Media Literacy: Essential Survival Skills for the New Millennium
Barry Duncan
Barry Duncan is an award-winning teacher, author, consultant, and past president of the Association for Media Literacy (Ontario). This article is reprinted with permission from Orbit (vol. 35, no. 2, 2005).
Issue Contents
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We live in a mediated world, a “global village,” as Marshall McLuhan famously described it. Events such as 9/11, the war in Iraq , teen pop idol Britney Spears’ 24-hour marriage, Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Superbowl, and the latest “reality” television all blend into a strange media brew. In this article, Barry Duncan outlines the place of media education and media literacy in the classroom.
We have to reckon with new and evolving communication technologies: from cellphones to digital cameras, from internet chat rooms to the mind-boggling information resources available on the World Wide Web. The expanded communication territory and the blurring of boundaries between entertainment, popular culture, consumption, and communication suggest that we include within our understanding of media such sites as shopping malls, pop icons like Barbie dolls and Pokémon, and the buzz about brand-driven fashions. According to Canadian culture critic Naomi Klein, “brands are today’s new rock stars.” Mass media and popular culture represent multi-billion dollar opportunities for global marketers peddling the latest goodies for teens and ’tweens, and a major concern for parents and caregivers. It should be no surprise that media literacy has finally entered our schools. While its reception has been grudging at times, media literacy is no longer seen as a superficial frill, but as an essential component of the curriculum.
Media Literacy Defined
In 1989, the Ontario Association for Media Literacy (AML) offered this definition for the Ministry of Education’s Media Literacy Resource Guide:
“Media literacy is concerned with developing an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. It is education that aims to increase students’ understanding and enjoyment of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products.” |
These products include: writing detailed TV scripts, creating satiric collages, or editing complex video material.
We use media for a variety of purposes and contexts in the classroom. It is important to distinguish between “teaching about” and “teaching through” the media. Many teachers use media as audio-visual aids to support subject content—teaching through— while teaching about media presupposes a critical approach, where media texts themselves are explored in terms of their form, strategies, organization, referents, points of view, and so on. However, there is no reason why both approaches can’t co-exist to generate a more thoughtful, culturally relevant curriculum.
Watching a media literacy class in which students, armed with digital cameras, tell their stories is an exhilarating educational experience. Messy at times and seemingly chaotic, creative media projects demonstrate that theory and practice must support each other.
Origins
The first wave of media education emerged in the 1960s, catalyzed by the U.S. civil rights movement, influenced by feminism and the questioning of media coverage of the Vietnam War. In Canada , cultural nationalisms and the emergence of a Canadian film and television industry shaped early media education efforts. Alarming TV viewing statistics of young people helped motivate teachers and parents. Until recently, when Internet usage surged ahead, the average teen had logged 15,000 hours of television by the end of Grade 12, in contrast with spending 11,000 hours in the classroom.
Initially a “movement” of enthusiastic classroom teachers, it was not until the 1990s, largely due to the proliferation of digital media, that Canadian media education began to be taken seriously by education policy makers.
In 1986, Ontario was the first jurisdiction in North America to make media literacy a mandatory part of the curriculum, from K to Grade 12. Following that decision, the widely recognized Media Literacy Resource Guide was published in 1989 by the Association of Media Literacy. By 1997, the rest of Canada had followed and media literacy was embedded in provincial policy guidelines for all English/language arts programs. Typically, media literacy is established as a “strand” assuming 25% of the expectations set out in provincial guidelines for the English/language arts curriculum.
While some teachers may pay only lip service to these requirements, at least they are contained in mandated guidelines. As more teachers receive in-service training, enrol in Additional Qualification courses, or conduct their own research, they welcome media education in their classroom, not as an add-on but as a creative and culturally relevant opportunity for learning. In several provinces, media studies is offered as a complete stand-alone credit, usually at the Grade 11 level.
Key Concepts
Media literacy is drawn from many fields, including sociology, psychology, political theory, gender and race studies, as well as cultural studies, art, and aesthetics. The work of Marshall McLuhan and others in communication studies is also important. The field is dynamic, with different approaches, yet there is considerable international consensus on important concepts and areas to be covered in media analysis.
CODES AND CONVENTIONS
Consider how different media communicate messages. In learning about film, for example, we look at the technical codes of close-ups, zooms, dissolves, pans, and tilts, and the effects created by sound and special effects. Further investigations in codes and conventions might address the use of the TV news anchor’s desk as a symbol of authority or the images of death and satanic destruction in CD covers of heavy metal music.
VALUES AND IDEOLOGY IN MEDIA
We all have a set of beliefs about the world which shapes our fears and aspirations, from the roles of schooling, attitudes to same sex marriage to the role of police. Typical questions when analyzing a media text or image: Who is in a position of power? Who is not? Does the text exclude any groups of people or their beliefs?
MEDIA AND INDUSTRY
The commercial organization and implications of the mass media need to be recognized; otherwise, we are culturally naïve and socially irresponsible about the basis of our systems of communication. Most of our entertainment and communication technologies are owned by a small number of global corporations, e.g., Time Warner, Disney, and Viacom. Issues around concentration of ownership and control also apply to merged media corporations in Canada , such as Bell /Globe Media and Canwest/Global. Does this level of control influence what stories get told and how, and how different groups are represented? Lest the topic seem too abstract, consider recent documentaries on Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and Nike. Help students investigate monopolies, the extent of corporate resources for advertising, and the incredibly powerful role of public relations’ initiatives. Critical marketing has become the most important aspect of modern media. (Consult Naomi Klein’s invaluable book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Random House, 2000.)
MEDIA AND AUDIENCE
Audience is used in two different ways
For elementary school teachers who inevitably cross subject borders, media literacy approaches can shape and unify several curriculum strands.
In the Media Classroom
In the media classroom, we want to pursue thoughtful media analysis in which it is understood that class discussions and reflection are the basis for constructing new knowledge. In this context, the classroom is a “site of struggle” in which meanings are negotiated. U.K. educator Len Masterman insists that media studies should be inquiry-centred, co-investigative (it does not seek to impose a specific set of values), and egalitarian (teachers and students share media experiences, but may have different interpretations).
Early models of media education denigrated young people’s popular culture. The media were seen as bad and students needed to be taught how to discriminate and resist. There are still teachers who believe that such approaches are appropriate and that students need to be culturally inoculated. More recent models presume a richer and more diversified vision of society, where popular culture plays a key role in our everyday lives. Such models recognize the dynamics of power, the role of pleasure and politics, and consider media as a significant influence on identity formation. Along with the liberating elements implicit in audience theory, as well as student-directed media production, such models empower students to make up their own minds about challenging ideas and classroom debates, fostering conditions for critical autonomy. Without going on a crusade of media bashing fuelled by moral panics, the media classroom deserves openness, intellectual rigor, loads of enthusiasm, and a willingness to take risks.
Teachers can begin by acknowledging their own problematic and contradictory passions and by being prepared, when appropriate, to share them. Playing “spot the stereotype” is limited in itself. Why not encourage students to write thoughtful papers on their media pleasures and encourage them to use media logs for open-ended responses? Encourage mainstream readings of popular television texts and then model some oppositional readings. Encourage students to transfer insights developed in the media classroom into other areas: the politics of schooling, the role of authority in the family, and the world of work.
References
Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture. London : Polity.
Masterman, L. (1989). Teaching the media. London : Routledge.
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