Autor: Tilmann P

Source: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~mec/MECWEB/Teaching Media in the New Millennium.pdf [12.08.2003] Southampton 2000. P. 1-15.

Published with kind permission of the Graduate School of Education, University of Southampton.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 1

WHAT SHOULD WE STUDY? 4

Media Agencies 5

Media Audiences 5

Media Representations 6

HOW SHOULD WE STUDY THE MEDIA? 7

Practical Work 8

Critical Autonomy 11

CONCLUSION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? 12

REFERENCES 14

INTRODUCTION

The study of media is still a very new academic discipline in schools. Even in the UK, where it has been established for some time, it is still less than half a century old. Many teachers are keen to respond in the classroom to the demands of rapidly changing commercial, official and vernacular cultures, but are finding it difficult to know exactly how to do so, especially given the lack of appropriate training available. There are no easy solutions to the problem. But it is fairly simple to describe what Media¹ teachers should know: Media teachers should be able to answer three simple questions:

Most of this paper is concerned with the second and third questions, but first some basic definition will be helpful. Perhaps the most well known definition appeared in the report of the Cox Committee that formed the basis of the first National Curriculum specifications for teaching English language and literature within statutory education (ages 5-16):

Media Education...seeks to increase children’s critical understanding of the media...(It) aims to develop systematically children’s critical and creative powers through analysis and production of media artefacts...Media Education aims to create more active and critical media users who will demand, and could contribute to, a greater range and diversity of media products.

A less publicised but more manageable definition, by Bob Ferguson, defines Media Education as

an endless enquiry into the way we make sense of the world and the ways others makes sense of the world for us. (Hart, 1998, p. 100)

But the fullest rationale for studying the media has been produced by Len Masterman, who offers seven basic reasons for studying the media (Masterman 1985: pp. 1-17). He points to the increasing Saturation of the environment with media texts and processes, from television programmes to shopping bags: media usage is the single most time-consuming activity in most people’s waking lives. Ideology (or “ the selective construction of social knowledge” ) is embedded in all forms of media communication: the topics and treatments that seem so natural and transparent are always the product of someone else’s agenda and choices. Information has become subject to ever higher degrees of Management through public relations agencies, and increasingly market-differentiated access to it that produces inequalities in knowledge. Politics depends to a greater extent than ever on ‘sound-bites’ and ‘photo-opportunities’, as if the real power-broking and decision-making in our national lives took place in a virtual media world at a distance from the everyday lives of citizens. In order to participate actively in democratic practices, it is vital to understand and have some say in media processes. Literacy has become a social practice that depends on new visual and electronic competencies. This dimension will become critical in the future.

So there is an urgent need of Education for the Future. As media organisations become increasingly trans-national, information, entertainment and education are no longer guaranteed their place in the public domain. Formal education comes under threat from commercial competition and values and all the remaining elements of the ‘public sphere’ are subjected to an accelerating process of Information-privatisation. In an increasingly ‘mediatized’ world, media forms become commodities to be bought at a price in the market-place.

Other reasons have become apparent since Masterman wrote Teaching the Media, and I should like to add three further ones of my own. First, the growing significance of Digitization in the recording, storage and transmission of words, images and data and the convergence of previously distinct technologies that digitization enables, raise new issues about personal privacy, surveillance and security. These issues demand our attention and the study of public media is an obvious route into them.

Second, the process of Globalization means that the world communications market is affecting more and more local markets. New digital technologies, often supported by neoliberal politics, are spreading across the world, encouraging consolidation of media ownership, the expansion of financial markets and a huge growth in international commerce.

All these aspects of globalization raise important issues about national identities, cultural homogenisation and inequalities of access between the ‘media-rich’ and the ‘media-poor’ nations.

Finally, implicit in all the previous reasons for studying the media, there is the need for each individual to take responsibility for their own Moral and Spiritual Development, not just as citizens, but as humans. For those who embrace a post-modernist worldview, this may seem an unfashionable or even impossible position to take up. But it is precisely the spread of postmodernism that makes such an emphasis necessary. Media Education is unavoidably concerned with learning about values. It involves a search for meaning and purpose in relation to challenging life-experiences; the growth of self-awareness and responsibility for one’s own experience and identity; the development of self-respect; recognition of the worth of others and the importance of relationships; the importance of compassion, of imaginative engagement with experience and of creative activity. Moral development is based on a conscious will to behave in a morally principled way in the context of agreed social codes and conventions. It expresses itself in the making of reasoned and responsible decisions.

WHAT SHOULD WE STUDY?

The media select and process facts for us. Because they do so systematically, they necessarily affect the way we interpret what they are saying. As well as informing us, the media also shape us. In order to understand more fully how the process works, we need to become literate in the various languages of the media. Becoming media-literate means more than just responding to media messages. It also means understanding how they work, how they differ from personal experience and how they differ from each other. It means learning about their dominant styles and being able, when necessary, to use them. Media Education is not the acquisition of a body of knowledge about specific media texts, forms or languages, but a means of developing critical competence and understanding. It is a discipline that has its own theoretical framework, distinctive key principles and core concepts, and a characteristic mode of enquiry. Media Education is a life-long process. Study of the media in schools seeks to develop a permanent framework for understanding media forms and institutions, by examining and revisiting a range of media texts. This framework is based on five key principles.

Figure 1: Key Principles of Media Education

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

We can look briefly here at three of these areas in a little more detail: agencies, audiences and representations.

Media Agencies

Current patterns of ownership and control in the media, the growth of ‘advertorials’ ‘infotainment’, ‘product placement’, programme sponsorship and the blending of editorial and promotional material make an understanding of the political economy of media agencies, the more urgent. The profit motive has traditionally been blamed for the worst excesses of the media. Yet learning about the media demands much more than a knee-jerk condemnation of advertising. There are many more interesting questions to ask at a time when government is using national advertising campaigns against AIDS, drink and drugs and when pop musicians are raising millions for the relief of famine. A media-literate person would know something about why some campaigns work and others fail and would be able to explore questions like why Britain can sustain such a successful advertising industry in such a fragile economy; or how advertising can claim that many products are environmentally friendly when the very purpose of advertising has traditionally been to promote consumption.

Media Audiences

Much has been written recently about how media audiences bring their own concerns and values to their interpretation of texts and how they respond actively as makers, not just receivers of meaning. Yet there are still widespread fears that electronic forms of popular culture are somehow damaging and endangering young people. To find out more about how young audiences respond to the media, we studied some 14-year-old school state school students. On the surface, their involvement with media seemed passive: logs of their viewing, reading and listening initially suggested that they did little but watch television soaps and listen to pop music on commercial radio. The only thing that broke this continuous involvement was school, where, one student claimed, ‘There’s not much media’. But when we talked to them in more depth, we found evidence of more active motivation. Under the apparent indifference lay quite complex personal agendas. Most of their listening and viewing was done alone, although they talked at length with fiends about their experience. Almost none of their viewing was in groups or with their families. The main motives for their habits were clearly credibility with their peers and differentiation from their families. When we asked them to track their families’ habits, we found that strange dialogues began. One 14 year-old student had to enlist the help of her older sister in getting her father to take her survey questions seriously. Apparently some families don’t talk to each other much, not even about television. Far from being a shared experience, television has become for this group a privatised medium that can be used like radio. We also found that for these teenagers, reading was a very private and personal activity that they were slow to talk about because much of it drew on sensitive issues. It was a process that, like music, closely involved their identities. We found that the apparent degree of active engagement with texts depended on how the young people were questioned. The more detailed the questions, the more complex and active the response.

Media Representations

Representation is a much used but not always well understood concept. It is useful primarily because it reminds us that the media are not simply a window on the world: they represent the world in some way. In reporting on the world, they make particular, recurrent senses of it: They refract it, rather than reflect it. But Representation has several different meanings.

Figure 3: Media Representations (Lusted and Drummond, 1985, p. 44)

HOW SHOULD WE STUDY THE MEDIA?

The role of Media Education is to help students to enjoy a wide range of media and to be aware of how they work. We need to accept the validity of the specific meanings that young readers create through their reading of many different kinds of texts. Only then can they develop into readers who can make their own sophisticated judgements. Ultimately, they should be able to speak independently and with confidence about the characteristic forms and pleasures of a range of different kinds of texts. This process necessarily involves them in becoming more active media readers and audiences. As they become increasingly able to create a critical distance between themselves and the media texts they value, they are moving towards the kind of critical autonomy that is essential for operating as citizens. The essential task for teachers is not to make qualitative distinctions between literary and media texts nor to place them on some form of hierarchical scale. Rather, it is to help students learn how to evaluate for themselves any kind of text according to content, form and context. Knowing about the contexts of production and consumption is a necessary basis for understanding how to read texts. The realisation that texts are constructed rather than discovered is central to the development of higher level reading skills. Successful learning in Media Education can only come from teaching that acknowledges schools as sites of cultural struggle, where values are contested in debate and discovered through active involvement, and where students learn about and test out values for themselves in practical classroom situations. As a result, Media Education has developed a distinctive mode of enquiry, that can be characterised in three dimensions:

Figure 4 : Media Education as a Mode of Enquiry

Practical Work

Apart from understanding the basic purposes and principles of Media Education, teachers also have to cope with practical work. Although practical work can include anything that happens in the classroom, many teachers think of it as to do with technology. But media technology needs approaching with care. Using video, for example, requires some technical skills; it is often time consuming, expensive and frustrating. It may also lead to poor quality work and does not magically guarantee any increase in understanding the media. Using complex technology may actually mystify rather than clarify. The two main problems are using the technology effectively and ensuring that theoretical issues are raised in the process. Mastering the technology without understanding the issues is as inadequate as theoretical understanding without experience.

Figure 5: Practical Work

any activity which involves the process of constructing meanings using images, sound, film or video...from brief exercises which act as agenda-setters or talking points with limited outcomes, through to fairly complex simulations or polished pieces of video: the end product will vary according to the context and objectives of the exercise. (Grahame and Mayman, 1987, pp. 9-10)

Students cannot and should not aspire to the standards of broadcasting and should work within the limitations of the technology at their disposal to construct alternatives rather than replications of existing material. (Grahame and Mayman, 1987, pp. 9-10)

There is a clear distinction between doing practical work and doing production work. It is similar distinction to that between production for dramatic performance (theatre) and participation in drama processes (drama in education). Both are important areas within Media Education but should not be confused. The essential focus of practical work is on having something to say. But it is not just a question of articulation. There is also an overriding need to relate what is learned to wider social experience, to recognise the contexts into which that experience can feed, so that students are able to apply their understanding rather than simply express critical opinions. If this need is not realised, teachers are in danger of developing “a generation of worldy-wise cynics who teach others only so that others may be in the know.” (Ferguson, 1977, p. 60)

Twenty five years ago, the first systematic study of education about the media in English schools strongly advocated the production by students of texts for particular contexts. Students’ Media assignments, they suggested, “ should be produced with a real audience or public in mind...the school, or even better, the local neighbourhood. (Murdock and Phelps, 1973, p. 143) Teaching through media production and teaching in social contexts are both strategies that can make the task of Media teachers more effective and specialist Media teachers frequently incorporate such approaches in their work. Yet one of the most surprising absences in much Media work is the study of media texts through production or in action in actual social contexts.

So how can we incorporate the social context of production in the classroom? First of all, we need to recognise that how we assess practical work has a big impact on what students learn from it. A great deal of work submitted by students for assessment is missing the important dimension of personal experience and significance. What students produce for assessment depends on how they work and what they learn during the course. It depends on them taking an active part and being more responsible for their own learning. Working in small taskoriented groups produces potential gains in social and communication skills. But handling recorded material, making editorial decisions, constructing a perspective and making a product for an audience also have a practical and critical dimension. Practical simulations involving news reporting can usefully lead into a more systematic examination of news values. This kind of learning by doing is both more immediate and more demanding than traditional approaches. It also helps students become more aware of what they are learning and enables them to transfer their understanding to other media products and processes. The assignments they produce for course work will then reflect this process. But practical work need not necessarily depend on using lots of equipment. It can be based on the simplest of technologies like pens and paper, or more complex but accessible ones like audiotape and word-processors.

This means a change in the role of teachers. It means learning how to organise group work effectively and being able to stand back from such work. It means more one-to-one tutorial work, helping students more with devising appropriate assignments to take on, with setting goals for themselves, monitoring their work and helping them develop evaluation skills to apply to their own work. It also means taking more risks than traditional methods have required. Such work places teachers in a position where they often do not know the answers and where they are prepared to allow students to make mistakes.

Figure 6: Taking Risks

“Modern teaching techniques, whatever the subject, entail risks for the teacher. It’s much safer to stand up at the front with the syllabus on your table and to go through it chronologically as it were – step by step – guaranteeing that the students will give back to you what you’ve given to them. The best ones will give it back to you coherently and the worst ones will give it back to you incoherently but everybody will have a measure of success. I think something that we have to get over very quickly, is that they are going to be allowed to make mistakes. There’s a tendency with the increasing levels of course work to assume that every time the student puts pen to paper, he or she is being tested. They’ve got to be allowed to do rotten written work and learn from it.” (Alec Laurie, Teacher) When the nature of classroom work changes, the traditional essay will inevitably lose some of its dominance as a form of assessment and a whole range of new forms will be necessary. The figure lists some of the most common alternatives to the essay:

Figure 7: Some Forms of Assessment for Practical Media Work

Critical Autonomy

The ideal to which Media classroom methods aspire is democratic and participatory, not passive and autocratic. Group work focuses on reflection and action rather than repetition and reproduction.

Individual students’ views matter and their articulation is vital in Media lessons. Through small group and whole class interaction, genuine dialogue is encouraged that enables a wide variety of ‘readings’ and views to be represented, assumptions to be questioned and contradictions to emerge.

Sharing and analysing individual responses to media texts reveals a wide range of possibilities, but usually focuses on a ‘preferred’ reading as the dominant one in a given culture. Questions about the origins, purposes and language of texts help to create a dialogue around interpretation. These interpretations will show a degree of cultural uniformity but also the particularity of individual readings. In this way, students grasp that culture is realised inside each individual, rather than being something ‘outside’. In the process of engaging with texts for themselves, they are learning about making decisions and judgements of value. They are learning to be ‘critically autonomous’. ‘Critical autonomy’ can be developed further by encouraging ‘negotiated’ or ‘oppositional’ readings that deviate from or subvert the ‘preferred’ reading.

Teaching about the media involves new ways of looking at familiar things. It also means listening to what students tell us about their media habits. By bringing the worlds of media information and formal education together in a constructive way, Media Education can be both accessible and powerful. It opens up the potential for a form of literacy that is more than functional and that recognises that information is always value-laden. Values need to be learnt in an active and interrogative way rather than passively absorbed.

Students need to learn how to decode culture from the inside and for themselves. They need to examine and reflect on the social world of values through the medium of individual consciousness and identity. They also need to articulate their responses to cultural texts in social contexts that will make their own and others’ responses accessible, visible and negotiable.

CONCLUSION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

So the Media teacher of the future will encourage critical thinking in students through practical activities. He or she will also need to understand media as institutions, rather than just series of texts. Like schools, media institutions are recognisable by the changing forms and norms that they establish over time. They demand certain kinds of discourses, values, professional allegiances, and practices that are often made visible in the way that they speak about themselves publicly through job advertisements, information packs, and annual reports. Study of media institutions is especially significant because it is an area in which young people are most inexperienced and in most need of learning from adults who may have such experience. It involves asking questions like “What is this text for?” rather than “What is it like?” , “How was it made and how does it work?” rather than simply “What does it mean?” , and “What are its values?” rather than “What is its value?” (Branston, 1984, 1987). It also means looking for the unexpected and for uncertainties in the ways in which media organisations operate, rather than seeing them as monolithic structures that may be encompassed in thinking about the media as singular rather than plural.

The Media teacher of the future will also need to incorporate aspects of information technology into a curriculum that goes beyond embracing the traditional ‘mass media’ and that is not distracted by the inherent fascination of new technologies without reference to their ownership and socio-political functions. This will mean going beyond both the existing curriculum and the role of digital technologies in education as mere learning devices. It will mean including critical examination of software developments and information exchange and even employment patterns on a global scale.

The new digital information and communication technologies will need to be seen as more than simply information sources (eg Internet downloading) or as writing resources (for individual and collaborative drafting, editing and, formatting and presentation of texts and for multimedia authoring) or even as a publishing forum (eg uploading to the Internet) or as a means of interacting and exchanging ideas by networking and conferencing. They will also need to be seen as objects of critical study in their own right. This means studying and understanding their operation and potential not only in the classroom, but also in terms of global information exchange and communicative commerce. As Bob Ferguson has argued, the new Media educator will need to “develop a viable and ongoing engagement with the evolution of new technologies as industries, and with the ways in which multimedia approaches are being utilised for educational and other purposes.” (Ferguson, 1996, p. 68)

Under the headline ‘LONELINESS OF VIRTUAL LIVING’ (31st August, 1998), the UK daily newspaper The Guardian reported that a 2-year, $1.5 million study of Internet usage found that 169 normal adults experienced significant “deterioration of social and psychological life.” The study, called Homenet, claimed that using even such apparently sociable features as E-mail and Internet chat made people less sociable, more lonely and more depressed. One hour spent using these Internet services caused an average increase of 1% in depression, 0.4 % in loneliness, and a loss of 2.7 members of the subject’s social circle.

How should a media-literate person respond to these incredible claims? First, he or she would want to know who financed the research. In this case, it is surprising to find that it was mainly financed by hi-tech companies. Second, he or she would want to ask why this is news and would quickly place the story within the category of scare-mongering stories about new media. Third, he or she would want to evaluate these claims by seeking out the original report on the Internet and looking at the research methods more closely. Fourth, he or she would also want to know why, ironically, The Guardian printed this story about the negative effects of the Internet but then gave the web-page address for readers to follow up. Finally, he or she would want to know why the web-page contains no further information at all, only the same story in exactly the same words!

I have tried to define what Media teachers will be like in the next millennium. Media teachers will engage in practical, interactive work with students that is relevant to their own social and communicative needs, using whatever technologies are appropriate. At the same time, Media students will draw on their own knowledge and understanding of media forms and processes in the context of real media industries and institutions.

But how we teach is not just about teachers. It is also about schools as institutions and classrooms as particular kinds of pedagogical spaces. Classrooms are far from ideal places for a Media curriculum, because they are highly artificial spaces and we should not expect to find actual media interactions occurring in them as in everyday social life. But they can occasionally be abandoned in favour of visits to places where media texts are actually produced. Conversely, visits from media practitioners can be arranged and, perhaps increasingly through the mediation of new technologies, classrooms can be turned into spaces that simulate work-places. In this way, the processes of media production can be explored in a social context that can encourage students to be more reflective about their own positions in relation to the media. Media may then be recognised as events and institutions that exist in the social world of young people beyond school, as well as in classrooms.

So the Media Education of the future will depend on new kinds of teachers, new forms of teaching and new kinds of classrooms. It will focus on:

Figure 8

If the Media Education of the future is to be successful, it will need to mark the beginning of a life-long learning process that will enable students to become not just consumers and users of globalized media, but reflective and active citizens of the world.

REFERENCES

Bazalgette, C. (Ed.) (1989) Primary Media Education: A Curriculum Statement London: BFI

Ferguson (1977) Liberal Education, Media Studies and the Concept of Action Screen Education,

Grahame, J. and Mayman, N. (1987) Criminal Records: Teaching TV Crime Series London: BFI

Hart, A. P. (Ed.) (1998) Teaching the Media: International Perspectives New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Murdock, G and Phelps, G. (1973) Mass Media and the Secondary School Basingstoke: Macmillan

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1‘Media’ is spelt here with an initial capital to signify the subject discipline, as in ‘Media Education’. Otherwise, in such phrases as ‘the media’ or ‘media texts’, the normal lower case usage is adopted.

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