Chapter One Response

Whenever I encounter a discussion of the necessity of media education in the English curricula, I think back to a tenth grade honors English class I took at my high school. One major component of the course involved repeatedly watching a documentary that was against the use of landmines. The film used many graphic and disturbing images, and while its basic premise was not disagreeable, we were urged to view the film critically – to find, if we could, how it was positioning us as viewers, and ultimately to evaluate its arguments.

Flash forward to my sophomore year of college. A series of short documentary films, all bearing the title, “Loose Change,” started making the rounds in the e-mail forward circuit. Each film in the series made a case for various conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11th attacks. The presentation was convincing, and the filmmakers cited some sources, but I naturally did not accept the films’ claims on face value. Some light research of my own, including reading reviews from a variety of perspectives, revealed that much of the “research” cited in the series was shoddy and speculative.

The reaction I had to watching this documentary series was not instinct, nor did I learn critical analysis from simply being a passive consumer of mass media. This pattern of behavior was taught to me and others in my sophomore year of high school. Arguably, had I not learned those skills in high school, I would have picked them up later en route to my English major and master’s in English education, however, not everyone can count on encountering these lessons later. For many students, high school may be the only place they are encouraged to take a critical approach to their consumption of mass media.

I believe this is one of the main duties of a teacher, especially an English teacher: to show students texts and ways of approaching texts that they would not encounter if left to their own devices. As Beach explains in this chapter, courses that instruct students on critical approaches to mass media are a principle way of achieving this. One particularly potent application, and one that I am personally interested in, is using mass media images to demonstrate the ways in which concepts of race and gender are socially constructed. This is an admittedly out-there way to think about gender and race, and one that was initially difficult for me to get my own head around in a modern literary analysis course in my junior year of undergrad. Beyond being conceptually difficult to grasp, it is also not a comfortable notion for many students. Using images to demonstrate the limited representations of different groups in society, however, facilitates this revelation. As a brief example, I showed my own mass media class a Hungry Man advertisement in which construction workers shown eating something other than the microwaveable dinner were depicted as effeminate. My students’ initial reaction was to laugh and to join in the derision. After some discussion, most of my students – boys and girls – were disgusted with the ad and what it had to say about masculinity and femininity.

To address the concerns of the Eden Prairie school board member, his or her worries are not totally without merit. I do imagine that some school districts see mass media curricula as icing, merely riding on top of the base of the skill set conventionally taught in English classrooms. However, just as our mass media continue to blur old lines, so too should our modern curricula – across all subjects – reflect a culture that increasingly engages with multimedia in favor of traditional texts. Furthermore, I would caution anyone who cannot see beyond the novelty of our new media to its broader implications extending into the future – and here I get stomach-turningly preachy – to consider the metaphorical frog: drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, and it will jump out; drop a frog into a cool pot of water and slowly bring it to a boil, and it will be boiled alive. Our mass media, by nature of its sheer ubiquity, is the water we are all submerged in. Only through mass media courses, as suggested in chapter one of Beach’s text, will students be brought out of the pot to see what it is they are immersed in.