Self Reflection & Innovative Pedagogy - Equipping students and New Media

Henry Jenkins comments on media convergence are particularly resonating for me.

One thing that I have learnt, quite simply, is that I am a “learner”. Of course learning is a lifelong process, but in the context of my education practice, for the first time ever, my teaching role is in the midst of change. As Sonia Livingstone suggests; children are, for the first time in history, seen “as a source of wisdom rather than innocence and ignorance” (2009 p. 181), particularly in the areas of New and Digital Media and the emergence of participatory culture, of which film and television is still a part. The media landscape is changing and rapidly.

Back in the mid 1990s, I was involved in a short television project, funded by The Australia Council, about “Interactive television”. It was broadcast as part of a short film series on SBS and was a very exciting experience.  I remember thinking how farfetched it seemed, but at the same time I was open to that fact that this could very well be a reality. I just probably did not expect that to be in just under a decade. Now, film and television has indeed converged with online technology, and often I find myself accessing YouTube to watch long lost videos and music clips, see innovative animations from new film makers and enjoy movies. Not only can I just watch these programs, but I can comment on online communities and give my opinions to others and meet like minded audience members. In a strange way, although I may never meet these people, film and television has become a social experience other than just one I enjoy with my family in the living room or share with a class.

Teaching media literacy is at the very core of my subject area. One reason I elected to take this subject in Youth, Popular Culture and Texts was to update my knowledge in this arena, particularly as media converges.  I acknowledge that this will be fundamental content to my teaching practice and that it will also impact on pedagogy.  I use these technologies as a layman, and in my regular everyday activities, but understanding the context for its use in education and learning with young people is vital. Although I have trained in film and television and been involved in various media productions, before embarking in a career in the education field, my knowledge will always need to be current.  I am a learner in the world of New Media and as Frances Willard, an American educator of a bygone era once said:
"No matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle, he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world."  ~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle

My students, born as “digital natives” (Prensky 1991) are the experts.  However, as Jenkins (2009 p. 15) says “children and youths do indeed know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers. In fact, we do not need to protect them so much as to engage them in critical dialogues that help them articulate more fully their intuitive understanding of those experiences”. Students still need adult guidance and facilitation in their learning. Another thing that is interesting is that debates about media literacy are not new, but they are no longer restricted to the media education classroom. As Livingstone (2009 p. 198) asserts “once a rather specialist issue for media practitioners and educators...media literacy is now a central issue for everyone concerned with people’s – not only children’s – critical, participatory and creative engagement with all forms of media and communications” . It is being realised, just how important media literacy is, just not in a Film, Television and New Media classroom, but across the entire school curriculum.

Given these issues in mind, this relates to a few things I would like to bring into the media education classroom. It would be fascinating to observe how a project or unit could be spread over several different media types – a thematic unit. Rather than students doing isolated tasks on each media form (such as an animation or a singular video as part of a unit in Australia film for example), it would be exciting to see how a film/video project from production practice could be made from conception to upload on YouTube and blogged in process and review.  In production practice, where students may have usually have kept a written journal of the process, this component of a task could be moved to a blog. Students could share with their production group and exchange video links and ideas. A Critique section could also be done via blog, rather than a submitted via hard copy assignment allowing students to provide actual film and television excerpts as reference. Where permission would allow, a mash up of videos could be produced for a unit like Teenage film or music video,  where students could change the meaning of a video text by mashing it together and juxtaposing different images together to create another meaning. But unlike the editing suite, they would upload this to another source for informal comment and use existing texts and share their production more widely. Blogs could also allow students to exchange and incorporate ideas like a scrapbook and provide feedback for each other. This could be particularly interesting in topics such as ‘advertising’ or ‘propaganda’. 

Another thought was to take advantage of students knowing more than their elders in some areas, and to develop a unit that focuses on this, to assess prior knowledge, to not only realise any possible “participation gaps” (Jenkins 2009) in the class, but to develop a collaborative way to teach others using New Digital Media in a peer learning environment. Additionally, it would be good to run community forum software off a school’s website, to allow students to discuss their favourite television and films and as a result, base an assessment task around an interest shared community like this. The opportunities of teaching with New Media are boundless. Collaborative learning would move beyond the classroom and online. Students could share ideas whenever they came to them, and work on production tasks with a more flexible approach. As Jenkins (2009) and Quin (2003) assert that educators have always known that students learn best through experimentation and observation – basically learning by doing, rather than by reading a text book or attending a lecture. Simulations, like those suggested above, would help broaden their experiences in learning and their understanding of various media texts.

My part of this blog has focused largely on media and moral panics, and issues that concern youth. Moral panics still occur today, and I did encounter some, via parental concern with units that I taught. Being a parent now myself, I do understand a lot more why parents may be concerned about various issues, and this unit has allowed me to think about New Media and popular culture, not just with my educator’s hat on, but as a parent as well. It is a very exciting time for education with the advent of New Media, and it something that provides boundless opportunities. Once we lay the critical foundations in place with our students through analysis and critique, the new media technology can be used to best advantage in the classroom and provide students with the resources for fantastic learning experiences.

Elizabeth

REFERENCES:
Jenkins, H. (2009) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media education for the 21st Century. United States. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York. New York University Press.

Jenkins, H. (Speaker) Henry Jenkins [streaming video recording] Retrieved: October 1st 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJaqXVaOaI

Livingstone, S. (2009) Children and the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon. (9) 5 pp. 1-6.

Quin, R. (2003) Questions of Knowledge in Australian Media Education. Television and New Media. (4), 439-460.

"If you watch too much TV you'll get square eyes! (&ADHD&obese&morally corrupt....)"

Why TV is good for kids: raising 21st century children – Response to article by Lumby and Fine and the divisive opinions that surround children’s television viewing.

Debates have raged for years as to the alleged effects of television viewing on impressionable young minds, almost as long as television has been in existence. They still continue to rage today, only now television is joined in this ongoing debate by other new media forms such as computer games, mobile media and the internet. Catharine Lumby and Duncan Fine’s (2006) chapter Why TV is good for Kids: raising 21st century children discusses some of the research into these issues.

Just like the debates about the effects of television have been around almost as long as television itself, it was not the only mass medium to fall under this sort of debate.  Potential detrimental effects of popular texts and mediums have been around for centuries. Anything that could be produced and supplied to the masses, such as novel, was a target. Lumby and Fine (2006) cite the 1792 publication The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution that suggested that engaging in the acts of reading novels was a wicked and deviant act. Similarly, an article by Arnett, Larson and Offer (1995) cites a situation, where in 1774, Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther was banned in some parts of Germany, as it may encourage impressionable adolescents to take their lives, much like the character in the story. Death and promiscuity may result if a young person reads a book?! Music Halls in Victorian Britain were said to produce immortality, unlawfulness and violence. Even bicycles, another mass produced item of a bygone era, were said to bring about a chaos and moral decay! (Pearson 1983 in Gauntlett 2005 p. 125-126) It seems absurd.

Although, where children and adolescents are involved, Lumby and Fine (2006) suggest, it is natural to be concerned about the effect that different media may have on them. They are vulnerable. They of course need love and adult guidance, but, they state; “rational concern is one thing, blind fear and unthinking prejudice is another. And, unfortunately it’s the latter which too often dominates debates about children’s media consumption” (2006, p. 56). These are called “Moral Panics”, a term coined by Stanley Cohen (ibid. 2006 & Gauntlett 2005) in response to media reaction of gang clashes between Mods and Rockers, in the UK in the 1960s. This real life event was blown out of all proportion when it was amplified by the media coverage. Basically, as Lumby and Fine (2006) comment “moral panic” refers to “hyperbolic fears, not to real life moral dilemmas” (p.56). Furthermore, they suggest that these moral panics distract people from the real issues and real problems. (ibid. p. 57). “Moral Panics” relates to an area of research or theory called “media effects”, where, quite simply, researchers have tried to find direct links between media (like television) to audience behaviour i.e.: violent television shows make for violent aggressive children.

However, many prominent media education scholars such as David Buckingham and David Gauntlett believe that such issues, like violence in society for example, are much more complex than simply a result of watching television. They assert that viewers are actually active and not passive and compliant as previously thought.  Such problems are usually a result of far more complex societal issues and as Lumby and Fine (2006 p.57) point out, “the root causes of social ills are complex – they don’t fit into a headline or 15 second news grab. And they certainly will not be solved by simplistic blame shifting”. Professor Buckingham asserts “that there has been a massive shift away from seeing children as passive television viewers. In both the psychological and humanities based areas of media and cultural studies, more detailed and refined studies of children watching and interacting with television, have shown, without a doubt that children do not sit for hours on end in front of the box and take in everything they see without processing and thinking about it” (in Lumby and Fine, p. 73). However, media effects and the related moral panics, still maintain popularity in some circles through organisations such as Young Media Australia and the Parents Television Council in the United States. Television, Lumby and Fine (2006) suggest, has been blamed for obesity, ADHD, and for corrupting our children.  

Someone who asserts that television does in fact cause great concern, and author of the book Remotely Controlled: How television is damaging our lives and various papers including Visual Voodoo: the biological impact of watching television, is well known UK Psychologist Dr Aric Sigman. Sigman (2006) suggests that television does indeed have links to obesity, bullying, ADHD, children’s brain development and is a leading cause of half of all violence related crime (Remotely Controlled- blurb). Targeting the primary audience of “Generation X” parents (the parents of today’s children), who Michael Grose (2005, p. 222) says “will continue to be the most anxious cohort ever to have raised children outside of wartime. They will continue to make safety and their children’s education their main priorities”, Sigman has a wide audience for his books and Remotely Controlled was a best seller. Guilt and anxiety are rife within this parenting age group who, as Lumby and Fine (2006) suggest have been told that “television is an unnatural intruder into family life. It’s the electronic babysitter” (p.68). So what better than to feed parents anxieties on this issue and create a panic where children’s health and development is concerned?

Sigman has his views on children’s television, and not surprisingly, has looked into the preschool program Teletubbies. This innocent preschool show had caused quite a degree of moral panic in its day, as being “potentially more dangerous to the psyche than crack” (Howard and Roberts 1999 in Lumby and Fine, 2006, p. 64) as it allegedly promotes drugs, obesity and gay lifestyles through apparent hidden subtexts. Although subtexts are not the issue for Sigman (2006 p. 41) but children’s brain development and he states that the Teletubbies is “..entertaining yes, but there’s no reason to assume that it confers any benefits whatsoever. It may cause attentional damage, as well as displacing vital behaviour for children’s development”. However, as Lumby and Fine argue (2006) a research study by early childhood education and literacy expert Jackie Marsh found that the Teletubbies had a positive effect on learning in early childhood settings and her study produced frequent examples where children who were previously unwilling to interact with adults and other children joined in with activities because of their fascination with the Tubbies (Marsh 2000, in Lumby and Fine 2006, p. 62).  Additionally the word ‘may’ in Sigman’s point, does not clearly indicate anything but speculation. As for obesity, ADHD and television being addictive Sigman cites numerous studies that he believes is indicative of television viewing habits of children and young people. In particular, Sigman (2006) agreed with the 1999 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics, that there was in fact a correlation between children’s television viewing and ADHD. However, Lumby and Fine (2006) are quick to point out that this study ignored the many other cultural aspects, that the children involved in the survey, might encounter in their everyday lives. And the approach that was undertaken in the survey could be applied to any other activity, including soccer.

Gauntlett (1998) says that the main problem with most of these studies into the apparent direct effects of media like television, is that they tackle the problem backwards and states that "the 'media effects' approach, in this sense, comes at the problem backwards, by starting with the media and then trying to lasso connections from there on to social beings, rather than the other way around”. And, Sigman’s opinion on the effects of television is not indicative of all psychologists. United States Psychologist and academic in adolescent development, Jeffrey Arnett and colleagues Larson and Offer (1995) have researched the alleged effects on behaviour in young people and media like television, and assert “...it is problematic simply to draw a direct cause and effect relationship between media stimulus and the subsequent behaviour of the media consumer” (p.512). Arnett et al.  (1995 p.513), like Buckingham agrees, that “adolescents are active media consumers”.

It is clear, that the debates about the alleged behavioural and health effects of television is quite divisive and it is no surprise that debates still continue, and with it moral and media panics. Particularly when it concerns adolescents and children and their well being. Lumby and Fine’s chapter Why TV is Good for Kids: raising 21st century children is effective in reminding parents and educators about the need for a common sense approach with children, adolescents and television viewing.

Elizabeth

REFERENCES:

Arnett, J., Larson, R., Offer, D. (1995) Beyond Effects: Adolescents as Active Media Users. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. 24 (5) pp. 511-518. 

Buckingham, David. (2000) After the death of childhood: Growing up in the age of electronic media. Polity Press. UK.

Gauntlett, D. (2005) Moving Experiences: Media effects and beyond (2nd edition). UK: John Libbey Publishing.

Gauntlett, D. (1998) Ten Things Wrong with the Media Effects Model. Retrieved October 5th 2010 http://www.theory.org.uk/david/effects.htm

Grose, M. (2005) X,Y,Z: The New Rules of Generational Warfare. Random House Australia: Sydney.

Lumby, C. & Fine, D. (2006). TV villains: media panics. In C. Lumby & D. Fine (Eds.), Why TV is good for kids: raising 21st century children (pp. 55-96). Sydney: MacMillan

Sigman, A. (2005) Remotely Controlled: How television is damaging our lives. Ebury Publishing: London.

Sigman, A (2007) Visual Voodoo:  The biological impact of watching TV. Biologist. 54 (1) pp. 12-17.