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.