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.