Television ',Critical Viewing Skills', Education

Major Media Literacy Projects in the United States and Selected Countries

James A. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136471087
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Representing a significant survey and evaluation of major media literacy projects in the U.S. and selected countries throughout the world, this book covers all aspects of critical viewing skills. It provides comprehensive, theoretical and historical background about the field, the criteria for its evaluation, and various structured programs including the CVS projects and programs sponsored by school districts, individuals, non-governmental national organizations, and private companies.

The book can serve as a guide for curriculum planners as well as teachers in the classroom and adult workshops -- and also parents and individual adult viewers -- in applying the best match of theories, practices, readings, and specific exercises to monitor and enhance television's role.

I

THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ESTABLISHING CRITERIA FOR “CRITICAL VIEWING SKILLS” EDUCATION

Part I provides background and foundation for this report. An historical sketch of the development of television media literacy programs follows a review of major aspects of related theory drawn from philosophy, sociology, pedagogy, and other disciplines. Not intended as a theoretical treatise, the chapters in Part I offer a skeletal synthesis of some major theoretical foundations with implications for media education. From them are drawn criteria to be applied (in Part III) to the projects to identify emphases as well as strengths and limitations. The reader is urged to explore further the continually developing body of reception theory as well as communication and education theories generally, including media education and specifically television critical viewing skills.^*

TERMINOLOGY

At the outset some distinctions must be made among terms used in the field and in this report.

Communication education and the more restrictive media education can refer to a wide range of interpersonal as well as technologically mediated transfers of information and meaning. These terms are too broad for what is surveyed in this report. Various proponents of media-training programs, with their respective purposes and procedures (see “Definitions” in Part II), label their work with different phrases.

Media literacy, although broader than television or even broadcast study, does emphasize the elements of language and symbol discussed on preceding pages. Television literacy would seem to emphasize the medium’s content and form as presented visually and aurally, including their codified interrelationships (elements juxtaposed through editing). But literacy is only part of the endeavor. Broader understanding of the structures, processes, and impact of the television phenomenon on society calls for awareness of how media institutions interrelate with that society. Neil Postman was quoted (Variety, 1981) as objecting to the term because “television is not a book; you do not learn literacy by watching television” (p. 42). Schwartz (1981) commented on the “post-literate” environment of electronic media, with their vast store of information not requiring the ability to read or write. That, of course, takes the word too narrowly. Proponents of media study programs have used literacy analogously. They relate the cognitive and affective processes involved in television viewing to similar processes in reading. And studies have noted not only the affinity between both forms of media experience (TV and print), but concurrent development of reading and thinking skills when TV viewing skills were being developed—reflecting a more holistic phenomenon in human cognitive development. Postman preferred to distinguish television from other communication forms as separate and worthy in its own right because it creates a new “communications context” that eventually will modify “the cognitative [sic] habits, social relations, personal styles and political interests” of all viewers, especially children.

The basic constructs in educating to media literacy are perception, reflection, reasoning, evaluation—in short, “critical thinking.” Parsley (1981) therefore referred to his detailed program of television study as one of teaching “critical thinking skills” (p. 133). They include understanding the process of valid inferences, abstracting, generalizing, syllogistic reasoning, propaganda analysis, and various forms of problem-solving traditionally exercised in language and mathematics studies.

Electronic media are typically experienced as communication previously packaged and presented to a widespread, anonymous audience that is essentially passive. Thus, Ploghoft and Anderson (1981) labeled as “receivership skills” the learned abilities to respond to media stimuli creatively with sensitivity and discrimination.

Many projects surveyed in this study exclusively concentrate on contemporary television as the medium and the mode for teaching critical thinking and receivership skills, and are called critical viewing skills programs.

Called by various names in different parts of the world, these individual and institutional efforts strive not only to guide adults and children to better, more responsible, more responsive and active analysis and reaction to media experience, but also at times to influence the media managers and governmental bodies responsible for overseeing them. Organized projects in North America reflect those purposes in varied terms: television literacy, critical receivership skills, critical viewing skills, or more broadly, critical thinking. Groups in other countries, notably Australia and in parts of Europe, employ different nomenclature but demonstrate similar purpose and methodologies. All endeavor to guide and train consumers of media to a higher standard of awareness of and critical response to their personal experience of mass media. A brief chronology of how major training programs evolved offers historical context.

Chapter 1 sketches the background of theoretical assumptions about man, society, culture, and communication as bases for identifying criteria by which to assess various media literacy projects. Included is discussion of language and literacy, symbols, ethical and socio-political contexts, research, and educational theories. (Readers familiar with such foundations for teaching media literacy may wish to skim or skip entirely the first chapter.)

Chapter 2 outlines salient characteristics of major projects, noting patterns among their purposes, methodologies, and various definitions of what constitutes critical viewing skills. And it distills 20 criteria reflecting theoretical points drawn from the preceding analysis. Those criteria are applied in Part III to the projects reported in Part II.

Chapter 3 traces the historical development of programs of study in media literacy—their antecedents in film and radio study in the 1930s and 1940s to recent developments worldwide.

*Notable and relatively recent are works by Worth and Gross (1981), Fiske (1987), and Carey (1988); plus books fusing theory with application by Ploghoft and Anderson (1981), Worth and Gross (1981), Hefzallah (1987), and Anderson and Meyer (1988) in the United States; and by Masterman (1980,1985a) and Alvarado, Gutch, and Wollen (1987) in the United Kingdom. Complete citations are in the References at the end of the book.

1

Foundations of Media Literacy Studies

Because various kinds of media education have proliferated, it is useful to identify their range of objectives and also their differing assumptions about why and how people use mass media and about presumed impact on personal development. Most often media literacy projects occur in a context of formal education, which itself reflects various educational and cognitional theories. And, of course, the sociopolitical and economic environment where specific media study programs exist influence those projects in their assumptions, purposes, structure, and materials. On the following pages these well-springs of communication, media, and education are examined as the foundation for identifying criteria for designing and appraising media education programs.

HUMAN LANGUAGE, LITERACY, SYMBOL SYSTEMS

The human person possesses a unique characteristic among living beings: the capacity to abstract, reflect, draw relationships, and make judgments. Beyond this power of intelligence is the ability to communicate those thoughts and feelings in arbitrary codification of language, both spoken (linguistic) and written (literary). Grammar, syntax and rhetoric or style are components of this power of language. Competence in these skills—both active (as speaker-writer) and passive (as listener-reader)—is called literacy. These same terms can be extended to the aural and visual media, which include “images” in sound and sight. They are often codified into systematic structures to augment natural (iconic) sights and sounds. The images also demonstrate creative manipulation, just as in spoken and written forms. And they add the essential component of time (length, duration, rhythm) in juxtaposing the aural-visual elements—perhaps making the mass media of film, television and radio as akin to music as they are to literature.

Language is a system of symbols.¹ In a larger sense, symbols can be considered as the form for “organizing ideas by which people develop perspectives about their relationship to the world,” in Himmelstein’s (1981, p. 97) phrasing. This implies the important role played by media creators who select the symbols—and the symbol-structures or codes— that reflect and interpret reality accurately or in a distorted manner. Consumers of media have the task of decoding television sensitively, intelligently, critically in order to give meaning to the medium’s content. A body of analysis—developed by Gross (1973, 1974), Worth (1981), Fiske (1987), Carey (1988), Anderson and Meyer (1988), and others—refers to the need for cultural and media-specific “competencies.” They involve “modes” of various kinds of media and genres, and “codes” by which signification is imbedded in content and form to be recognized and interpreted by receivers who are the ones ultimately giving “meaning” to their experience of media material. Competence of senders in crafting is related to competence of receivers in interpreting communications distributed through mass media. The process is based on the viewer’s “media consciousness” which Altheide and Snow (1979) identify as a “general logic that media professionals and the audience use to ‘make sense’ out of the phenomenon presented through the media” (p. 200). Widespread media experiences by the mass publics contribute to the collective consciousness of society (Snow, 1983, pp. 10–11).

Underlying all this is semiotics, the science of signs. It studies how signs work and the ways we use them; it analyzes how a sign and its meaning are related, and how signs are combined into codes.²

SOCIAL SYMBOL SYSTEMS AND TELEVISION

Ironically, the very medium that contemporary society associates with superficial techniques and trivial content is the same medium that respected educators and social researchers seriously look to as an agent for renewed study and growth in cultural experience and understanding. They see this coming about through “total language” of semiotics that lie at the core of communication in any society.

George Gerbner built on the theme that the human person rarely experiences reality directly but rather through symbolic context that gives meaning to perceptions. Echoing Marshall McLuhan, he noted that television is not just a successor to other mechanical-electrical media; it is instead the successor of tribal culture—with its rituals, symbol system, conventions, and continuous involvement and confrontation of the participant-observer. He asserted that analyzing and coming to understand and judge television in our daily living is more than “viewing skills”; it is tantamount to reinstituting liberal education. It attempts to liberate the individual from an unquestioning dependence on the immediate cultural environment, by looking beyond (forward and backward) to science, arts, the classics, and the achievements of mankind, in order to transcend the local, isolated impoverished environment. Thus he asserted that television is truly “the central socializing process of our species in industrialized society” today.³ Television’s conventions, its program schedules of information and entertainment, its pace and patterns of presentation, its omnipresence in homes and on the world scene as an electronic window or mirror all help weave together the fabric of our society that we call contemporary culture—which is broader than “popular culture.”

This is so because “stories”—whether creative fiction or selections of factual reality in news, documentaries, interviews, talk programs and so forth—show how things work, what things are, what has value and is worth choosing, and what we are to do about it. These selective perceptions on an institutionalized scale for mass publics form the body of widely recognizable and accepted configurations of how reality is constituted and what is worthwhile in it. In other words, they form our system of “acceptables” and “desirables,” our myths and stereotypical patterns of perceiving, comprehending, and evaluating. Society’s attention, attitude and behavior are built on such foundations.

This communication process cannot be ignored in our own society. Television today is a major carrier of acculturation and socialization— along with family, school, church, and peer groups, who themselves are all swept into the pervasive phenomenon of television-mediated social agenda and judgments.

Horace Newcomb (1981) looks upon TV as the central symbol field in con...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ESTABLISHING CRITERIA FOR “CRITICAL VIEWING SKILLS” EDUCATION
• PART II ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATIVE STRUCTURED PROGRAMS OF “CRITICAL VIEWING SKILLS” EDUCATION
• PART III EVALUATION OF CVS PROJECTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE PLANNERS AND IMPLEMENTERS
• Appendix A: Initial Three-Page Questionnaire, 1981 Survey
• Appendix B: Follow-Up One-Page Questionnaire, 1985 Survey
• Appendix C: Sources of Information and of Printed and Audiovisual Materials for CVS Projects
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index