Perhaps because I'm preparing to teach a lesson on ideology, I found this section of reading fascinating in terms of practically incorporating any kind of fair analysis (and by fair I mean avoiding the spoon-fed conversations that Timbre addressed) into the classroom. The overriding theme for all of these chapters seems to be this:
Allow the students room to incorporate their own opinions into any analysis or creative work. Let them work on their own terms. (it's a blog--I'm allowed to change the text size, right? Maybe a little RaNdOm CaPiTaLiZaTiOn?)
Buckingham addresses a key issue when teaching students to be critical--being 'critical', decoding things 'correctly', can become a form of social capital where students can assert their own superiority over the masses that are being 'duped' every day by media messages. Reading it reminded me of this article (yes, I just plugged the Journal of Media Literacy Education) by Paul Mihailidis where he talks about the results of a media literacy study he did at the university level, and to boil it down for you, he did a study comparing student conversations about the media between a group of students who had taken a media literacy class and a group of students who had not. One of the unintended results seemed to be that the students who had taken the media class were on the whole much more cynical than their media 'illiterate' counterparts. Putting down the media as merely something to manipulate, tearing texts apart for potentially stereotypical representations, etc., without ever allowing anything redemptive into the conversation, became par for the course in his conversations with these students. The control group of students who did not take the class were much more willing to acknowledge personal enjoyment of said media, and though they weren't as well equipped with the vocabulary to discuss media's effects, they were still able to have intelligent and enlightening conversations about media without so much of a cynical stance.
I believe I may have previously mentioned how I had lots of friends who didn't want me to "ruin" the movie for them after we'd watched it by breaking it down (as if a close reading of a text spoiled it...), but perhaps this is why; if we're not careful, talking about media texts can become a joyless exercise where students compete to see which of them can rip apart a media text most effectively. There needs to be room for students to express their honest opinions of a media text, to relate it to their own lives, to look not only for the bad or the manipulative, but also for the good in a text. As Buckingham mentions several times (but here most succinctly), there needs to room for "dialogue or negotiation between students' existing knowledge and experience of the media and the new knowledge that is made available by teachers" (153). Proper analytical and creative activities "should encourage students to acknowledge the complexity and diversity of their pleasures in the media; and to recognize the social basis of all such judgments of taste and value, including their own" (110).
This is getting fairly long, so I won't talk about how I also found the emphasis on student reflection really important (important enough that I want to restructure Hands on a Camera to be sure that the screening of the films is not the last activity, but rather the penultimate one);or that I also agreed with the notion of incorporating more creative activities into a classroom other than the big final project; or that I plan on having my students to a small "media autobiography" in class on Monday. These things could take up hundreds more words. All in all, I liked this reading a lot because it gave me lots of things to consider and reevaluate about my own style of teaching, it gave me lots of practical ideas for future use, and while Buckingham acknowledges that all of these things are difficult in practice, he still gives me hope for a successful future in media education.
2 comments:
Isn’t it sad that to look at something critically has almost become synonymous with criticizing it. As you’ve mentioned here, Buckingham discusses this idea that once we become “critics,” in that we gain the necessary language to be critical, there necessarily follows an almost distain for the media itself. As it becomes a subject of more academic study, does all enjoyment really need to come out of it? For some reason, the natural tendency is to say “yes,” I think, which is too bad. I would venture to say, however, that this same problem exists outside the media, as well. I mean, ask literature teacher if kids like to study chosen novels; but, if those kids were to pick up the same books without the influence of the teacher, I’d venture the response would be much more positive.
Now, here’s my random thought about this; I think it’s a general attitude about everything. I don’t know if it’s always been this way, but being cynical and negative seems to be the “educated” way to address most anything in life. In the play Three Days of Rain, Pip comments to Walker that “Being in a good mood is not the same thing as being a moron,” which is, I think a perfect representation of this automatic assumption that if you’re not cynical, you must not know anything.
My comment is short for your post, but I feel a desire to post it regardless. Studying film, and understanding narrative film texts, has actually made the watching of films much more enjoyable for me than they had been before - and not in the intellectual "superiority" of the exercise. Perhaps it is because I have a better "taste" for it (pardon the pun based on my next comment). "Babette's Feast" was a boring, drawn out movie for me until I understood media a little more. It is still a long movie, but by the end, because I could watch with a particular lens in my mind, the sweetness and beauty made the whole journey worth it. I think there is something to say for our negative way of putting it as "rip" apart a media text and we (as a culture) have sadly perpetuated that as a way of talking about media literacy and media education. I think such a way of putting it has given media education a bad rap.
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