Rationale for Teaching Media Studies

I recently completed my student teaching experience at Shakopee Senior High. I am pleased to report that Shakopee embraces technology and mass media instruction. Every room is equipped with an LCD projector, VCR and DVD player, and internet access. The school is divided into many pods, with eight classrooms apiece. Each pod has a bank of computers for students to use, this in addition to several computer labs and the main media center. The mass media course on offer at Shakopee Senior High is an elective, but popular at that. Half of the semester in mass media is devoted to film study, the other half to other topics such as journalism, advertising, and television. I taught the latter half in my student teaching experience at Shakopee.

While that is all well and good for the students and teachers at Shakopee, this is less than ideal for the assignment, so I will be addressing my rationale to Bizarro Shakopee Senior High.

Bizarro Shakopee Senior High (BSSH) is located in a small town ringed by farmland. While the staff is mostly young and progressive, the surrounding community is only now turning on to the internet, which they view as a diversion at best, a danger to the security of their personal information at worst. Eager to address dropping scores on mandated state testing, the area school board is pressing for a back-to-basics curricular approach. Mass media type courses, seen as frilly and unnecessary, would not be included in this reactionary reformation of the curricula.

The case for inclusion of mass media instruction in the current curriculum is twofold. First, we must recognize the ubiquity and centrality of the several new media to the lives of everyone, especially our children. Second, we need to look beyond the novelty of these technologies and consider how they are actively shaping our literacy, and subsequently, how they may be used to improve and build upon traditional literacy skills such as reading comprehension and writing.

The surge in pervasiveness of video games, handheld music players, increasingly complex cell phones, and the internet has caught the attention of researchers interested in both the scope and nature of the impact of this late technological revolution. Notably, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) recently completed a nationally representative survey of two thousand third-to-twelfth-graders. Among other findings that indicate the central role mass media has taken in the lives of young people, the KFF found that nine in ten have a computer at home, and the average respondent spends six and a half hours per day, seven days per week with TV, music, computers, video games, and reading books. The time spent with books represented the smallest chunk of that time at just three quarters of an hour. These findings reveal only the latest in a growing trend of a shift of our collective attention from traditional literacy skills to new literacy skills. Some educational systems that have been onboard with this evolution in media consumption include Ontario, Canada, where media education has been required for grades seven through twelve since 1987, and Great Britain, where ability to critically analyze the media is nationally assessed.

With the overwhelming attention being paid to the effects of the mass media, both by educational systems abroad and researchers, should serve some indication that failing to account for these forces would make for a curriculum incomplete in scope. More importantly than appearances, however, is what our students stand to lose if we do not include study of mass media in our curriculum. I fear there may be an assumption that because our younger generations are so adept at manipulating these new forces, that they have an expert understanding of its effect on their minds, and the society as a whole. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, I would argue that the manner in which most people use media such as the internet, video games, and television, amplifies the effects these media have on the individual mind. A mass media curriculum would encourage people to go above and beyond letting these new media simply wash over them, to instead pause from time to time to take stock and reflect on how these media are actively shaping them on an individual and societal level. What’s more, mass media curriculum is not on parallel tracks with traditional concepts of literacy, rather they are increasingly merging. The use of these media sits on a foundation of traditional literacy skills – reading, writing, and interpersonal communication – but it is not a mere rider. The merging of these new and conventional literacies has resulted in the emerging necessity of courses at the post-secondary as well as the secondary levels that focus students’ attentions on how these forces have been and will continue to change the way in which they interact with their world.