Media Literacy Education in Action

Theoretical and Pedagogical Perspectives

Belinha S. De Abreu, Paul Mihailidis, Belinha S. De Abreu, Paul Mihailidis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415658348
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135123710
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Media Literacy Education in Action brings together the field's leading scholars and advocates to present a snapshot of the theoretical and conceptual development of media literacy education—what has influenced it, current trends, and ideas about its future. Featuring a mix of perspectives, it explores the divergent ways in which media literacy is connected to educational communities and academic areas in both local and global contexts. The volume is structured around seven themes:

• Media Literacy: Past and Present

• Digital Media and Learning

• Global Perspectives

• Public Spaces

• Civic Activism

• Policy and Digital Citizenship

• Future Connections

Compelling, well-organized, and authoritative, this one-stop resource for understanding more about media literacy education across disciplines, cultures, and divides offers the fresh outlook that is needed at this point in time. Globally, as more and more states and countries call for media literacy education more explicitly in their curriculum guidelines, educators are being required to teach media literacy in both elementary and secondary education contexts.

Part I
Media Literacy

Past and Present

The first section of Media Literacy in Action focuses on the growth of media literacy through a historical lens. The aim is to ground the entire book in a larger perspective over time and beyond any specific theme, strand, or focus. In this section you will find holistic reviews of the growth of media literacy in specific parts of the world, across disciplines and grade levels, and in formal and informal education settings. Chapters develop narratives of media education practice in critical and historical contexts. Ideas focus on the evolution of media literacy movements in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Seminal media literacy educators are interviewed to offer their insight on their careers in media literacy and what they believe were and are the biggest challenges that face the movement today. A discussion of new literacies is also offered as a way to ground the notion of literacy in a theoretical context, and build towards a portrait of what literacies today require in a multimodal digital media culture.

1
Media Literacy

An Incomplete Project

Julian McDougall

The global project of media literacy for the twenty-first century is under review (Buckingham, 2010) and contextual formulations strive for an elusive consensus for this broad and fragmented community of practice.

This chapter will provide a genealogy of the various educational practices that have, in different countries and contexts, attempted to develop or enhance students’ abilities to critique and create media towards more reflexively engaging with the mediation of life.

There are clear and present fault-lines and tensions between media literacy as a discrete area of or outside of the curriculum; between media literacy as a cross-curricular or extra-curricular practice and between media education as a formal subject and the broader field of literacy education. Notions of new, digital, and media literacies have served to undermine the project. This chapter concludes with suggestions for pedagogic strategies that might dispense with such unhelpful ‘insulation’ between categories.

Media literacy education, then, is an ‘incomplete project,’ generating ‘its own aporias’ (Habermas, 1993, 131) and can only be renewed by new forms of more reflexive and negotiated pedagogy that bear witness to the complexity of reading practices—ways of being literate—instead of focusing on the ‘nouns’ of media literacy—the dubious distinctions between forms of textual activity.

(Media) Literacy

In a response to an article I co-authored (McDougall and Sanders, 2012) for Journal of Media Literacy about the ‘conditions of possibility’ for critical media literacy, Cortes (2012) offered a hypothesis drawn from observing his cat:

He can mess up our TV remote. And he can turn up my Bose radio, usually to the classical music channel. Yet, despite Tigger’s media experience, I wouldn’t classify him as media literate, certainly not possessed of critical media literacy … Let’s call it the Tigger Paradox, the gap separating experience and adeptness from critical analytical ability. (Cortes, 2012, 24)

Whilst educating people to be literate is broadly understood as part of citizen entitlement on utilitarian principles, there is a clear and important distinction in policy and rationale discourses surrounding media literacy. The reading and writing of words is rarely discussed as response to anything other than the obvious benefits of using language. Media literacy, however, is often justified as a response to something—the development of mass media, and more recently, digital and social media. Whilst there is great variance in how the axes of affordance and protection are drawn and how media literacy policy is mapped across them, this obvious difference is important to recognize. Before educators can successfully integrate media literacy into the ‘day job,’ there must be agreement that media in some way make a difference. In this sense the (incomplete) project of media literacy education is not the same as either literacy development in general or education’s usual epistemological arrangements.

Media literacy as a response, then, has a genealogy and some distinct ‘flavours.’ Before making generalizations it is important to bear witness to the complexity of how media literacy is discursively framed in space and time, as Lin articulates in this description of Asian policy and practice:

Sometimes, various discourses are adopted strategically. The citizenship discourse with a negative assumption from the protectionist discourses of media is an example of a hybrid discourse. As late-comers to media education, advocates in Asia are aware of the dangers of solely applying the protectionist discourse. They strategically adopt the negative effect as rationale for promoting media education while adding the flavour of the active ‘civic engagement’ rhetoric. The hybrid discourse carries contradictions in itself. (Lin, 2009, 40)

This is a revealing case in point. Whilst the inception of English Literature education was controversial, mobilizing arguments over its epistemological rigor, it is safe to say that educators wishing to teach children to read rarely have to behave strategically to combine ideas about both the power and danger of ‘book learning.’ At the risk of convenient simplification, there are four dominant discursive models at work in the international genealogy of media literacy, each of which is integrated in various ways into the formal institutionalized practice of media education. With these disclaimers offered, the following summary attempts to describe this ‘history of the present.’

The social model has situated media literacy within a broader set of plural ‘literacies.’ Within this category we can locate elements of media literacy within ‘new literacies’ and ‘multiliteracies.’ There are some key areas of dissensus between and among these but by way of general mapping of the field we can say that these approaches share a belief that ‘the competencies that are involved in making sense of the media are socially distributed, and that different social groups have different orientations towards the media, and will use them in different ways’ (Bucking-ham, 2003, 39). In practice, this model seems to be marginalized in media literacy education.

Protectionist models, which are more or less explicit in this intention, sometimes share characteristics with attempts to determine competences and skills that can be benchmarked against ages and contexts. These are dependent on normative judgments and definitions of a media literate person, group, or whole society (Livingstone, Papaioannou, Perez, & Winjen, 2012, 5). Despite appearances to the contrary, this model—when combined with others—dominates the landscape of media literacy education.

The citizenship model operates within a broadly Habermasian model of public sphere communication and is partly discussed as a response to technology— media literacy as inclusion in the online consensus—and partly as affordance for a more participatory society—a ‘new civics.’ Whether or not digital and online media are understood as determining such social action (as opposed to offering active citizens an online space to share their existing offline engagement), the focus here is on active media use as civic action in response to and/or involvement in governance (Hasebrink, 2012). The most dominant form of the citizenship model is the ‘employability’ discourse, which is more politically neutral—indeed it entirely reproduces the neo-liberal hegemony—but nevertheless shares the assertion that media literacy competence is required for contemporary participation in the public sphere—of employment in the ‘creative industries’ (Hesmondalgh & Baker, 2011) in this case. A more specific ‘flavour’ of the citizenship discourse that could be applied in more or less protectionist or creative/participatory contexts is Erickson and Meletti’s (2013) media literacy resources for young people sharing online remix and parody material. This intervention combines a potentially protectionist agenda (from unintended law-breaking) with the creativity and participation discourses (to encourage more ‘safe’ production), but also goes further to lobby for a change in U.K. regulation to allow more exemptions for such parodic work, in order for young people to be equally free to experiment and develop media (for creative employability, also) as their counterparts in the United States and much of Europe.

Creativity models are perhaps the most contested variant of the media literacy discourse and can only be fully ‘unpacked’ within much broader debates around the nature of creativity itself and its function in education. Gauntlett’s (2011) research into the online exchange of everyday creative practice and the role of web 2.0 in facilitating this, has been the subject of an overly polarised academic fray over the need or not, for a Media Studies 2.0 (see Berger and McDougall, 2011a, b). Readman (2011) describes the problem of implementation in the observation that ‘if media educators are prepared to acknowledge that “creativity” is not a “thing” but rather a site of conflict where different definitions and interests compete, we are less likely to accept it as a useful assessment term or something that can be measured and rationalised.’

‘Subject Media’ is not a separate category, as it contains elements of the others, depending on how practiced, but it provides a powerful and distinct framing for media literacy education. ‘Subject Media’ describes the formal—and legitimated— curriculum teaching of Media Studies with attendant specifications and assessment regimes. The power of ‘Subject Media’ is exercised in its proximal relation to other disciplines—most notably English, and how in the daily work of teaching in institutions, media learning becomes a ‘vertical discourse’ as a conceptual framework is handed down and manifested in the provision of resources and text books.

At policy level, the ‘broad brush’ approach is most clearly manifested and combined with a failure to demonstrate scale. For example, European Union strategies from 2000 onwards have financed a plethora of media education projects, all related to a shared objective—teaching children and their parents, in the online age, to ‘use the media effectively’ but also ‘having a critical approach to media as regards both quality and accuracy’ and ‘using media creatively’ (EC, 2007:4) Likewise, in the United Kingdom, OFCOM, a regulatory body, was charged by Government with a media literacy strategy which also sought to bring these very different activities together in a ‘3c’ model—communication, being critical, and creating. In these worthy developments, we can see the awkward ‘lumping together’ of protectionist, citizenship, and creative discourses, but little attention is paid to the social model of differently situated, plural literacies. At the same time, the failure of scale is a result of these projects and task force initiatives sitting outside of any formal curriculum—Media Studies or other. Hence the project of media literacy is framed as extra-curricular and by nature of the funding contexts, the sum of perennial pilot studies.

Matters of ‘incompletion’ are complicated further by the proliferation of media literacies. The shift to cross-media, transmedia, and spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013) make a difference to each discourse, but the degree to which new variants beyond media literacy—to digital literacy, new media literacy, trans-media literacy—are needed for an educational response, is no less an ‘idea speech situation,’ to the extent that some have argued for a dispensation with the idea of ‘the media’ altogether (Bennett, Kendall, & McDougall, 2011) or a resurrection as ‘mediacy’: ‘the technical facility to use new machines, but also to understand and use the codes of conventions of each related medium’ (Anderson, 2012 35–36).

So, on the one hand, it is difficult to resist Buckingham’s blunt observation (2012) that all of the above is ‘a bloody big mess.’ But preferring the softer ‘incomplete project,’ in order to demonstrate how these discursive models overlap with lesser and greater degrees of intention, some contrasting examples will now be discussed. The educational ‘content,’ pedagogic practices and modes of assessment are not the focus here. Rather, the intention is to ‘map’ them against the models suggested above. Clearly these strategically selected examples cannot stand for the entire global practice of media literacy education. Rather, they offer a ‘taster’ for what will follow in this collection but with our attention at this point on the differences between them.

Reading and Making the Cave

In a review of Canadian/North American media literacy education, Pungente, Duncan, and Anderson (2005) offer this opening gambit from a school student as a rationale for a protectionist approach:

The media can persuade anyone to do something or to think a certain way. It can promote drugs and violence, or it can preach good education and hard work. We learn from the media and we also get sucked into the media. It covers everything—campaigning, fashion, education, and most importantly, life. When I say life, I mean anything that can ever happen to you, from the clothes you wear to regular days at school to walking home from somewhere. (2005, 1)

This premise is reproduced in Pungente’s more recent ‘Inside Plato’s Cave’ initiative—an online course for media literacy educators, starting out from a statement of indisputable fact—that we can draw an obvious parallel between Plato’s parable and contemporary media and that media literacy can liberate today’s children from the plight of the prisoners in the Republic.

Zezulkova’s (2013) research into media literacy education in urban and rural Czech elementary schools shows how the broader discursive formations can be locally situated...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Media Literacy: Past and Present
• PART II Digital Media and Learning
• PART III Global Perspectives
• PART IV Public Spaces
• PART V Civic Activism
• PART VI Policy and Digital Citizenship
• PART VII Future Connections
• List of Contributors
• Index