What, then, are some arguments that can be made for the inclusion or integration of media education in the curriculum? Decisions about school curriculum are often based on the importance of learning certain practices to function as active, critical participants in society. Certainly, learning to use and critique the media is central to being a contributing member of society. To justify including media literacy in the schools, you need to consider the importance of media in shaping participation in culture and society. The following are some of the important functions of media in society.

The role of media in constructing mass, popular culture. Media plays an important role in constructing mass, popular culture (Freccero, 1999; Ogdon, 2001; Simon, 1999). With the rise of a mass media during the 20th century accessible to millions of people, people were able to share the same media texts, resulting in a shared, common set of experiences related to the construction of a mass popular culture. For example, during the 1950s, most Americans had access to mass-circulation magazines such as Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Time, and Readers’ Digest. These magazines contained articles and ads portraying Americans as active consumers, particularly in terms of gender roles. Men were shown driving new cars with large fins and a lot of chrome; women were shown cooking in their kitchens with a lot of new appliances. These images functions to construct a shared sense of a mass culture based on shared knowledge and practices associated with being an active American consumer. Members of society share the same news broadcasts, television programs and films, sports broadcasts, advertising, newspapers, magazines, and websites. This can create a cultural sameness that stifles alternative or deviant perspectives that challenge the homogenization of society.

All of this creates a tension around the concept of “popular.” The construction of mass, popular American consumer culture contrasts with local popular or “folk” culture associated with specific regional cultures — the Maine fishing village culture, the rural Appalachian culture, the Native American culture of the Hopi Indian, the African American culture of Harlem and South Chicago, which have their own unique culture practices and values, many in opposition to mass, popular culture portrayed in the media. Large media conglomerates such as Disney, Time Warner, and the Murdock News Corporation create media texts that have a universal appeal across the globe, but often mask over or misrepresent unique features of local cultural practices. For example, Disneyworld contains exhibits portraying different global cultures and regional culture practices. However, these representations homogenize and mask unique cultural features of these regions in ways that do not challenge Western values of Disneyworld visitors. The result is a loss of a local, popular culture associated with local or regional values that define people’s identities and worth. For example, adolescents raised in a small town may no longer value the local practices of the small town relative to those practices associated with glamorized versions of “the big city” portrayed in the media. Moreover, arguments by environmentalists about the need to preserve local natural habitats may be dismissed as inconsistent with the consumerisms celebrated in the media. This suggests the value of challenging the roles of media industry in its attempt to homogenize unique, local differences in its media representations. It also suggests the need to value deviant, unusual voices in the media that are often marginalized, suppressed, or censored by the media industry, voices that serve to challenge privilege status quo forces.

Another tension associated with the “popular” revolves around differences between “high” versus “low” art or media texts. Certain classic films such as Grand Illusion, Citizen Kane, or North by Northwest could be consider “high” art, while B-movie horror films or horror fiction could be consider “low” art. While it is certain possible to judge differences in the cinematic and aesthetic quality of media texts, this distinction raises questions as who assumes the power or status to define constitutes “high” versus “low” artistic value in media texts. Films, television, or music considered to be “popular” is often associated with commercial promotion and distribution, which are largely controlled by larger media conglomerates. As a result, small, independent productions may not achieve popular status simply because they are not sponsored by a media conglomerate and therefore have not been promoted, even though they be high-quality productions.

Media education plays an important role in helping students understanding the ways in which media texts become popular and the role of the media industry in shaping popularity.

Popular Culture: Resources for Critical Analysis

Sarah Zupko's Cultural Studies Center: Popcultures.com

Popular Culture Magazine

Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture

Images: a journal of film and popular culture

Manchester Institute for Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Popular Culture Library

Popular Cultural Vertical File

Recognizing the relationship between media and “reality.” Another important role of media education is that it helps students interrogate the relationship between the media and “reality.” It helps students interrogate the media as a construction tool that can be used to construct realities based on certain ideological, political, or economic perspectives. All of this requires students to learn how the media “mediates” reality by constructing that reality in terms of its own particular purposes and agendas. For example, studying media representations of gender, class, and race helps students recognize that gender, class, and race are social and cultural constructions, as opposed to biological givens. By understanding that what it means to be masculine or feminine are often constructions driven by commercial interests to sell products associated with being or becoming what the culture considers to be masculine or feminine means that students recognizes the role of the media in mediating reality.

The role of the media in providing entertainment and pleasure. Much of media education is often with adopting critical stances about media experiences. While adopting critical stances is central to media education, it is also important for teachers to recognize the ways in which students derive pleasure from the entertainment provide by the media. This means that the classroom should also become a site for students to share their pleasures in using the media and reasons for those pleasurable experiences. In responding to films, students experience the pleasure of engaging in well-developed stories and characters or from the aesthetic quality of media texts they perceive as having high levels of cinematic, production, or sound quality.

Students often define their identities through these uses of the media, so negative judgments of that media can be read as judgments of their identities. A more positive approach is to help students recognize the nature of those pleasures and the reasons for those pleasures. One reason for the high appeal of, for example, horror fiction, is that these texts “bring readers of both print and images into contact with culturally forbidden practices. Readers can imagine themselves both the victims and victimizers in horror fictions generated to bring out themes of repression” (Alvermann, Moon, and Hagood, 1999).

Fostering critical analysis of media as an alternative to media censorship. The increased exposure of adolescents to a range of different media texts that contain violent or sexual material has called for increasing censorship of the media. These “moral crisis” calls for censorship presuppose a cause and effect relationship between reading or viewing this material and adopting violent behaviors or engaging in sexual activity. While there is some research indicating some cause/effect relationship between children’s viewing of violence in cartoons and violent action, that research is inconclusive and applies particularly to children who are already violently orientated. Assuming these cause/effect relationships fails to consider what readers or viewers bring to media texts as central to the construction of the meaning of that text. Moreover, advocating for censorship can actually enhance adolescents’ interest in certain texts given their need to resist markers of adult authority.

One alternative to censorship is to foster critical analysis of media texts so that adolescents are responding critically to portrayals of violence and sexuality in the media. Marjorie Heins and Christina Cho in Media Literacy: An Alternative to Censorship posit the value of having students examine the assumptions and beliefs inherent in media portrayals of violence and sexuality, for example, the degree to which the causes or consequences of portrayals of violence and sexuality are shown.

Module 1: Word document

What Does it Mean to Teach Media Literacy?

Justifying Media/Film Study in the Curriculum

Defining the Importance of Media Literacy

What is Literacy? The Need for a New, Broader Definition of Literacy and Texts

Media Education: Different Goals and Approaches

What Students Report About What They Learn from Media Education

Final Task

References