Autor: Tilmann P

Source: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~mec/MECWEB/Mecpper2.pdf [2003-06-11] Southampton 1996.

Table of Contents

ABOUT THE MEDIA EDUCATION CENTRE 2

Aims and Activities 2

Associated staff 2

Key features 2

Foreword: The Media Education Revolution – by Len Masterman 3

References 8

MEDIA EDUCATION IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE 8

The New Media Environment 13

Media, Culture and Education 16

The Models of Media Education Project in England 18

Previous Research 18

Research Methodology 19

Sample Section 24

Interviews 24

Outcomes 28

The International Models of Media Education Project 29

REFERENCES 31

ABOUT THE MEDIA EDUCATION CENTRE

Aims and Activities

Launched in 1996 and based in the Research and Graduate School of Education, the Centre has grown out of regional, national and international activities in the study of the media over the last decade. It will consolidate and extend the work of the Southampton Media Education Group and the Southern Media Education Research Network with Media researchers and practitioners both regionally and nationally. Internationally, Centre staff have established links with other European and world-wide work on Media through research and conference activities and through an extensive list of publications.

The Centre is a cross-faculty initiative which links Education, Arts and Social Science postgraduate work and which the University supports by provision of material resources, facilities and staff time. Through its programme of seminars, conferences and publications, the Centre will act as a catalyst for new developments, as a forum for debate and as a mechanism for research collaboration. Postgraduate taught and research courses (including Distance Learning options) are also offered through the Faculty of Educational Studies.

Associated staff

Key features

This is the second in a new series of research papers from the Media Education Centre which we hope will be useful for teachers, researchers and administrators.

Andrew Hart is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Research and Graduate School of Education, University of Southampton, where he teaches Media Studies on the MA(Ed) course and supervises MPhil/PhD research. He also teaches on the postgraduate Initial Training course in English, Drama and Media Studies. He has published widely on Media Education and has worked closely with teachers as Director of the Southampton Media Education Group (winner of the British Film Institute’s Paddy Whannel Award for innovation in Media Education) as Director of the Southern Media Education Research Network and of the recently established Media Education Centre. He currently represents the UK on the World Council for Media Education. Recent publications include Teaching Television, Making ‘The Real World’ (CUP 1988) and Understanding the Media (Routledge 1991). He also wrote, with Gordon Cooper, the BBC Radio 4 series Understanding the Media on which the book was based. His most recent book was with Sue Hackman: Developing Media in English (Hodder 1995). This paper is the first of a series arising from research carried out for Teaching the Media: International Perspectives and is to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum, New Jersey, USA.

Foreword: The Media Education Revolution – by Len Masterman

Why should we bother to study or teach about the media? In the past, teachers have given three different answers to that question, and those answers (and the practices which followed from them) have formed the three great historical paradigms of Media Education.

The earliest answer to the question “Why study the media?” ran something like this. The mass media are really a kind of disease against which children need to be protected. What the media infect is the culture as a whole. Culture is contaminated by the media’s commercial motivations, their manipulation and exploitation of their audiences, their corruption of language and their offering of easy, low-level appeals and satisfactions. What makes the media such a problem according to this analysis is that they produce a counterfeit culture, which is a direct threat to genuine culture and to authentic cultural values. Crucially, this is, amongst other things, an audience problem. It is not simply that popular culture and high culture cannot somehow co-exist. Clearly, at one level they can. The threat comes through the corruption of the audience. The very future of serious literature itself, for example, was held to be absolutely dependent upon the existence of a serious literate readership to sustain it. Without the existence of that discriminating reading public, literature itself would wither away. As early as the 1930s contemporary newspapers, magazines and advertisements were seen as actively destroying that serious reading public. The media demanded, and therefore produced, shorter attention spans and an appetite for the sensational, expressed in slick, smart and superficial language. This constituted an attack upon the very foundations of serious reading and, indeed, serious engagement with any art form.

If the media were a definite kind of cultural disease, then Media Education was designed to provide protection against it. Media Education was an education against the media, and contrasted the manipulative nature of the media with the timeless values of real culture, as embodied supremely in literature. That earliest paradigm is now popularly known as the inoculative paradigm (Leavis and Thompson, 1933). You allowed a little media material into the classroom only in order to inoculate students more effectively against it. On the whole, media teachers today represent a powerful lobby against that way of thinking about the media. But it is still probably the way in which most other teachers view the media. And you will still see remnants of that old inoculative view within the most progressive Media Education practice. For example, teaching about advertising is still almost universally teaching against advertising, rather than an attempt to develop an understanding of how advertising works, of the role of advertising agencies, or of the function of advertising within contemporary media. What effectively put an end to the dominance of the inoculative paradigm was the arrival in schools in the early 1960s of a generation of young teachers whose intellectual formation owed as much to the influence of popular culture, and particularly cinema, as it did to print-based culture. Such teachers were apt to argue that the films of directors such as Bergman, Renoir, Bunuel, Fellini and in particular the French New Wave directors actually possessed as much intellectual energy and moral seriousness as anything that was being produced within European or American literature. They produced a new answer to the question: “Why study the media?” It was to enable students to discriminate not against the media but within them, to tell the difference between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ film, the authentic and the shoddy television programme, work within popular culture of some integrity and work which was merely commercial and exploitative. This was the ‘popular arts’ paradigm (Hall and Whannel, 1964) which emphasised the idea that popular culture was every bit as capable of producing authentic works of art as was high culture. It gave Media Education a new agenda and a renewed energy in the 1960s, but by the mid-1970s almost all of that energy had been dissipated.

There were three principal reasons why the ‘popular arts’ paradigm failed to produce an adequate foundation for effective media teaching. First, Media Education was still seen as essentially protectionist. It was a somewhat paternalistic exercise in improving students’ tastes. It was still based on a very negative view of the media preferences of the vast majority of students, and was always likely to be resisted by them for this very reason. Second, it remained an evaluative paradigm, which was severely disabled by the fact that there were no widely agreed standards or criteria available for actually evaluating the media. Media teachers found themselves on very uncertain territory when they wanted to demonstrate precisely why this newspaper or television programme or piece of popular music was superior to that one. There was also a dangerous tendency for good to be equated with middle-class tastes, and bad with working-class tastes. The kind of media material which teachers tended to like – European films shown in film societies, television documentaries, and serious newspapers – was self-evidently good.

Hollywood movies, tabloid newspapers, and television game shows – the kind of material liked by students – were bad. Thirdly, it was not simply a question of the practical difficulties of discriminating between the good and the bad in the media. There were major doubts, I think, about the very appropriateness of applying aesthetic criteria at all to a vast range of media output. Was there really any point in trying to discriminate, for example, between good and bad news bulletins, advertisements, sports programmes or weather forecasts? The ‘popular arts’ movement was, essentially, a way of legitimising film studies. It privileged film, within the study of the media, as the one popular form with unchallengeable claims to having produced works of authentic merit. But it provided a distinctly limited way of illuminating the media as a whole. By the 1970s it was becoming clear that a Media Education that was to have any relevance at all for students had to give preeminence not so much to film, which in terms of cinema-going was by now somewhat marginal to the experience of most students, but to television which was much more central to their experience. During the late 1970s, a number of media teachers began to see and make connections between their own down-to-earth classroom concerns and the general drift of a number of structuralist ideas, particularly in the areas of semiotics and ideology. Semiotics firmly established the notion of the media as signifying systems which needed to be read critically, rather than windows on to a reality which had to be accepted. It established, that is, the first principle of Media Education as being that of non-transparency, and its dominant concept that of representation. No less important, semiotics undermined at a stroke all of those apparently immutable distinctions between the culturally valuable and the apparently trivial upon which Media Studies (and Literary Studies before it) had been based. Semiotics’ purpose was to reveal and decode, not to make aesthetic judgements. Since both were equally signifying systems, semiotics was able to make a scandalous equation between, for example, King Lear and a Big Mac. The way in which theories of ideology moved during the 1970s curiously dovetailed with these developments. There was a marked movement away from that traditional notion of ideology as a body of dominant ideas and practices imposed from above upon subordinate groups and which resulted in false consciousness. Rather, following the rediscovery of the work of Antonio Gramsci, ideology came to be equated with ‘common sense’, with what was most natural and ‘taken-for-granted’ about our ideas and practices. Dominance was achieved, that is, as much by consent as by imposition. For Media teachers, these developments in semiotics and ideology pointed in precisely the same direction. They pointed to the fact that the ideological power of the media was very much tied up with the naturalness of the image, and with the tendency of the media to pass off encoded, constructed messages as natural ones. They demonstrated, too, that questions of power were central to discussions about the production, circulation and consumption of images and representations. They raised questions about which groups had the power to define, and which groups were only ever defined. They established, in other words, the importance of a politics of representation, and thrust Media Studies into the heart of some of the most important political and social questions of our time. What was being achieved throughout the 1980s was a widespread international movement of Media teachers out of traditional discriminatory aesthetic paradigms into more broadly political and representational ones. iv Teachers were also working out some of the more radical implications of this shift for classroom practice. For what soon became apparent was that we were talking about something more than a change in subject content. What was being proposed were radical changes in teaching objectives, in classroom methodology, in methods of evaluation, and indeed in teachers’ and students’ understanding of what constituted knowledge. The answer which this third paradigm – the representational paradigm – gave to the question “Why study the media?“, went something like this: “In contemporary societies the media are self-evidently important creators and mediators of social knowledge. An understanding of the ways in which the media represent reality, the techniques they employ, and the ideologies embedded within their representations ought to be an entitlement for all citizens and future citizens in a democratic society.” In working through the implications of this paradigm, teachers found themselves working in new ways in the classroom. In fact, they were beginning to answer what is probably the most important question faced by educational systems in the late 20th Century and beyond: what constitutes an effective democratic education for majorities of future citizens?

As the research in this series of papers so vividly shows, some of these models of Media Education continue to have life in today’s classrooms. But these international studies also embody the struggle to move beyond the old paradigms to ensure that teaching strategies and school curricula develop in tandem with the pace of change within the media themselves. Let me end this Foreword by suggesting two major themes with which Media Education has to grapple now and into the immediate future. First, it is not possible for anyone living in the current commercial media environment to be media-literate today without understanding that the primary function of commercial media is the segmentation and packaging of audiences for sale to advertisers. Until now, Media Education has been based upon a premise of the most astonishing naivety: that the primary function of media has been the production of information or entertainment.

What we have principally studied in Media Education have been texts: television programmes, newspaper stories, and magazine articles for example. But these are not the chief product of commercial media. They are what Canadian critic Dallas Smythe has called the ‘free lunch’: the means by which the real product of the media, from which its profits are derived – the audience product – is brought into existence. (Smythe, 1981). A critical understanding of the basic techniques and tenets of marketing and of the nature of the audience product will need to be brought to bear upon the study of all media texts and institutions and will, I believe, have as central a place in the analysis of future media as such concepts as authorship had within film studies in the 1960s, and representation and ideology had in the v 1980s. Second, the growth of commercial media has been accompanied by the increasing impoverishment of public service and pluralistic media. The spaces in which we, as members of society, can communicate with one another without governmental or commercial interference are being closed down dramatically. As Media teachers, we shall need to develop an explicit commitment to the principles of open and universal access to information, and to preserving the independence from undue commercial influence or government interference of at least some producers of information. Teachers working within public educational systems already have a commitment to the maintenance and defence of public information systems, and they have to find ways of expressing this not in terms of an uncritical partisanship or on the basis of a narrow anti-commercialism, but rather as an open and generous allegiance to democratic values. And that entails, as always, putting all of the arguments to our students but leaving them with the responsibility for making their own choices.

Very large issues are at stake in struggles over the future configuration of the media industries. Should information be regarded as just another commodity or does it have a social value? Is it preferable to produce information which meets general social needs or information which makes a profit? Is access to information a right or should it be restricted to those who can pay? Is the production and circulation of information an extension of property rights or does it lie in the public domain? It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the future shape of all cultures and the future health of all democracies lie in the ways in which they answer these questions. But without the existence of an informed and media-literate public these issues may not ever be debated. It is our crucial role as Media teachers to ensure the continued evolution of that critical public. It is a task worthy of our energies well into the next century.

References

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

MEDIA EDUCATION IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

In spite of faster and more efficient communication systems across much of the world, international comparative studies in education are currently suffering some neglect. In most countries, the dominant interest in educational processes and practices elsewhere seems to be focused on ‘quick fixes’ or finding cheaper options for their educational problems. As individual nations have receded into a narrow concern with the control of domestic educational expenditure, interest in the diversity of educational approaches as reflections of different social and cultural contexts or of different educational goals has suffered. In many cases, this has led to conservative and even retrogressive developments in education.¹

While media ownership, production and distribution have become increasingly internationalized and even globalized, educational responses have not kept pace with these developments. The micro-interactions of the classroom seem strangely detached from the macro-developments in technology and culture. Increasing use of media in informal education does not necessarily mean an increased understanding of the processes by which this informal education occurs. Paradoxically, the correlation between media usage and media understanding may be an inverse one, as Marshall McLuhan hinted in his assertion that we “look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future.” (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 74-5). Like science fiction writers, we are chained forever to representing the past, even when we wish to address the future.

There has been much rhetoric but little research on Media teaching. This study is the first international perspective in the English-speaking world which systematically examines empirical strategies for the teaching of Media. It is also the first to focus on Media teaching with 14-16 year-old students. By contrast, most accounts of Media teaching to date have been concerned with arguing a case (often polemically) for Media Education or providing resources and strategies for Media teachers. There is a dearth of basic research, if research is seen as a process of investigation which is public, systematic, controlled and critical of its own methodological weaknesses (Cohen and Manion 1994: 4-5, 40). Local research needs a global context and there is a need for comparative studies, so that the few local studies which have been attempted are not seen in isolation. Research on classroom strategies for Media teaching is still in its infancy. Previous studies have focused on general discussion of theoretical approaches and have often looked at Media Education ‘programs’ without grounding such discussion in actual classroom teaching approaches. Such abstraction can be extremely misleading, especially when it relies on secondary sources of information. For example, Piette and Giroux’s unusual account of the European Media Education movement’s origination in Finland treats published educational resources as if they were actual sequences of teaching, failing to distinguish between a publication for the classroom and what actual teachers have done with it. (Piette and Giroux [Ed.] 1997: 90, 121-26) The geographical distance of such reports from their sources is very apparent and invariably diminishes both their validity and their value. In a similar way, Brown’s work on ‘critical (television) viewing skills’ often relies on second-hand reports which ignore actual developments and focus on virtual ones (Brown 1991). He provides useful detailed accounts of funded and voluntary programs in the USA, but nothing on actually observed lessons. There is very little reference in his work to actual classroom practice and only one reference to an actual research project in the UK, conducted by David Butts in Scotland in the mid-1980s (Butts, 1986). Such work as Brown’s is necessary and valuable, but it is geographically and methodologically limited. It is best described in his own words as providing “a pragmatic invitation...[for]...explorers and practitioners” (Brown 1991: 330).

In the UK, there have been other studies of classroom practice, notably the British Film Institute’s (BFI) most recent report (Learmonth and Sayer, 1996). But, as its title implies, this report is a study of ‘good practice’ which relies on reporting on the work of the strongest teachers in schools specially selected for the quality of their work in this field. The report, based on eight secondary schools in the UK, is helpful in drawing attention to some of the commonly found strengths and weaknesses of Media teaching, but its primary focus is on appropriate inspection criteria for the evaluation of teaching and learning. It is not explicitly concerned with the relationship between teacher perspectives and classroom practice. It reports on a very small number of Key Stage 4 (ages 14-16) lessons, providing detailed information about only one of these (Learmonth and Sayer: 36) It cannot claim to be research in the standard Cohen and Manion sense, since it neither declares its research approaches nor critically discusses its methodology. It is impossible, therefore, to assess its validity as research.

Some significant studies have focused more on learning theory than on teaching strategies. The work of Buckingham and colleagues in England offers a series of rich and detailed explorations of student-teacher and student-student interactions in Media classrooms which has been very productive of new questions about learning processes. It has also played a useful role in relating Media learning to language-learning theories. But it does not focus on teaching strategies or processes, nor reveal and reflect on its own methodological weaknesses. This makes it very difficult to use in any comparative way (Buckingham 1990, 1993a, Buckingham [Ed] 1993b, Buckingham and Sefton-Green 1994).

This paper describes an international project based on research which began in England. It aims to initiate a more fruitful dialogue about specific educational approaches within some of the major English-speaking nations throughout the world. It does not seek to offer a comparative evaluation of different paradigms for Media Education or different teaching models in practice, but to explore the diversity of educational concerns, goals and classroom practices. This exploration will help to define existing models in different countries more precisely and to make them more visible and more accessible. The purpose of this research is not evaluative but illuminative. It will enable and encourage readers in different parts of the world to gain new perspectives on Media teaching, to examine teaching approaches which differ from their own and to reflect on their own practices with a view to understanding them more fully and enhancing their effectiveness in the classroom.

By providing detailed case studies of current work in different parts of the world, this project enables allows comparative analysis of various Media teaching paradigms and practices in different cultures within the Englishspeaking world. The case studies do not claim to be representative of Media teaching in any of the contexts studied. Although they are firmly placed in their own historical, cultural and curricular context, there is no claim that they provide any basis for generalization towards reliable surveys of Media work in different countries. The research is partial in three senses. Firstly, it is limited in scope, since it reports on a small part of a much larger picture and focuses on a fairly narrow and localized range of work, mainly within the teaching of English. Secondly, it is highly selective, since all the teachers in our samples were chosen to participate because of their known involvement in Media work. Thirdly, it is partial because all the contributors to the project are acknowledged advocates of the potential value of Media Education within formal schooling.

According to one authority on language teaching, there is an “enormous lack of descriptive work in classrooms” (Brumfit and Mitchell 1989: 6). This is especially true of Media Education classrooms and this study therefore provides valuable new information. Specifically, it addresses the following major issues:

The participants in the international project agreed to adopt a common research framework for the diverse social and cultural settings in which we knew that Media Education was happening. In the event, we not able to keep this framework constant in all of our six national settings. In the USA and Canada, we were unable to establish the necessary conditions for the research framework to operate formally and had to rely on adaptations of ongoing work with slightly different orientations. The Ontario research draws on particular concerns with personal biography and acquired critical discourses as potential determinants of teaching strategies, while the Massachusetts study is firmly located in a programme of Professional Development for teachers. In the latter case, it is also clear that Media teaching is not confined to the teaching of English and is emerging in various ways within other curriculum areas, frequently under the title of ‘Media Arts’. However, both North American studies provide some remarkable insights into the texture of work in their own contexts and some vital points of contact with the other studies.

These differences are reassuring, since they emphasise that the residues of curricular colonialism are not universal. If the Northern Ireland, South African and Australian studies clearly reveal discourses which echo debates about English teaching which began in England, the North American studies show that varied vernacular strategies are developing. There are many different notions, even within the English-speaking world, as to what is meant by Media Education. Even when we are clear that we are dealing with teaching and learning about the media rather than the use of media (educational technology) in the classroom, there is still much potential for confusion. (The term ‘Media Literacy’ is also often used in North America as well as Media Education). As was noted in an earlier international collocation of Media work:

Media Education in practice is now so varied and takes place in diverse contexts such as educational or community based institutions, religious organisations or popular movements; in some situations teachers alone organise programmes, while in others professional media workers are involved (Bazalgette, Bevort and Savino 1992: xii).

These differing approaches are related to, but not necessarily predicated on, a wide range of curricular frameworks, from statutory requirements in England, Northern Ireland and Australia, to much more informal arrangements in North America and South Africa. It was because of this range of context and practice that this study was deliberately limited to predetermined curriculum contexts and age-groups and for this reason that we attempted to maintain a consistency of research methods across cultures. In England, some clarity and continuity have been achieved through various attempts in recent years to define Media Education within the National Curriculum for English. The details of these developments will be explained in the next paper in this series. Here it may be helpful to note that the emergent term ‘Media’ is used for convenience as a simplified way of referring both to general ‘Media Education’ in English or across the curriculum and to the more specialized subject ‘Media Studies’. The initial capital is not merely an assertion of disciplinary status. It is also very functional in helping to distinguish ‘Media teaching’ (where media are the objects of study) from ‘media teaching’ (where media are the instument or means of communication). We may soon be able to speak as easily and confidently of ‘Media’ as we already can of ‘English’, as is already happening in some schools. Even then, however, we shall need to recognize the wide diversity of practice encompassed under the term, for example in the differing emphases which teachers and courses place on practical as compared to analytical work.

The New Media Environment

The development of new media technologies, new media forms and new institutional structures is certainly a global phenomenon. The spread of the Internet has accelerated the more general process of ‘mediatization’² of experience which Armand Mattelart has analyzed so incisively (Mattelart, 1991, 210). It is a crucial aspect of the development of the ‘global village’. This ‘mediatization’ is not only enlarging and altering our vocabulary: it has already begun to affect the actual forms of everyday communication and interaction. As McLuhan put it, “we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations” (McLuhan: 79). He correctly and provocatively diagnosed the “Age of Information and of Communication (in which) electric media instantly and constantly create a total field of interacting events in which all men (sic) participate” (McLuhan: 264). McLuhan (1964) predicted that conventional educational processes would be fundamentally altered in the ‘global village’ in response to new electronic communication processes. He saw education as, ideally, a form of “civil defense against media fall-out” (McLuhan: 208). But he did not foresee that educational institutions and processes would fail to keep pace with technological and corporate development. For the educational response has been neither global nor radical. This dislocation between the accelerated pace of development in information and communication technology (which, it is currently estimated, doubles in power and halves in cost every eighteen months) and the sluggish conservatism of educational systems is a major problem in the West. It is not one which will be solved simply by increased access to new information and communication technology. It requires a radical overhaul of educational curricula and methods. We are entering an age of multimedia in the sense of a new, increasingly enveloping and involving media environment which is experienced as an interconnected whole. Media culture has massively expanded over the last few decades. There is a range of new media: cable and satellite TV, home computers, video recorders and camcorders, new ‘on-line’ interactive services, video discs and other consumer-oriented interactive software.

There is also a growing interpenetration of media, as genres, themes and contents flow from one to another with increasing ease as a result of the movement from analogue to digital coding and the consolidation of communications conglomerates. Technological and statutory developments have led to significant changes in the ways in which young people interact with the media. Various forms of deregulation have led to the increasing availability of specialist and streamed services which no longer fit the traditional models of broadcasting. Technological developments have facilitated increasingly creative interactions with media artefacts. These practices include ‘scratch’ video, the use of ‘dub’ and mixing techniques in live and recorded music and the reworking of still images through digital manipulation. At the same time, computer technology has increased the opportunities for relatively sophisticated production in sound and still and in moving images. Increasingly, these are distributed through the Internet, thereby changing the relationships between young people and commercial media industries. Indeed, the development of broad-band networks which abolish the ‘tyranny of distance’ and allow a continual, interactive flow of cultural productions, information, experience, and expertise of all kinds, is widely seen as the pivotal innovation in the emerging array of ‘new media’. Optimists see schools’ ability to use these developments as a basic precondition for building a society able to take full advantage of the movement from an industrial to an information age. They point to the potential for creating a more open society, a more informed and participating citizenry, a more fluid and innovative culture, and a more flexible and appropriately skilled workforce. This view is shared by both major political parties in Britain. The UK Government has placed particular emphasis on the need for schools to promote ‘network literacy’ and has funded a number of pilot projects linking schools to broad-band networks. It has also stressed the wide-ranging educational potential of the ‘information highway’ and sees schools acting as computing and communications hubs for local communities. To facilitate this, it has secured an agreement that British Telecom will install links in every school in the country at zero cost, in return for permission to offer entertainment services over its networks. As the experience of computing in schools has shown, however, simply introducing new technologies does not ensure that they will be used either fully or flexibly. The ways computers have been received and used in schools reflect current social reality. A number of British commentators have pointed to economic and organisational realities; high running costs; lack of appropriate training for teachers. But there is also a cultural reality which is shaping the ways new technologies are used in schools and how pupils relate to them. The ‘new media’ are being introduced into a situation where there is a complex network of established connections and disconnections between schooling and the mass media environment. These relations can create openings and opportunities for flexible innovation in teaching and learning around ‘new media’ but they can also erect symbolic barriers. The rhetorics and pleasures of pupils’ leisure-time involvements in media often sit somewhat uneasily alongside school-based initiatives (Murdock, Hartmann and Gray, 1992).

There is a need to conduct systematic research on these issues now. If we are to develop strategies and policies which maximise the potential cultural, social and economic benefits of innovations in communications, we urgently need better and more comprehensive information on which groups of young people are currently moving into the multimedia future, on how they are using available possibilities and on the dynamics which promote or inhibit their involvement. Understanding the changing role of schools, as ‘gatekeepers’ of young people’s cultural experiences and competencies, is absolutely central to answering these questions.

Media, Culture and Education

The issues discussed so far are embedded in a wider set of relations between culture, environment and education. Culture is used here in the broad sense of the clusters of meaning through which people make sense of the world, together with the ways in which these understandings are expressed publicly through language, artefacts and social practices. Command over culture requires access to the appropriate resources for interpretation and innovation. Handing on the stock of existing culture and the skills to reproduce, replenish and adapt it has long been seen as central to a society’s survival and growth. Children and young people are at the centre of this process. They carry culture forward into the future. Since the beginning of the industrial age, when commentary on the ‘condition of culture’ began to gather momentum, it has been obvious that complex modern societies produce a plurality of cultures. Amidst this diversity, three cultural spheres have emerged as particularly important:

The demarcation lines between these three cultural spheres are, of course, fluid and permeable. There is continual traffic across borders. However, schools face a particular problem. They are the main institutional mechanism for handing on ‘official’ culture as inscribed in curricula. In Australia, in common with other ex-colonial nations, there has been a rejection of an earlier ‘official’ culture and there is now some uncertainty and a continuing struggle to establish a canon which adequately reflects vernacular cultures. In England, schools are increasingly charged with handling an agreed canon which reflects previous national and colonial certainties. Their negotiations with commercial and vernacular culture are therefore fraught with difficulties. These difficulties have intensified in the last two decades as a result of specific social and educational changes. First, the complex and heated debate over what should constitute ‘official’ culture has intensified. On the one side stands the project of installing a National Curriculum which specifies what is central and what peripheral, what constitutes the cultural core, when it should be taught, and how the outcomes should be measured.

On the other side, we have an increasing awareness of cultural diversity and relativity fuelled by a variety of changes, eg. the arrival of a post-colonial polity and the ensuing debate about multiculturalism; the vogue for postmodernism with its associated valorizations of difference and relativity. As a result, teachers in the classroom (and particularly English and Media teachers) face a range of new pressures and dilemmas which are accentuated by changes in the cultural formations outside school. Secondly, as noted earlier, the media environment which surrounds schools and engages pupils has become more complex, more pervasive and more integrated. Finally, the new centrality of media culture to young people’s experience is arguably strengthened by the erosion of the sites which previously sustained and handed on vernacular cultures through family and community networks and by the decay of public space.

Many young people no longer experience media texts as complete entities. Rather, they seem capable of relating to and enjoying a series of fragments and of ‘parallel processing’ many media events simultaneously. Traditional ‘effects’ research has focused on audiences as passive objects, but more recent ethnographic approaches see audiences as informed subjects who respond actively to texts. Qualitative studies have shown how different media genres relate to diverse ‘taste publics’, how the social dynamics of 10 domestic contexts relate to media usage and how new communication technologies are being integrated into domestic settings (Moores, 1993; Silverstone, 1994). Studies of young people’s usage of television and a range of other media (Buckingham, 1990, 1993a, 1993b; Buckingham and Sefton-Green, 1994) have begun to outline a developmental model of new forms of literacy in terms of narrative, discursive and modal competencies. These competencies are more than skills. They are social practices which develop by means of ‘spontaneous’ acquisition and by ‘scientific’ or more systematic learning experiences. Seen together, these developments in cultural practices and in research perspectives make this an appropriate moment to take a systematic look at the way schools, pupils and parents negotiate the formation of cultural futures.

The Models of Media Education Project in England

Previous Research

The only previous substantial work on Media teaching took place in the early 1970s when the Schools Council funded a pioneering investigation into how schools were responding to the burgeoning media culture around television and pop music, and the ways in which teenagers’ involvements in this culture were affecting their commitment to school and their educational performance (Murdock and Phelps, 1973). This large-scale survey found that 80% of teachers in grammar schools and 42% in comprehensive schools sampled felt that the study of the mass media had little or no legitimate claim to classroom attention. The findings were widely used and debated both in Britain and elsewhere, but in the twenty years or so since then, there have been no further detailed large-scale studies.

Since then, the rise of qualitative methods in Media Studies has, however, provided much more detailed and nuanced accounts of children’s and teenagers’ media experiences and their relation to changing patterns of social division, family structures, everyday life, and personal identity. Within education there has been a vigorous debate about the use of media in schools and about the value of Media Education. More recently, these arguments have been given added impetus by the rise of increasingly interactive media. As the influential Cox Report in England noted, in this new context, Media Education must aim “to create more active and critical media users who will demand, and could contribute to, a greater range and diversity of media products” (Department of Education, 1989: 9.6). Yet we currently lack an adequate evidential context for such debates because no recent study has returned to the full range of questions raised by the 1973 study and explored them systematically across an appropriate range of contrasted educational settings.

The original Models of Media Education research project in England (Hart and Benson, 1993) explored major questions about aims and methods for Media teaching amongst teachers of English. It uncovered several areas of uncertainty about Media teaching and identified a range of models which English teachers draw on in the classroom at Key Stage 4 (ages 14-16). The project produced detailed descriptions and analyses of a wide range of approaches to teaching about the media.

A survey carried out in the Hampshire area in 1988 revealed a very wide range of understandings of and attitudes towards Media Education, but offered little insight into the detail of classroom practices. When asked to describe their own practice by questionnaire, respondents often seemed to rely on indistinct memories of significant moments which they had not managed to connect into a coherent programme of studies. The structured interviews we conducted with teachers for the Understanding the Media project (Cooper and Hart, 1990; Hart, 1991) somewhat reduced the problem of subjective recall by enabling a greater depth of investigation.

Unlike Buckingham (1990, 1993a) whose early work on Media Education concentrated on problematizing many of the claims made for Media teaching in secondary schools and on providing a revisionist account of Media learning in the context of children’s social development, we were only incidentally concerned with pupils’ learning. His critical look at the claims made for group work in developing social skills, learning to work under pressure, understanding team structures, providing opportunities for selfreflection and exploring the idea that reading texts is a process of negotiation is helpful. He endorses the view that if pupils share their pleasure in texts with their peers, their understanding is developed. Similarly, some of his most recent research (1993b, 1994) is concerned with the growth of children’s evolving understanding of television modes and processes, particularly in terms of how this operates in informal social settings. Although the questions of what and how children learn are also central to understanding how teachers teach, the focus of this project was explicitly on the latter.

Research Methodology

Classroom research has long been animated by major theoretical and methodological debates which can be sketched only briefly here (Hammersley 1993). It may be helpful, however, to discuss briefly the two methods used in our own research to collect two distinct sets of data, through structured interviews with teachers and through systematic observation of selected lessons.

In the 1960s, the dominant method for studying classroom phenomena was systematic observation. Large samples of teachers and students were observed at regular time intervals or for specified periods and recurrent events and interactions were recorded according to a pre-determined coding scheme. One of the best known of these is Flanders’ Interaction Analysis Categories (FIAC), but there are now more than 100 others. Systematic observation has been frequently criticised as having some major flaws (Walker and Adelman 1975; Delamont and Hamilton 1984). For example, using pre-determined categories may prevent insight into unpredicted complex behaviours. At the same time, arbitrary time-sampling neglects and may distort ‘natural’ classroom interaction patterns; and restriction to classroom settings ignores the contexts of teacher and student cultures, and the assumptions and intentions which envelop them.

Whilst this research method has been ably defended (McIntyre and Macleod 1978), it is clear that FIAC and other coding systems are not equally suited to all classroom situations. FIAC is particularly appropriate for coding talk in a ‘transmission’-type classroom but produces difficulties in coping with talk in small-group contexts where pupils talk to each other. The external systematic observer is also unlikely to understand, let alone to code adequately, many of the detailed connotative aspects of classroom talk. A great deal of talk in ‘open’ classrooms necessarily remains hidden.

During the 1970s and 1980s, an increased emphasis on “naturalistic study of everyday settings employing relatively unstructured, qualitative methods” (Hammersley 1993: x) gained favour amongst classroom researchers. Through the influence of several different but interlocking approaches (in particular, ethnography, ethnomethodology, interactionism and phenomenology) there has been a marked shift away from the study of large samples and the use of quantitative analysis and statistical explanations towards the production of ‘thicker’, more in-depth data based on ethnographic techniques. Amongst a range of interpretive and qualitative approaches, the case-study method has come to dominate classroom research.

Unlike full-scale ethnography, which necessarily involves extended periods of intensive participant observation, case studies have the distinct advantage of enabling research results and recommendations to be produced within a usable time-frame because they reduce the amount of necessary researcher time spent in a given setting. At the same time, case studies offer the subjects who participate a greater measure of control over the research process through negotiated access to data and publication of findings. Both of these factors are especially significant in school settings, where teachers are both extremely busy and have a legitimate professional interest in classroom research which may enhance good practice.

The case-study approach using ethnographic techniques emphasises description and analysis rather than theoretical perspectives. It does not involve the rigorous setting up and testing of hypotheses so much as the evolution of appropriate theoretical explanations for the data collected. Although our experience and previous research have suggested some potentially reliable hunches, our approach in this project was heuristic rather than demonstrative, illuminative rather than revelatory.

What are English teachers doing when they say they are doing Media Education at Key Stage 4 (ages 14-16) in secondary schools?

In the light of our earlier experiences in interviewing teachers informally (Cooper and Hart, 1990) we used structured interviews to investigate teachers’ motivations, aims and anxieties in greater depth. We also carried out systematic observation of lessons and included a de-briefing process with the teachers interviewed. Eleven teachers were interviewed for about an hour each during a six-month period in 1992. A Media lesson (also averaging about an hour) was later observed by the interviewer. Interviews were recorded on cassette and transcripts sent to the interviewees to check for accuracy. An essential conclusion to every interview was to ask for a brief description of the lesson we were to observe and a full account of the lesson’s aims.

Our basic research question was made operational by focusing on two major sub-questions:

The setting for observation was the classroom and the focus was on the teachers’ instructions, questions, responses and other actions. Coding of teachers’ strategies was carried out according to a systematic observation schedule, but not according to a given time-frame. Because the judgement of an event’s significance was entirely in the hands of the lesson observer, observations were necessarily high-inference. But, as with all systematic observation processes, they have the distinct advantage of being made explicit. The main variables were:

Figure 1

More detailed indicators of these variables included, for example, lesson follow-up, room, furniture, equipment, noise, interruptions, response, timing. The ‘Key Concepts’ identified were based on the BFI’s ‘Signpost Questions’ shown in Figure 2. These provided a robust but flexible framework for coding different conceptual focuses in both the lessons and the interviews.

Figure 2 (after Bazalgette, C. (Ed.) 1989: 8): Signpost Questions

Using this form of coding for observation meant that we were able to avoid some of the recurrent criticisms laid at the door of the ethnographic casestudy approach. For example:

We drew on a number of reflexive strategies to counteract these potential weaknesses. The most obvious of these was to make the research methodology explicit at each stage of the process, both in terms of its rationale and its operation. This meant critically examining each decision retrospectively and being aware of unpredicted variables which may have influenced the collection and analysis of data. It meant revealing the ‘natural history’ of decision-making and making it possible for readers of the formal project reports to form their own inferences and conclusions from the final account. Such reflexivity means including the mistakes and misunderstandings, rather than trying to cover them up. The biggest danger of our approach, however, was the potential ‘demand effect’ upon teachers. The lessons were all observed in classrooms, had all been planned in advance and explained to the observer. So, although the settings were naturalistic, the lessons may not have been ‘natural’ ones. They may have been specially provided as ‘show-case’ lessons for the benefit of the observer, whose interests were always explicit. This seems unlikely to have happened in practice, however, since there seems to be so little consonance between the pre-determined aims of lessons discussed with the observer and what actually went on in the lessons themselves. (Other explanations of this dissonance are possible, but they are not flattering towards teachers.) It may be argued that it is not at all natural for teachers to clarify aims before a lesson and stick to them. Yet lesson-planning is a foundation element of Initial Teacher Education and provides the backbone of most Professional Development courses and resources, so this is hardly a valid objection. There were also considerable advantages in having two sets of data, one from the structured interviews and one from the systematic observation of lessons. On the one hand, the empirically observable events of the classroom could be enriched and illuminated by the contextual data on teachers’ assumptions, goals and strategies revealed by the interviews. On the other hand, bearing in mind the weight of evidence that what teachers do in 16 classrooms cannot be extrapolated from their own accounts of their intentions or retrospective recall, the classroom observations provided a wealth of empirical data which facilitated comparative analysis. There is a danger, of course, of merging the two sets of data irresponsibly so as to fill in gaps in either set of data. This danger was overcome, however, by carefully keeping them in separate analytical domains. A list of questions was devised to provide the basis for the structured interviews with teachers before the classroom observation took place. These questions sought to differentiate classroom approaches to Media Education in terms of aims, content and methods. In addition, the questions attempted a brief exploration of the teachers’ previous experience and their perceptions of Media Education’s status in their schools. This approach was adopted on the grounds that teaching does not take place in a cultural vacuum.

Sample Section

Schools were chosen after enquiries to appropriate authorities about centres within a fifty-mile radius of Southampton University known to have an interest in Media Education. The selection of schools was made by: a study of addresses supplied by the Southern Examining Group of schools in Hampshire and Dorset known to be running GCSE Media Studies courses; the mailing list of Southampton Media Education Group; lists of secondary schools supplied by Hampshire’s four Divisional Education Offices; lists held by Hampshire Schools Inspectorate of schools known to be teaching Media and, in particular, to have entered candidates for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) Media Studies in l991; personal contact with Heads of English Departments. The Southern Examining Group’s list provided five of the eleven schools visited. Three were chosen from centres known to have sent teachers to Media Education courses at Southampton University and a further three were gained through personal contacts. Ten of the schools are in Hampshire and one in Dorset. Area Education Offices were most helpful in sending addresses of all the centres in their areas. Fourteen centres were contacted through Heads of English Departments. Only two centres failed to reply, while a third showed interest but dates proved impracticable. Although the intention had been to interview and observe on separate days, six teachers expressed a definite preference for completing both sessions in a single visit. The choice of individual teachers to be interviewed and observed was largely in the hands of Heads of Departments, although it was clear that we needed to meet teachers with a commitment to Media Education. The selected sample had either volunteered or been asked at Department meetings because of their known interest in Media work.

Interviews

With the teachers’ agreement, interviews were normally recorded on audiocassette but notes were taken in order to make supplementary questions possible. The interviews generally lasted for about an hour and were based on a common set of structured questions. (See Figure 3) The main aims of the preliminary interview were to discover what the teachers intended to do in the lessons we observed. We also wanted to formulate a preliminary description of these lessons so that the we would be tuned in to significant elements and approaches. It might often be important to understand the personal and social constraints that influence the teacher’s approach. A teacher might, for example, perceive the attitudes of the other members of the department to be skeptical of Media Education. In these circumstances, a perceived need to justify lessons in terms of the development of language skills or to set tasks which emphasise written composition might influence the mode of teaching. Similarly, a teacher might bring to Media Education a background of literary theory, semiology, or industrial experience, for example, that might strongly influence the selection of, and approach to, themes. For these reasons it was thought worthwhile to explore the backgrounds of the teachers involved in the research and their perceptions of the status of, and support for, Media Education within the department and school.

Figure 3: Questions for Structured Interviews

Background

Support

Aims

Methods and Content

How far do you find it necessary to produce your own resource material? If you were advising a teacher new to Media Education about resources what would you say?

Has your work in Media Education influenced what you teach in, or how you teach, other subjects?

Focus

Although the original aim of the interviews was to establish the specific aims of the lesson to be observed, it was one of the rewards of the research that these interviews also proved to be extremely revealing of the continuities and differences in teachers’ approaches and perceptions. It soon became clear that much longer interviews could be justified for the value of the data obtained. Teachers were very articulate and often expressed appreciation of the opportunity the interview had given them to explore and share their thoughts.

After analysis of the interview transcripts, profiles of the interviewees which focused on their preferred teaching styles were returned to the teachers for comment and addition. The main purpose of returning profiles to teachers was to provide a check on their validity, so that they might act as reliable frameworks for interpreting the lesson observations which were to follow. It was also, however, a courtesy to busy professionals who had given time and effort to assisting with the research. Teachers often complain that they are asked to take part in research projects but rarely hear any accounts of the work done or see any benefits to education practice. Every effort was made to emphasise the expected value of the project in developing recommendations for the practice and resourcing of Media Education.

Lesson Observations

the balance of time for the parts of the lesson; the nature and style of questions; the degree and nature of pupil participation; the resources used; the tasks set; the concepts available to pupils and the language used by teacher and pupils. An account of each lesson was written and sent to the teacher concerned for comment. Audiocassette recording and photographing was used with the consent of the teacher.

e. g. follow-up, room, furniture, equipment, noise, interruptions, response, timing.

All teachers gave permission for their lessons to be tape-recorded and for photographs to be taken. Observation was normally from the rear of the classroom so as to be inconspicuous, though teachers always introduced the observer to the classes and had usually told pupils in advance of the visit. Where group work was a major part of the lesson, the observer was usually invited to sit in on or talk to groups.

There were problems in observing lessons. The presence of an observer is inhibiting for most teachers, who might consequently be tempted to play safe with lessons that were unlikely to prove challenging. Teachers in fact displayed great integrity in continuing with established programmes of work rather than offering ‘one-off’ favourite lessons, but this usually meant that the lessons seen were part of a sequence, often of three or more weeks’ work. The project’s constraints of time meant that teachers’ favourite lessons could rarely be seen: a project of at least four terms’ duration would be needed to ensure that this difficulty could be overcome. Instead, teachers were given the chance during the interview to describe favourite lessons. The research methods and instruments adopted were relatively simple and transparent. We laid no traps, attempted no trick questions and kept the participants as fully informed as possible throughout. We invited them to a follow-up conference when the research was in draft form to meet external consultants on the project and to another conference to discuss a Professional Development book (Hart and Hackman 1995) which we prepared as one of the means of disseminating the research.

Outcomes

The lessons we studied and the teachers we interviewed revealed the teachers’ limited experience of media processes and agencies. This meant a restriction of range to relatively familiar areas. Like media texts they studied with pupils, they were strongly constrained by their own institutional and ‘production’ contexts. Agency, Industry, Institutions and Production, which are arguably most central to teaching about the media, were rarely addressed by teachers. At the same time, although there is as yet little research to substantiate it, these are probably the areas in which pupils have least expertise (see the final paper [no. 9] in this series for a fuller discussion of this issue).

It was noted earlier that our method of identifying teachers’ purposes before the lessons were taught may have been responsible for an element of artificiality in what we observed. In reality, however, having both structured interviews and lesson observations supplied us with a set of case studies which illuminated one of the most interesting areas of the problem we were examining: the relationships among the experience of teachers, the scope of their lessons, and the Media expertise they were able to draw on with confidence.

The International Models of Media Education Project

As a result of the success of the Models of Media Education project in England and contacts with other researchers, a collaborative project was established to develop the research internationally. The 1989 Lausanne symposium organised by Jean-Pierre Golay, the 1990 New Directions colloquy in Toulouse and the 1990 conference in Natal, South Africa, were all crucial opportunities for Media educators to meet and discuss their own work and developments in their local contexts. The Constructing Culture conference in Guelph, Ontario, run by the Association for Media Literacy in May 1992, went a step further by enabling leading Media Education researchers to meet and discuss potential collaboration in this project. Participants in the international agreed to use the same methods and instruments as were developed for the original English project, with similar cohorts of students and teachers, in order to provide a relatively fixed lens through which classroom approaches in different educational and cultural contexts could be observed.

Three years later, in June 1995, many of the participants in the study met again during the 4th Pedagoxia da Imaxe at La Coruna, Spain, for the first ‘World Meeting’ of researchers on Media Education, where the successful completion of nearly all of the studies initiated in 1992 was confirmed. Most of the contributors met again in June, 1996 at La Coruna for the 5th Pedagoxia da Imaxe conference to finalise their work.

Debates between conflicting views about the media of the future have strongly influenced current thinking about appropriate forms of education. Our research has identified a range of teaching models which will help conceptualise a wide range of practice amongst teachers of English. It shows how classroom strategies and practices in different countries are responding to the new technological developments and ideological debates. By providing two distinct but related sets of data on Media teachers’ rationales for their work (from in-depth interviews with small purposive samples of teachers) and Media teachers’ classroom methods (from systematic observation), the study has created a new basis which enables us to begin to:

Although they may sometimes appear to, teachers do not function independently of larger controls. What we are able to explore through the lens of comparative analysis is the extent to which national, regional and district cultures and policies impact on local practices. There is a necessary (and desirable) tension between the allocative controls of statutory educational frameworks and the operational controls of individual teachers in their classrooms. The spaces, resources, temporal frames and class sizes they operate within strongly influence, but do not completely determine, their aims and methods. So too with their personal biographies and goals. Our interviews and observations give us insights into some of the complex interactions between cultures, teachers, students, resources, methods and curricular contexts in educational settings. We have experienced a series of adventures into the minds and classrooms of teachers who are attempting to relate their curricula and methods to developments in information and communication technology and the cultures of young people. There are some general similarities of approach and some sharp differences which demonstrate how important it is to resist the temptation of ‘exporting’ models of good practice to inappropriate contexts and to reject some of the colonialist assumptions which have deeply affected English teaching around the world during this century. Our findings show, above all, that we need to think globally but to work locally if we are to develop approaches to Media Education which systematically address increasingly powerful ‘mediatization’ and globalization processes whilst at the same time creating classroom strategies which genuinely reflect the vernacular demands of different cultural contexts.

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This work, and any part of it, is copyright. Putting any part of this work to any unauthorised use is a punishable offence and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproduction, translation, copying, micro-filming, electronic storage or any other electronic re-working.

1I would like to thank members of the Southern Media Education Research Network for their continuing interest in this research. In particular, I am grateful to Andrew Goodwyn of Reading University and Graham Murdock of Loughborough University for their contributions to the development of some parts of this chapter.

2However ugly this term may seem to English speakers, it is preferred here to the even uglier form ‘mediazation’ used by Thompson (1990) in Ideology and Modern Culture, where he defines it as “the ways in which the symbolic forms in modern societies have become increasingly mediated by mechanisms and institutions of mass communication” (p.75)

WHO is communicating with whom?	AGENCIES
WHAT type of text is it?	CATEGORIES
HOW is it produced?	TECHNOLOGIES
HOW do we know what it means?	LANGUAGES
WHO receives it and what sense do they make of it?	AUDIENCES
HOW does it present its subject?	REPRESENTATIONS