Media students as media researchers

I believe one of the most under-utilized, and yet powerful, media literacy strategies to use in secondary media classrooms is media research. In particular, students can gain great insight into media audiences and institutions via well constructed research activities.

Students interviewing other students, their parents and grand parents, siblings and others about their media tastes and habits, motivations for using those media , how their media use has changed over the years and so on can provide powerful insights. Of course this might be part of a production project such as a documentary rather than a formal written paper.

Conducting primary research of historical media can also be extremely rewarding when combined with critical research questions. For example, students researching media in the 1960s might source local newspapers from that period to identify the number of movie theatres and drive-ins that existed, what the television programs of the day were and what advertisements reveal about entertainment and popular culture of the time.

Research also helps to broaden out the scope of media education which has traditionally focused on textual analysis, when concerned with theory. While student can gain a great deal from close analysis of a range of media, they can also learn a lot about processes of production and consumption by aiming to answer a range of critical questions through research.

Here are three ideas for classroom research projects:

1. Students videotape an interview with a classmate about their favourite film, television program or game, asking a range of questions that really get to the heart of their fandom.

2. Student use primary sources to research the media that was popular in the year they were born. They should look at newspapers, magazines, if available, television programs, popular music and so on.

3. Students undertake a case study of a media event - for example, the release of a new blockbuster film. As a class they use a range of sources to find out as much information as possible about the production process, target audience, use of special effects, financial matters, marketing, etc for the film. The aim is to place it in its broader social and economic context.

Media education and discourse

Previously I have mentioned that I believe media education needs to engage with post structuralist theory. The evidence is all around us that young people engage with media in post modern ways that are far better accounted for by post structuralist theory than older structuralist theories that seek to identify things like hidden ideology within texts. Young people are not the subjects of dominant ideologies that position them and offer limited life choices. They negotiate their way through multiple available subject positions that are as varied as and fluid the contexts they find themselves in. That's not to say they have complete autonomy in their choices, just that their relationship with media is complex and evolving.

Here are a couple of ideas I am negotiating myself at the moment:

Judith Baxter suggests that all individuals operate within networks of power relations and may be powerful, powerless, somewhere in between or a combination of these at any one time. Consider a typical classroom. In very simplistic terms one might ask - who has the power here? The teacher who sets the curriculum agenda? The students who can refuse to learn if they wish? The male students, supported via hegemonic masculinity, the female students supported via resistant femininity? The academic students who will be rewarded by broader social and cultural discourses or the rebels who have the power to disrupt learning? Obviously it is a combination of these. Depending on the task at hand and the interactions occurring there will be varying power relations at work. Young people's interactions with media are certainly no less complex than that.

Judith Butler argues that our identities are performative. We enact and define who we are at one and the same time and we draw on hegemonic and variational discourses to do this. We have no essential or core identity. This should be both troubling and liberating for media educators. Troubling because it suggests we have no essential sense of self except from within discourse and power relations. However, liberating because it means there is the ongoing potential (actually necessity) for there to be variation to hegemony. In other words, we all play a role in constructing what counts as hegemonic and this means we can potentially change it and continually do so.

Both these theorists demonstrate the necessity of thinking about media education as a process of local micro level interventions. That is, it is unlikely that a media education student will ever be truly "empowered" as a result of being in a media classroom, at least in a significantly life-changing way. However, students can be involved in media related activities that directly draw attention to social inequities and inaccuracies in their lives and those others. They can be encouraged to participate in discussions about issues related to themselves and their communities. They can experience classroom activities that require them to think differently about other people, ideas and places and the classroom can become a space which is open to, and supportive of, a diversity of ideas and positions about issues.

Social Media Literacy

Social media are changing the media landscape and therefore, media education will need to change alongside it. The likes of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Flickr offer individuals the opportunity to participate in media culture in unprecedented ways as producers of media, not just consumers.

While some media educators have resisted a new media in the past, on the basis that it was either the realm of technology educators or the province of geeks, there is no doubt that social media is a mainstream phenomenon and media teachers need to keep pace with developments.

Social media also brings attention to all the old issues and debates that media educators have been responding to for decades, first in relation to popular fiction, comic books and the cinema, then television, and later video games - that these media are corrupting, dangerous and anti intellectual. Of course, there is a need to be mindful of online crime, but media educators also need to fight for the right to educate about these media.

Currently, Education Queensland blocks student access to Myspace and YouTube in Queensland state schools. I believe this is a retrograde step that is akin to the proverbial ostrich sticking its head in the sand. If students aren't able to learn how to be ethical, safe and critical in relation to these spaces at school, where is this likely to occur?

In the meantime, teachers need to find alternatives to these online spaces so that students can learn about the unique nature of social media, and learn to ask critical questions about it.

AMLA Research Summit and Conference

This Friday in St Louis the Alliance for a Media Literate America kicks off its inaugural Research Summit to coincide with its biannual conference. Wish I was going... Research based media literacy conferences are rare, so it is an exciting opportunity to draw attention to what is still very much an under-researched field. Hopefully conference proceedings, or some other form of publication, will result.

Recently the AMLA also released its "Core Principles" for media literacy education. These suggest that media literacy education should be underpinned by a respect for young people's media and popular culture; that both theory and practice should feature, in an interrelated sense, in any media literacy curriculum; that media are diverse and varied and that judging some media as inferior places unnecessary limits on education about media; and that media education aims to help young people to participate in media culture. Within this there is also the adoption of the familiar key concepts of media education, with variations on the media languages, institutions, audiences, representations and technologies concepts used in several countries around the world.

Social values analysis

Social values analysis is often used in media education classrooms to get students to contemplate the ways in which media reflects the beliefs and values in society. This often includes the use of historical texts like films in which students are required to identify evidence of the social values of the period in which they were made. For example, a film like To Kill a Mockingbird might be analysed to identify evidence of the beliefs of the civil rights movements in the 1960s. This approach tends to be text centred, and structuralist in the sense that it suggests the text will have been directly effected by its production context. There is little sense that meaning is negotiated, or that films will be read differently in different contexts. One argument that has been put to me is that it would be too challenging (for students) to utlise discourse theory to help students gain a more complex understanding of the relationship between texts and social and cultural meanings. It is suggested that social values analysis is more easily understood by students and teachers alike.

However, I don’t think media education has ended its evolution. I believe we can continue to improve our approach, and part of this should be to assess new social and cultural theories to see if they have something to offer media education. I believe that social values theory is problematic because I have often taught it in the past. I used to teach a unit called Sitcoms and Social values in senior English that aimed to show students that since the 1950s social values have evolved, and that this could be identified within the texts themselves. However, I was stopped in my tracks by some of my students who couldn’t see why Lucy was supposedly a stereotypical 50s house wife when she was so independently outspoken, and by most of my students who were confused over whether or not the Simpson’s characters were stereotypes (on a variety of levels), because the evidence pointed in contradictory directions. Is Apu as racist stereotype of an Indian shopkeeper or a satire of the stereotype…etc. Of course it depends on who is reading the text – I ended up telling my students. I’m not saying everyone uses the text centric approach to social values, but when I read essays at state assessment review meetings here in Queensland, it is clear many do.

To me, our situation is similar to that which confronted media teachers in the 1970s and ‘80s when confronted by semiotics. Up until then it was easy to rely on the old sender>medium>receiver communications model. It was confronting to read Barthes, and many teacherswondered how students would ever “get” semiotics. And yet media educators have very successfully adapted semiotics for the secondary school level, as we all know. Barrie McMahon and Robyn Quin’s seminal “Reading Images” presented a model that was usable by media teachers and students, and has been internationally influential. It is common place in today’s media classrooms to hear students discussing denotative and connotative meanings and identifying technical and symbolic codes. I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to do the same with discourse theory.

I’m not suggesting that we make media studies heavily theoretical – of course we shouldn’t be discussing post structuralist theorists with them. I’m simply asking why we retain a theory that has passed its use by date (at least in terms of how it is often applied), and I don’t agree a new approach will necessarily be more difficult for students. I’m not even saying we should use the term discourse (just that we should draw more on discourse theory). Maybe we should simply talk about competing ‘social understandings’ or competing ‘social readings’ or something like that. The key thing for me is that we have an obligation to help our students understand that texts are sites of (culturally and socially invested) contested meanings, because that most accurately describes what they are. I’m not convinced that the “social values” approach, particularly when applied to historical texts, really achieves that. I think some people tend to rely on “settled” meanings of both values and texts and that’s problematic.

Film Australia's Digital Learning site - popular culture and media

Film Australia's new Digital Learning site gives teachers direct access to some excellent resources from the Film Australia archives. There are hundreds of clips relevant to a whole range of topics that might be used in the media education classroom. A search for something like 'popular culture' brings up a host of clips that have interviews with media theorists and practitioners about different aspects of popular culture.

However, just as interesting are the clips that might not seem immediately relevant to media ed that will make great resources topics as varied as gender representations, youth culture, sport and media, Australian identity and so on.

The clips are mostly of a very good length to be useful as discussion starters, or short pieces for analysis. All in all, the site should be a central resources for all Australian media educators.

U.K. Media Education Association conference 2007

In May the U.K's Media Education Association held a conference featuring Britain's leading media educators. Via the conference page, you can listen to MP3 recordings of presentations by internationally respected media education theorist, David Buckingham; former head of education at the British Film Institute and long term media education advocate, Cary Bazalgette; and media educator James Durran.

Interestingly, the U.K. Media Education Association was only established in 2006. The U.K. has never had the equivalent of Australia's Australian Teachers of Media, or Canada's Association for Media Literacy. This has most likely been due to the strong advocacy role played by the British Film Institute over the years.

If you want to know what's happening with media education in the U.K., visit the website to download the latest newsletters.

Analysis Vs Production in media education

Media education has experienced an ongoing tension between critical written analysis and media production, as evidenced by the following:

- In Australia at least, contemporary media education has descended from 1950s and '60s film appreciation which was usually conducted in English classes and film making which took place in Art classrooms. As media studies became more formalised, there was often a distinction between the "academic" approach of analysis and the vocational and practical approach of production. Often these were studied by quite distinctive groups of students, with some schools opting for one approach or the other.

- During the 1980s the legtimisation of media studies through the application of cultural studies theories marginalised student media production which was seen to reinforce dominant ideology, and anti-intellectual.

- Students often choose media studies because they want to learn how to make media, not because they want to become media analysists. This is sometimes reflected in courses where media theory is much less emphasised than production.

- Very little media analysis work seems to be based around students reflecting on, or being critical about, their own work.

It is this last point that I think is important - because this is where the potential lies for students to better understand the media ed key concepts. The media KCs should be fundamental to media education. Unless students are involved in activities that help them to make the media key concepts explicit, they are experiencing technology or multimedia education rather than media education.

Media education is education about media, and therefore production work should serve the purpose of helping students to learn about media languages, audiences, institutions, representations and technologies. They should be able to explicitly reflect on how these concepts relate to their own and others' productions.