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.