What Futures for Media Literacy?

Well, that went well - I went a few minutes over time, but people seemed happy to stay on even though the final panel at ATOM2006 was about to start. I got to the panel a little late, and John Hartley is already in full flight - he looks to have begun by noting that literacy no longer means print literacy, nor even mainstream media literacy: indeed, most media education now takes place outside of schools, he suggests. Multimedia literacy has grown up to be totally beyond the control of the traditional education system. Unfortunately, partly because of this, schooling prefers control and order over change and innovation, and imagination and interpretation are reduced to skills and methods. This manifests itself in the prohibition of Google images and the Wikipedia, in the rise of 'critical literacy' (or ideology-watch) skills, or in 'multiliteracy' (or office software) skills, for example.

At the same time, outside of school, teenagers daydream and get up to mischief - they exercise their imaginations and construct their teenage identities through music, television, and the Internet - it's well too late to block access to these sources. This is a question of innnovation,too - where but the creative industries is new wealth creation going to emerge from, and how are these industries going to function if the 'literate' consumer/producers which they require are hampered in their development through outmoded educational systems? The teenager is the most important driver of the most important sector of economic activity. Things change very fast, but education changes very slowly... There is a choice to be made, then, for educators: change or order - control culture or system innovation.

Next up is Carmen Luke from the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. She notes the massive change in media and communication technologies which has taken place over the last 20 years - this has led to profound changes in the content and social relations of media education, to a shift in power relations between the haves and have-nots, changes in the ability to engage in media production, shifts in authority, legitimacy, and trust in published material, as well as changes to the role of schools and other educational and societal organisations, of course (including parents!). Media literacy is not just about operational skills, but about the contextual, cultural, and historical understanding of the social impact of new media and communication technologies - but indeed, a lot of that impact is itself driven by the uses made of such technologies by new generations of users. Media educators need to assist that generation in gaining the skills for understanding and analysing that impact.

Finally we're on to Karen Brooks, discussing the newly-rekindled 'culture wars' around Australian media education. There is a growing perception that the current education system has failed its students - that students emerge without sufficient reading and writing skills or are otherwise seriously deficient in their basic skills, while being schooled by 'left-wing teachers' in 'postmodernist deconstruction'. Karen suggests that the debate is one we need to have, but that it has been derailed by the ideologists already. Mainstream discussion paints the picture of a golden past, and ignores the necessarily ideological nature of teaching and learning and the political inflections of culture; there is a fierce negativity and a refusal to look past the inclusion of popular culture in the curriculum, and most commentators have little knowledge of what actually takes place in today's classrooms.

There is an education panic here - the supposed decline of the traditional English curriculum is posited as leaving our children morally and ethically 'rudderless', and the decline of numeracy and literacy standards is well overstated. There is a misguided mindset that if education is entertaining, it cannot possibly be rigorous. In the Australian context, much of this is driven by educational consultant Kevin Donnelly of the advocacy company Educational Strategies, in a series of seven insipid articles over the last few months providing much of the fuel for conservative groups' sustained attack on the education system. What these critics are overlooking is that the media are sites of enormous contradiction and change, but also a key place for identity formation and creative production by kids. Young people are consumers and authors of the self; their identity is not fixed, but changeable - and therefore to ignore the role of media in contemporary young people's lives would be a serious mistake. Instead, schools need to make media literacy and media production central to the educational curriculum, and kids need to be taught how to challenge the forces that homogenise and stereotype education as well as everything else in the world. Only this enables them to not only challenge established views and questions, but also to ask questions of their own.

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