Media and Technology education

The review of the senior curriculum in Queensland seems to have placed media alongside English education, Design education and Production and Performance (see previous post). However, it does not make a link to Technology education. This is interesting because media has often been associated with Technology education - for example the National curriculum review in the early 1990s associated media with English, the Arts and Technology.

I think media's most natural home is within the Arts, but I also think there are significant ties to the English and Technology learning areas. I would be concerned about a senior curriculum based on "fields" of learning that did not make the connection between media and technology education for two reasons:

The first is that media education has a lot to offer technology education. Increasingly, aspects of technology education include design and productions processes - for example in the case of multimedia production. However, students are rarely required to critically reflect on the social & cultural aspects of the products they are developing. Media educators are experts in these processes, and could collaborate with technology educators to make technology education more authetic and critically reflective - to offer electives within the Technology field that do this.

Secondly, I believe the technology knowledge and skills gained within media education courses like Film, Television and New Media are often undervalued and unrecognised. Obviously, the main goal of media education is to help students become critically reflective participants in media culture as both producers and users of media. However, along the way, they develop quite sophisticated technology skills and knowledge. For example, media educators have been producing digital videos for many years, something Technology educators are now treating as cutting edge and innovative.

I would think that a technology education "field" would therefore benefit from some focus on production from a media education perspective. Also that media education classes would be given more recognition as places where ICTs are engaged with and technological literacy developed.

Of course this creates a significant dilemma - the more areas of the curriculum media is identified with, the more potential there is for it to become less developmental in a cohesive way.