Media, Curriculum, and Teaching

Overview

Media teach as well as create and disseminate ideas and images about myriad topics, including race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and disability. As such they function as nonschool educators about diversity.

Until recently, books and articles on media and diversity have generally focused on such traditional media as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and motion pictures. In the past 2 decades, however, the explosion of the Internet has revolutionized the concept of media to include such elements as blogs, websites, social networking, [Page 1462]computer gaming, and even personal correspondence. Taken as a whole, these two categories of media can be viewed as an informal diversity curriculum, with media creators and disseminators functioning as informal teachers, while media consumers serve as students who learn about diversity from that curriculum.

In the realm of diversity, this media explosion has two major implications for school educators. First, it means that virtually all persons involved in school education—students, PreK–12 teachers, college professors, administrators, parents, and policymakers—will have been exposed to media teaching about diversity. Second, it provides opportunities and challenges for school educators to address and incorporate those media into their curriculum.

Traditional Mass Media

Until the past 2 decades, the word media was virtually synonymous with mass media. It referred principally to such traditional mass media forms as newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and motion pictures.

Those media teach informally about myriad topics, including diversity. Over time, the mass media have provided five distinct but interrelated types of diversity teaching.

• 1.
  Mass media present information about different social categories, such as ethnic groups, and about broader diversity topics, such as discrimination, intermarriage, and immigration.
• 2.
  Media organize information and provide interpretive ideas about these constituent societal groups and other diversity-related topics.
• 3.
  Media create, reinforce, and disseminate values about societal groups, intergroup relations, and other aspects of diversity.
• 4.
  Media create audience expectations about how diversity will affect their lives, sometimes by inflaming topics and transforming them into hot-button issues.
• 5.
  Media provide models for behavior by members of individual groups, for the treatment of members of other groups, and for ways of dealing with diversity.

Web-Based Media

In the past 2 decades, the explosion of the web has radically altered the media environment and has continuously given rise to new types of media and channels of distribution. Surveys indicate that approximately two thirds of U.S. adults get news from online sources. Like the traditional mass media, web-based media also serve in the five aforementioned roles as informal teachers about diversity. However, web-based media exhibit additional characteristics, including

• 1.
  the more rapid dissemination of information (both correct and erroneous), including the spreading of unfounded rumors and accusations, as well as facilitating widespread, immediate responses to and interpretations of breaking news;
• 2.
  continuous interactivity, with media consumers instantly becoming media commentators, such as posting responses to blogs;
• 3.
  enhanced consumer choices, with audiences returning regularly to selected web sources, such as those that reconfirm predispositions about diversity and reinforce beliefs about specific groups.

The categorization and taxonomy of web-based media are in constant flux. In relationship to diversity, this new media spectrum can be envisioned in five categories.

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