Editorial published during the Coronavirus lockdown, considering the nature of Media Studies as a discipline and epistemological orientation

Readman, Mark

NEUROSURGERY ENTHUSIASTIC WOMEN SOCIETY

Media Education in the Time of Coronavirus

Bournemouth University Research Online

Media Education in the Time of Coronavirus 5Editorial: Media Education in the Time of Coronavirus Mark ReBdman, Bournemouth UniversityEnforced isolation tends to make one re!ective, as does (I have discovered) writing a scheme of work for an international A level in Media Studies. Realising that I hadn’t actually taught Media Studies A level for over ten years I found myself trawling old books, new books, websites, recordings and images for inspiration, guidance and to jog my memory. One inscription in a copy of Len Masterman’s Teaching the Media ("rst published in 1985 – mine is the later Routledge edition) reminded me that it has been almost 30 years since I "rst stepped into a classroom to teach Media Studies. Indulge me then, while I re!ect on what media education meant to me in the 90s, why I think it has always been not just amenable to research, but inherently a continuing research project, and how the articles in this issue of the journal embody that spirit of enquiry and re!ection.     I have written before about my debt to Masterman (Readman 2013) and, if anything, my admiration for Teaching the Media increases with time – not only does the book outline a rigorous conceptual approach to media education, but it embraces the necessity of a critical stance in relation to education itself. In short, it is fundamentally a methodological book – media education is, more than anything, an epistemological orientation in Masterman’s hands: a mode of questioning and a refusal to take anything for granted. #is mode of questioning is the product of a particular design, and it is the design which provides it with both disciplinary speci"city and !uidity. He describes it as “a coherent discipline in its own right, with its own characteristic concepts, practices and modes of enquiry” yet also argues that it “should not be con"ned to the province of media teachers” and that it should “inform the teaching of all subjects” (241). #is progressive approach to media education as something ‘lifelong’, ‘holistic’ and ‘ecological’ struggled to survive, however, as, gradually, the disciplinary boundaries were drawn, and the exigencies of assessment produced an orthodoxy of production activities, auteurist responses, and theoretical 6 Media Education Research Journalname-dropping. #e challenge, I think, was later picked up by Bennett et al. with their argument for the need to move beyond ‘the media’ and examine, instead, the dynamics of the mediascape. #ey criticise Masterman’s advocacy of ‘alternative’ media production (it was the 80s, a$er all) for being “unwittingly conservative” (Bennett et al. 2011: 124), but the spirit of the project he began is developed in theoretically rich and exciting ways in their book.And it is this notion of a ‘project’ that seems pertinent. One of the great attractions of media education in the 90s was that it felt like the Wild West – frontiers didn’t exist yet, territories were up for grabs, and claims could be staked. #ere weren’t textbooks and schemes of work readily available, so resources had to be produced as well as teaching strategies developed around them. #ere were books and BFI publications about "lm and TV, of course (there was a particularly good one on Teaching TV Sitcom, 1985) but, apart from Teaching the Media I can only remember !e Media Studies Book (1991) with chapters by, for example, David Buckingham, Gill Branston and Jenny Grahame. #e approach was, as with Masterman, a conceptual one; the chapters focused on, for example, ‘Language’, ‘Narrative’, ‘Audience’ and ‘Institution’. #e nature of the ‘subject’ (before it became formalised as a subject) was a negotiation. I knew what it wasn’t at least; it wasn’t Communication Studies, with its emphasis on face to face communication, its functional models of ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ and its apparently unproblematic interpretations of non-verbal communication. Media Studies, conversely, questioned everything and was critical, playful and ‘porous’. #is ‘thing’ then, called Media Studies was in a continual state of formation, re!ection and observation - it was, I guess, like an action research project. It was also a heuristic project – we would try things out, evaluate the outcomes, try again. I used to begin my weeks by handing out to students a ‘media quotation’ for discussion. #ese slips of paper had been artfully produced on the department’s sole Macintosh Classic, loosely modelled on Graham Rawle’s ‘Lost Consonants’ series in !e Guardian (http://www.grahamrawle.com/lost-consonants.html). Like ‘Lost Consonants’ they featured ‘cut out and collect’ dashed outlines, each one numbered (also signifying collectability) and bore a quotation from, for example, Christian Metz, Roland Barthes, or Pierre Bourdieu. My own addition was an ironically enlisted advertising slogan along the bottom: “Media Quotations: they’re so$, strong and very long” (from Andrex toilet tissue), for example. I relished the collision of high and low, the cerebral and corporeal (!e Modern Review, with its sell-line “Low culture for highbrows” was regular reading at the time). #e medium/form elicited some laughs (perhaps mostly mine) which took the edge o% the explicit injunction to analyse, interpret and learn and (yes, if I’m honest) to acquire the cultural capital of theory. #e hours I spent sourcing an appropriate quotation and constructing these provocations and challenges astounds me now, but I believed in the project, I believed in the explanatory force of theory, and I believed in the importance of debate. My ‘media quotations’ Media Education in the Time of Coronavirus 7practice was both !ippant and deadly serious. It re!ected the implicit understanding that, as Murdock and Golding argue a quarter of a century later, (the debate has continued this long!): media studies is not a discipline in the conventional sense, occupying a designated academic territory with fixed boundaries. It is a space of encounter and debate. Its concerns overlap with the cognate areas of cultural and information studies and draw on traditions of inquiry and debate from across the entire range of the social and human sciences. (Murdock and Golding 2015: 41-42)I wouldn’t have characterised my work as a ‘research project’ back then, although, with hindsight, there are some indications in the audio diaries I recorded at the time, in which I think aloud about how, for example, I might use Sean’s Show (Channel 4 1992-1993) to teach about realism. #e audio diaries were, themselves, an ironic and self-conscious engagement with the temporal a%ordances of the media – I mention Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in the very "rst one. It wasn’t until I began my doctoral work and my supervisor Jenny Moon encouraged me to write re!ectively, that I realised I had been doing this in some form all along.It is hard now to think what isn’t mediated, particularly at a time of global lockdown when every meeting takes place online and other people’s children, animals and kitchens become part of the texture of public conversations. #e articles in this issue of MERJ predate the Coronavirus pandemic, but all are attuned, nevertheless, to the mediatised nature of everyday life and education, and all are committed to projects of critical enquiry. Robyn Ilten-Gee, for example, links narrative moral agency with critical pedagogy and podcasting, showing how the medium facilitates the construction of empathetic subject positions. #rough this she argues that the literal inclusion of di%erent voices in a recorded narrative work creates opportunities to manage con!ict and foster resilience. Similarly, Mark Subryan and Lada Trifonova Price reveal how students of journalism can become re!ective and re!exive agents of knowledge production when presented with speci"c epistemological challenges – they argue for the need for journalism education to go beyond practicalities and to embrace the complexities of research skills in order to develop a critical mindset.Géraldine Wuyckens shows how students of all ages can be stimulated to engage critically with digital technologies and interactions through a ‘design "ction’ process which involves imaginative projection and critique. Richard Wallis, Christa van Raalte and Stefania Allegrini reach some fascinating insights into the nature of media education through an analysis of the reflections of graduates, two decades after their course. The ethnographic media work of Abhishek Chatterjee, Heitor Alvelos and Jorge BranEÍo Pereira involves students in a project of curation and preservation; the ‘anti-amnesia’ of their title is powerfully evocative of the 8 Media Education Research Journaltemporal possibilities of media production, which is used here in a pedagogic project to “rescue materials, documents, testimonies, and historical facts that may otherwise be lost or forgotten”. Finally, #eresa Redmond, Evelien Schilder and Jennifer Luetkemeyer perform a kind of ‘!ipping’ of conventional pedagogy by assessing the qualities of questions that students ask, rather than answers. #eir use of media literacy to foster critical enquiry is absolutely congruent with the aims of Masterman back in 1985 and recognises the ‘entangled’ nature of literacies. In a time of (mediated) crisis the value of such resources and abilities is clear. ReferencesBazalgette, C., Cook, J. & Medhurst, A., 1985. Teaching TV Sitcom. London: BFI.Bennett, P., Kendall, A. & McDougall, J., 2011. A"er the media: Culture and identity in the 21st century. Abingdon: Routledge.Lusted, D., Ed, 1991. !e Media Studies Book: A guide for teachers. London: Routledge.Masterman, L., 1989. Teaching the Media. London: Routledge.Murdock, G. & Golding, P., 2015. Media studies in question: #e making of a contested formation. In Conboy, M. & Steel, J., Eds, !e Routledge Companion to British Media History. London: Routledge, 41-59.Readman, M., 2013. Not ‘Philosophy of Media Education’, but ‘Media Education as Philosophy’: Working with ‘Creativity’. In Fraser, P. & Wardle, J., Eds, Current perspectives in media education: Beyond the manifesto. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 160-174.

Media education in the time of coronavirus

http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/34974/1/Readman%20-%20media%20education%20in%20the%20time%20of%20coronavirus.pdf

Media education in the time of coronavirus

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NEUROSURGERY ENTHUSIASTIC WOMEN SOCIETY

Bournemouth University Research Online