Current Perspectives in Media Education

Beyond the Manifesto

P. Fraser, J. Wardle, P. Fraser, J. Wardle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349453054, 9781137300201
• eBook ISBN: 9781137300218
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book emerged from the online project 'A Manifesto for Media Education' and takes forward its starting points by asking some of the original contributors to expand upon their view of the purpose of media education and to support their perspective with accounts of practice.

1

Introduction: Beyond a Manifesto for Media Education

Pete Fraser and Jonathan Wardle

The idea that led to this book first came from listening to two media makers, rather than media educators, each talking about the notion of ‘purpose’; when Charlie Brooker interviewed David Simon, the creator of The Wire, at the Edinburgh International TV Festival, he asked him whether everything he did had to have a message. Simon replied:

Yes … or why do it? They are giving you 10 or 12 hours commercial free on HBO and they are not getting in your way. You get to say what you think is justified, and you get to find a way to say it. I’m using drama to do it. It’s the tool in my tool box. Yes everything should have a message or what’s the point?

Simon (2009)

The other was Peter Kosminsky, the docu-drama writer director responsible for The Government Inspector and Warriors, speaking at a graduation ceremony, encouraging media students to think about how they themselves would measure success:

Used correctly [television] has incredible power, and that power is about to be passed into your hands, and I would beg you to make good use of it. You don’t have to just continue and mimic what’s gone before … It’s time for a new generation to come along and make some mischief, please hear me, your job is to shake things up, and I don’t just mean in the industry itself. Your job is to shake things up in this country. A healthy democracy requires a powerful and free media; your job is to ask the difficult questions of people in power, your job is to make things difficult. So I would urge you not to focus on the difficult job of getting a job as a runner, or as an assistant producer, but try to figure out why you are going into the industry, what have you got to say? What can you do with this incredibly powerful medium?

Kosminsky (2009)

Both men offered an ideological perspective on the purpose of working in the media which got us thinking about the kind of media education we might be offering and how those engaged in it see its purpose. Are we seeking to develop the media producers of tomorrow, or to nurture individuals capable of holding power to account? Whether in the university lecture theatre or the school classroom, what do teachers see as the purpose of what they are doing?

We wondered how far media teachers are articulating their own agenda; as Neil Postman has written:

to become a different person because of something you have learned – to appropriate an insight, a concept, a vision, so that your world is altered … for that to happen you need a reason …. A reason, as I use the word here is different to a motivation.

Postman (1996: 5)

In early 2011, we asked a number of leading media educators to set out, in about 1500 words each, what they saw as the purpose of media education. Our initial call for contributions went very well and we put these online at http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/ and invited further pieces from visitors to the site. We were both pleased and excited by the range of responses, in terms of the varied approaches they took, the perspectives they offered and the contexts from which they came. We had contributions from North and South America, Australasia, all over Europe and South Africa. Our writers cited media education policy, research, pedagogic experience and their own autobiographies; they came from primary, secondary, further and higher education. They defined their work in terms of media literacy, media education, media studies, media arts and media production and they each set out a vision of what we should be doing.

We used the term ‘media education’ on the website, and continue to do so in this book, as an umbrella term which encompasses:

•  media studies – often used to mean an academic study of the media, both in schools and universities;

•  media literacy – a term mainly used in relation to schools, representing a broadening of traditional conceptions of literacy to encompass a range of forms beyond just the written;

•  media production – courses concentrating on making media texts;

•  media practice – recent attempts to blend media studies and media production in university courses.

We did this to encourage a broad range of diverse contributors, to bring them together in one place. In calling the project a ‘manifesto’, we quickly realised the impossibility of it ever working as such; there could not be one overarching vision statement which represented every sector and every perspective, let alone cut across the geographic spaces between our contributors. However, the interest generated by the project and our attempts at inclusivity did help to establish some sense of a dialogue which we wanted to continue; so we brought around 70 people together at a one-day symposium in London in June 2011, where several of the contributors to the site gave presentations and engaged in lively debate.

The manifesto had offered some scope for rhetoric; the symposium demanded evidence to justify it. This book asks some of the contributors to expand upon their view of the purpose of media education by giving them space to support their perspective with accounts of practice.

We have deliberately chosen an eclectic approach. This is not a handbook of how to teach media, but an opportunity for reflection upon the range of approaches that our authors take. Some chapters draw upon funded research projects, some focus upon the direct classroom experience of the writers, while others seek to offer radical rethinks of the basis of particular pedagogies. Some draw upon history, but all highlight the present. Our contributors here come from a range of contexts and write about different sectors; three are from outside the UK, several are from higher education; some focus on secondary school, one focuses on initiatives in primary and one on youth media projects outside of formal schooling. We have taken the same approach with the book as with the original online manifesto project – to encourage diverse voices to enable debate and reflection.

Our starting point for the manifesto project was the question: what is the purpose of media education? From the ‘discrimination’ approach to popular culture within the teaching of English which characterised early approaches (Leavis and Thompson, 1933; Thompson, 1964), media teaching has made a number of turns over the years. The prompting of Len Masterman (1980, 1985) has led many educators to view media education as a process of ‘demystification’, with teachers supporting students to develop the capabilities to read media texts in order to ‘liberate’ them from the media’s ‘mystification’. But others, like David Buckingham (1986, 2003), have questioned this, suggesting that may be students are not quite so helpless that they need their teachers to ‘unmask’ media texts. Others, such as Henry Jenkins et al. (2006), have argued that we study media texts and teach young people how to make them because the media play such a significant role in our lives and our ability to ‘read’ and ‘write’ media texts is vital to a civic society. Indeed, the sheer amount of time young people spend with the media is itself often offered as a key reason for studying it.

There are those who would dismiss the very idea of studying the media. The Daily Mail might argue that it has only been available in schools and at degree level to ensure that the participation numbers for young people engaged in formal learning and gaining good qualifications remain high – the ‘dumbing down’ agenda. In terms of a vocational media education, the last Labour government in the UK seemed to take the view that a key reason for recruiting students on to media courses was to develop a generation capable of leading the world’s creative industries in order to grow GDP.

A common view of education is that it does not do us any good unless it hurts; many young people, far from looking back on their schooldays as ‘the best days of our lives’, remember a time of rote learning and failure. It is still all too common to hear that their educational experiences are far from positive; but media courses for many students do offer pleasure and enjoyment of learning, and we would argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Some of the key themes of this book

Across the book a number of overlapping priorities and themes emerge from the varied perspectives on offer, despite some of their obvious differences. Several contributors touch on issues of emphasis and division within ‘subject media’. Questions include: should media education be medium-specific (film studies, TV studies, and so on) or should it be more general? Have claims of employability over-ridden notions of critical autonomy? Should we push for media studies as a discrete discipline or media education as an entitlement across the curriculum? How relevant are the key concepts of media education in a changed media landscape?

Implicit in many of the contributions is a desire to identify a metanarrative which legitimises the work being done in media classrooms. The political context in which media education takes place leads authors to ask whether there should be more emphasis upon questioning the power of the media and whether preparing a workforce for the creative industries risks depoliticising media education. The place of production in relation to critical analysis has long been the focus of debate in media education and several of our authors take this up, raising questions about the skills and experiences that some of our students bring to the media classroom along with some questions about the role of notions of creativity.

A number of the chapters make clear that for many, at the heart of media education, there is still a clear emancipatory agenda. But is the flag of social inclusion and democratic learning now only flying over the media classroom? And how much longer will there be a place for media education in the curriculum, particularly in the UK, where a backdrop of marketisation, privatisation and ‘reform’ looms over the experiences of several of our contributors, leading them to fear for the future?

Outline of the book

Deciding on the running order of the chapters was a bit like deciding which order tracks should take on an album; though in an age of iTunes and Spotify, perhaps the reader can shuffle them any way he or she chooses. Though the book defied any sense of ‘sections’, it does have a trajectory, with some links between the chapters leading from one to the next.

The first four chapters look at media education in the UK; all refer to the development of media teaching over the past 30 years and raise strong concerns about the impact of the current Education Secretary, Michael Gove’s ‘reforms’ of schooling, particularly in relation to media education. Jenny Grahame remembers her own classroom practice of 1981 and wonders about what might have been lost in the 30 years since; David Buckingham calls for a steady nerve in reinforcing key concepts as a tenet of media teaching; Steve Connolly laments the negative impact of Gove’s ideology upon the direction of the school where he taught and Kate Domaille raises fundamental concerns about the training of media teachers.

The next three chapters all take us outside the UK, with Michael Dezuanni and Annette Woods describing the introduction of media arts in the primary curriculum in Australia, Stuart R. Poyntz placing Canadian youth media projects in a wider context and Henry Jenkins from the US returning to his 2006 white paper to consider how his notions of participatory culture might be shaped into classroom practice. Jenkins’ ideas are then taken up by Helen Keegan, discussing her own teaching using social media in a university context in the UK, which in turn links to Richard Berger’s critique of the history of media as a subject area in UK higher education.

The final two chapters bring us back explicitly to notions of ‘purpose’, with Mark Readman arguing that media education may have gone too far in attempting to replicate professional practice, losing sight of its philosophical dimension and Julian McDougall suggesting the need to move outside our current framework altogether with a demolition of our subject-based assumptions.

References

Buckingham, D. (1986) ‘Against Demystification’, Screen 27(5): 80–95.

Buckingham, D. (2003) Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press).

A Manifesto for Media Education, available from: http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/ [accessed 11 January 2013].

Jenkins, H., with Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. and Weigel, M. (2006) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (MacArthur paper), available from:http://www.macfound.org/press/publications/white-paper-confronting-the-challenges-of-participatory-culture-media-education-for-the-21st-century-by-henry-jenkins/ [accessed 17 January 2013].

Kosminsky, P. (2009) Bournemouth University Graduation, 6 November.

Leavis, F.R. and Thompson, D. (1933) Culture and Environment (London: Chatto and Windus).

Masterman, L. (1980) Teaching About Television (London: Macmillan).

Masterman, L. (1985) Teaching the Media (London: Comedia).

Postman, N. (1996) The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage).

Simon, D. (2009) Interview with C. Brooker, Edinburgh International TV Festival, 28 August.

Thompson, D. (1964) Discrimination and Popular Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

2

Back to the Future? Old and New Agendas in Media Education

Jenny Grahame

A bottom set of disengaged and discontented Year 10 media students have been press-ganged into a community initiative: to construct a neighbourhood newspaper for the local area. They are to plan, write, edit, design and market an eight-page publication around local issues which they have themselves identified and researched. Their interest in local politics is negligible – although recent inner city rioting has sparked some interest. Few are regular tabloid readers, let alone familiar with the concept of a community newspaper; most have poor literacy levels, find writing continuous prose challenging and lack confidence in speaking and listening. They know they have been ‘guided’ towards media studies because no other option subject will have them.

Nevertheless, in the space of four weeks, they undergo an interesting (if fleeting) transformation. In groups, they organise, conduct and write up interviews with local police officers at Paddington Green Police Station, and summarise key findings of the post-riot report; they photograph and deconstruct political graffiti in the nearby underpass; they visit elders in the local Bangladeshi community centre and residents in a notoriously under-resourced care home; and, inevitably, they unleash their discontent with a plethora of critical questions to the senior management team of their newly federated school. The result is an anarchic hybrid of editorial invective, social observation, conflicting opinions and newsletter. It looks like a ‘dog’s dinner’ and is riddled with typos, ill-assorted fonts and poorly focused photographs; but it covers eight pages, sells its entire print run of 200 copies for 20p each, features in a much-lauded Year Assembly and miraculously ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Beyond a Manifesto for Media Education
• 2. Back to the Future? Old and New Agendas in Media Education
• 3. Challenging Concepts: Learning in the Media Classroom
• 4. Media Education: A Tool for Social Inclusion
• 5. Educating Media Educators
• 6. ‘These Are My Photos of When I Was Little’: Locating Media Arts in the Primary School Curriculum
• 7. Public Space and Media Education in the City
• 8. From New Media Literacies to New Media Expertise
• 9. Emerging Pedagogies
• 10. Cultural Disneyland? The History of an Inferiority Complex
• 11. Not ‘Philosophy of Media Education’, but ‘Media Education as Philosophy’: Working with ‘Creativity’
• 12. We Are the Resurrection: Media Education after the Media
• Index