi-platform vehicle, on screen, online, through press coverage, SMS and on social network sites; under the Reading strand a Shakespeare play can be analysed in a variety of formats and media, from page to stage to heritage movie to classic TV serial to graphic novel to remake to TV ad and beyond. These are not new examples, neither are they assessment-proof; inevitably multimodal study will be assessed in terms of the three conventional English strands, and the media learning will be evaluated only in terms of students’ communication skills. But they are a start.
• The Revised PoS and their interpretation by the Awarding Bodies for the English GCSE 2010 specifications suggest a new commitment to offering students a wider range of creative and analytic opportunities for learning with and through media. There is active encouragement for the use of multimodal adaptations, the use of moving image media as stimulus for talk and creative writing, and for the study of spoken language. The challenge for media education is, as it always has been, to find ways of exploiting these activities so that media texts are not merely transparent vehicles for skills development, but are in themselves objects of investigation and analysis, and situated in a broader cultural context.
• The revised curriculum reinforces individual subject disciplines with a number of over-arching cross-curricular ‘dimensions’, of which, significantly, technology and the Media is one. The aim is to provide opportunities across the curriculum for students to ‘consider media as both consumers and authors of content’, to engage with critical questions about the reliability of online content, and to acquire digital communication skills. Despite a skills-based agenda more closely identified with ICT than with media education, and a focus on access and competence rather than critical and political enquiry, this dimension offers further opportunities to find ways of integrating the study of media into a wider range of subject areas, and in theory at least opens the door to new forms of inter-disciplinary collaboration.

So, with cautious optimism, the time might be right for a resurgence of interest in the study of media in English. What follows is a brief overview of the development of ideas about the Media within the curriculum, and a snapshot of the current state of play.

Media and English: A (Very) Short Summary of a Long History

The relationship of media study to the English curriculum has a long history, which has been well documented and much debated over the last 70 years. Chapter 1 outlines the rich and entertaining history to be mined from exploring differing cultural perspectives over the decades, ranging from the need to inoculate students against the moral dangers of advertising and popular cinema in the 1930s, to Cold War moral panics about the subversive influence of American horror comics and the arrival of rock and roll in the 1950s. The early 1990s Tory government exhorted teachers to reject the cultural relativism of a Chaucer and Chips/Milton and McDonald’s English curriculum that might span both literary heritage and popular culture. Within ten years, however, and the dawn of the new millennium, the rhetoric had changed to accommodate the massive impact of new technologies and digitisation, and the range of different stakeholders in the school curriculum. As a result, the terms of debate have shifted to take on board not only the cultural and moral implications of the vast spectrum of multi-platform media forms and practices now on offer, but also on the increasingly complex technologies used to ‘deliver’ knowledge in schools.

Thus, the relationship between English and media has been shaped by a series of contradictory rationales that have underpinned subject development and that share a defensive attitude to the Media. Late twentieth-century English aimed (often reluctantly) to develop critical media reading skills as a way of protecting young learners from manipulation, bias and misinformation. It implied a range of ideas about discrimination, notions of value and quality, and a focus on media effects and influences exemplified in ‘dumbing down’ discourses. While early twenty-first-century English teachers would now challenge these views, they still inform some practice in English, and are perhaps residual in the unimaginative and restrictive pairing of non-fiction and media texts in GCSE examinations.

Aligning the Concepts

Much thought has been given to finding ways of refining and simplifying media concepts to sit more comfortably alongside those of other ‘host’ subject sites, in particular the English curriculum. In the early 1990s, the British Film Institute (BFI) Education Department, at that time a strongly influential voice and lobbyist in curriculum development nationally, published two innovative Secondary Curriculum statements identifying six core ‘aspects’ of the Media that could both provide a framework for specialist Media Studies teaching at a variety of levels, and be inflected across a range of other subje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Section One: Contexts
• Section Two: Curriculum
• Section Three: Career development
• Bibliography
• Index