Media Education, International

Programs in Great Britain

Most people would agree that Great Britain has the most well-established program of media literacy education in the world. Media education, which first appeared in the 1930s in England, grew out of a classical tradition of literary criticism that established a premise that modern society and its cultural manifestations were alienating and mechanistic. According to this view, young people needed to be protected from the deadening and distracting dimensions of mass media and popular culture. It was thought this could be accomplished by providing them with concepts and skills needed to discriminate between the elite culture of the literary tradition and newer media-based cultural forms. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literacy, and Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's book, The Popular Arts, signaled the beginning of a shift in thinking among scholars, who began moving away from making a “high culture/low culture” dichotomy toward analyzing the media through an examination of authorship, audience reception, meaning making, and cultural identity in a sociocultural context. With the rise of British cultural studies in the 1970s, a number of scholars and practitioners began to focus on the pedagogical dimensions of teaching about media. Journals such as Screen Education provided educators with opportunities to share, reflect on, and formalize ideas from the experimental teaching that was widely under way as film and popular media began to be used more widely in the classroom with children, adolescents, and young adults. In 1985, Len Masterman's book, Teaching the Media, became widely influential, reaching an international audience of scholars and educators with interests in media literacy. By 1989, media education was a compulsory part of British education and located as a subject area within English. Many organizations have been important in supporting the work of teachers and students, including the British Film Institute, the English and Media Centre, the Institute on Education at London University, and many others.

Moving Images in the Classroom is a curriculum resource developed by the British Film Institute to help strengthen students' skills of critical analysis in responding to images in the secondary classroom. It includes eight instructional practices that can easily be used by teachers with most films, documentaries, and other audiovisual materials. The curriculum resource is available free from the website of the British Film Institute, Education Division, at http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/miic.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/miic.

Students in England can take courses and examinations in media studies at both the GCSE and A-levels. GCSE is the first academic program for adolescents, usually culminating at age 16. The A-level examination is the academic flagship of the education program for those between 16 and 18 years old in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. A-levels enable those [Page 498]who wish to remain in school or college after the age of compulsory schooling to continue their education for another 2 years. An A-level student in media studies could expect to cover topics such as the Hollywood studio system, the history of public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, marketing in the music industry, and gender in teen magazines. Students would face the challenge of creating a media product as a member of a creative team and would learn to apply analytic concepts including media institutions, languages, audiences, and representation, referencing theories such as uses and gratifications or narrative structures. Even in Great Britain, media education leaders acknowledge that there is still little formal initial training for teachers and too little emphasis on media literacy at the elementary level.

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