Teaching media literacy as a separate school subject or as part of another school subject is lacking from the Greek educational reality, despite the international academic research and the development and application of media literacy teaching models. This thesis is an analysis of two case study research projects carried out in groups of students in two Greek secondary schools with the aim to study the students’ response to media projects, which are totally new for the Greek educational reality, realized in the English as a Foreign Language class.
The data is analyzed according to Burn and Durran’s 3-Cs model of media literacy, and more precisely its Cultural and Creative functions are the aspects used that include the concepts of Cultural Taste, Identity, and Creativity. These concepts are interpreted within the framework of Cultural Studies and Psychology theories. Important theoreticians considered are Bourdieu, Bennett, Giddens, Vygotsky, Jenkins and Bakhtin.
The examination of students’ participation in the media projects and their production work suggest that their cultural taste is a combination of global and local influences, a glocal result, in which the family, the peers, the media and the education play an important role. Their identity is multi-faceted, as a reflection of various aspects of their selves, and it is closely related to their cultural taste and their cultural capital. Students’ creativity is also expressed as a complex process, affected both by the guidance of the official educational context and the youth popular culture tendencies.
The tensions that emerge in the expression of the students’ cultural taste, identity and creativity during moving image projects characterize the Greek adolescents’ response to the newly-learnt moving image literacy, and raise important questions for educators and researchers