Session Information
23 SES 04 C, Education, Policy-Making and the Media
Paper Session
Contribution
In this paper I suggest that the relatively short history of media education as a school subject illustrates the emergence and operation of what many observers call neo-liberal forms of government in education. Communication technologies and globalizing media corporations are integral to, instruments for, and sites of, neo-liberal forms of government. These are forms of government that transcend national and institutional boundaries, and works ‘at a distance,’ by creating conditions in which individuals, families and communities are recruited into their own active self-government. The global scale and transnational capacity of media and communication technologies are important in these processes, yet the particular ways in which school curricula and education policies require local investigation. Canada and England are interesting in this regard because media education was introduced quite early in each place, yet took different directions. In addition, advocates for media education in these two countries have been connected through strong professional and personal links over many years (Duncan et al. 1996; Pungente 2004; Hart & Hicks 2002).
The first part of the paper traces central features of media education discourses in Canada and England, while the second reports on interviews with key informants who have been active in the media education ‘movement.’ I argue that the appearance of media education as a school subject thirty years ago, and the different aspirations for and approaches to it over time suggest that its history is both implicated in, and made possible through, changing forms of government in and beyond education. It may even be ventured that that the ideal of the active, critical, reflective and engaged media literate student is the neo-liberal subject par excellence (Dehli 2009). Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault (Rabinow & Rose 2003), the research is framed within an assumption that media education forms a set of discourses that are ‘made up,’ and are made to work, through common sense talk among teachers and students, as well as more formal statements and debates, circulating through professional and academic journals, books, curriculum documents, courses, workshops, conferences, web-sites, electronic communication and so on. Competing claims are made to establish what counts as media education, to assert what good media pedagogy should do and be, and to describe ideal outcomes for students (Buckingham 2007; Livingstone 2009; Stack and Kelly 2003).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Buckingham, David (2007). Media Education Goes Digital: An Introduction. Learning, Media and Technology, 32 (2): 111 — 119 Dehli, Kari (2009). Media Literacy and Neo-liberal Government: Pedagogies of Freedom and Constraint. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 17(1): 57-73. Duncan, Barry, Janine D'lppolito, Cam Macpherson and Carolyn Wilson(1996). Mass Media and Popular Culture (2nd Edition), Harcourt Brace Canada, 1996 Hart, Andrew and Alan Hicks (2002). Teaching Media in the English Curriculum, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. Livingstone, Sonia (2009). Children and the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pungente, John (2004). The Canadian Experience: Leading the Way. The Jesuit Communication Project, http://jcp.proscenia.net/publications/index.htm Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (eds.) (2003). The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. New York: The New Press. Stack, Michelle & Kelly, Deirdre M. (2006). Popular Media, Education, and Resistance. Canadian Journal of Education. 29(1): 5-26.
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