We present here a the dialogue between Neil Andersen and Bill Smart, both Writer/Consultants and members of the AML Executive. This conversation seeks to probe, define, and clarify some issues which have surfaced recently in the wake of a growing overlap between the commercial and the public space. (The first half of this conversation was printed in Mediacy, October 2000).
WS: Neil, the topic for discussion is Teachers and Partnerships with Business. Let's agree to restrict the topic to teachers - mainly because it all comes down to the classroom, and we'd like to address the concerns we've heard recently mainly from teachers. The whole idea of teachers being involved with business and involved with specific formal partnerships really goes back a long way - long before YNN - before Summit 2000 most recently and some of the related concerns that arose during and after the Summit 2000. Do you want to start by mentioning some of the early versions of teachers getting involved with the "Out There"?
NA: I don't know about individual teachers getting involved with "Out There." I think we're not concerned about the corporatizing of schools as we are about the proprietary invasion in other words, the increasing corporatizing of schools. I think we already have a large measure of corporatizing. Just to give you an idea of that The Milk Marketing Board has been active in Ontario schools for my entire teaching career and that is a form using the school as a marketing agent. Now that's OK, as long as a student doesn't have a dairy allergy - and so there are some members of the school population who wouldn't see milk as a healthy thing. There's an agenda being served there. Inoculations, which were standard through my school career, were part of the medical agenda, which, for a naturopath, wouldn't be a good thing at all. Blood donor clinics, which are also held in schools with full license, would be anathema to a Jehovah's Witness.
So there has always been some corporatizing going on but what I think we're really concerned about is first of all, that it seems to be taking over. Also, we tend to now to teach a broader range of media. At an earlier time if we didn't teach media at all - or if we taught feature films - we could select them carefully and not really deal with current media and therefore ignore marketing issues. I was reflecting that three of the most banned books are Huck Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Grapes of Wrath. You and I have both taught those books repeatedly and yet they're on banned lists in many places. So the school itself is an institution - it's a corporate identity with an agenda and so what we're really looking at is one corporation co-operating with another corporation. If such a co-operation is termed a "partnership," I would hope that it would mean mutual gain because that's what I think a partnership should be. I think in many ways that's the question that's on many people's minds: Is this for mutual gain? Or am I or my students becoming victims in this particular partnership?WS: I remember getting started in Co-op in Education about 15-20 years ago. I was surprised by the reaction - not only from people at the Board, but also teachers - who thought that Co-op for a subject like English was automatically a selling-out and a buying-in -- to some kind of agenda that didn't have anything to do with the English classroom. So maybe, for convenience, we can use this as the date when this type of partnership started to make some teachers - especially English and Media teachers - automatically uneasy. And more recently there have been a few things happen to make media teachers even more uneasy. Could you take a minute and talk about some of the recent events that have made this issue come up again. Although this may be difficult, could you simplify some of the issues connected to each event? Then maybe what we'll do is talk about your particular experience in this area.
NA: A media teacher is probably closer to this issue than almost any other teacher because a part of the media teacher's curriculum is to help the students see their roles in the concepts of marketing and corporate agendas, whether they appear in sports, a music video, or in a newspaper. That mandate, in fact, is right in our curriculum as compared to being incidental to other curricula. So we do have to deal with that. And as we talk about that, we realize that we ourselves might be implicated in that situation. In order to do what I consider to be a responsible level of teaching media, I have to get some of that marketing into my classroom. And I want something that's recent. I don't want something that is years and years old - partly because of the energy that will come with fresh examples and partly because of the relevance to my own students' experience. I want my students to be critically autonomous of current media when they're finished my course and that's not likely to happen if I use media that is five or ten years old. So, while I'm busily possibly bad-mouthing somebody who's taking advantage of the teen market -- let's say, through magazine ads, through movies, television broadcasting or something -- I start feeling a little uncomfortable because I realize that I cannot examine current artefacts without also creating some measure of exposure, if not promotion. In my own case I have constantly tried to tape news or spots and show them to my students and make photocopies of relevant articles or show ads from magazines. But in that case I could determine what was brought in, how it was being utilized, what kind of educational goals it was serving - and when I could stop using it. I could therefore select, prioritize, and sequence. Now, I think some of the discomfort is arising because we're losing one or more of those essential prerogatives.
WS: Let's take one area that I suspect you might not support totally and that's YNN. YNN, in some ways, is in the classroom for media teachers. Teachers can use it -- or not use it. Students can learn some media concepts from it, presumably. So what's the problem?
NA: For me, the YNN school-industry relationship crosses the line in terms of agenda-setting. YNN decides what's going to be in its broadcast and decides that my students are going watch it every day etc. and then it starts to set the agenda; it starts to become the curriculum. I'm not allowed to select, prioritize and sequence. That has been removed from my power and so if something is irrelevant to my curriculum on a particular broadcast, I can only ignore it as compared to eliminate it. My big problem is that I can't imagine doing a YNN news deconstruction every day. I don't think anything in anyone's class should occur every day. We tend to go through our courses in a kind of a journey - or layered - fashion so that we might start with one activity, then move on to another activity and carry some of the skills from the first into the second. But we're renewing things. We give our students several experiences. So the problem with YNN is that my students are going to watch that every day and it doesn't matter whether I approve of it or I like it or I find it useful - they're watching it. At that point I'm not sure whether we're in school any more. I think we're in another situation. We're at the mall or something where there's a controlled environment but that control doesn't belong at all to me, or even my principal.
While YNN is a broadcast designed specifically for adolescents, a similar broadcast is also available from CBC Newsworld. Except that you don't have to watch Newsworld every day and you can tape it and use it or alter it -- or ignore it altogether. And by and large, Newsworld is better quality news. So why would I want a YNN newscast when I can get something I can control as a teacher and get at no inconvenience to me or my students?
WS: What about the problem of money and teachers? There are a number of professional associations like The AML who need money in order to do the things they think are useful and good for students. To be honest - though much of the evaluation feedback was complimentary - one of the reasons we're having this discussion now is that The AML received some criticism for the extent to which the AML appeared to buy into the corporate agenda and to worry too much about money at Summit 2000. Could you give your views about The AML and its "Ties to Business" through something like Summit 2000- or other conferences as well? Was Summit 2000 tied into CITY-TV too much for example?
NA: While some critics thought so, it didn't work that way for me because The AML at no time had to compromise with regard to who was making presentations. We did have to compromise in regard to the keynote speeches and there was some concern about that because at least two of the keynote speeches became extended commercials for corporations.
But it was a partnership situation. So AML got its share and the other two pillars got their shares. One of the greatest strengths of that conference was the fact that -- by design -- business people and educators, both working in media, were in the same place at the same time. In other words, the corporate presence was there very deliberately. This wasn't because we needed money: it was because we wanted educators and producers to be together, to share ideas and perceptions. Rather than a need for The AML to go out and look for money, this was a design choice that made Summit 2000very distinct from the two Guelph conferences, which were exclusively educationally- oriented. We added the industry strand which made it a much richer experience and most of the delegates appreciated that. We did not however, at any time, have to compromise in regard to who was going to be doing our presentations. For instance we had a number of people who gave, in effect, anti-corporate workshops and nobody ever indicated their displeasure at that -- before, during or afterwards. Nobody in any of the corporate organizations said, "you can't do that we don't like that we don't approve their speaking against us" We had that full agenda. So where is the problem here? Didn't everybody get the voice they needed? And weren't media educators benefiting from the opportunity to attend and, in fact, comment on some of the industry workshops?
WS: Can you see the AML doing anything differently next time?
NA: The critics that I'm aware of really wanted us to jettison the whole corporate presence and I think the corporate presence made it a much more valid experience. It was a chance for consumers of sorts - that's us - to literally talk face-to-face with producers. It would have cost thousands of dollars if you wanted to go to an industry conference at another venue. The opportunity we had this time was not only to witness but also to be heard. If we might have done something differently, it might be to better prepare the educators for the industry experiences they were to have.
WS: I'm interested in this dynamic - or overlap. It still is a strange relationship when you have teachers and business talking to each other face-to-face. As I said, when I was involved in Co-op, I fancied that I could change "Them" by infiltrating the politics of the teacher, the politics of the classroom - and the culture too of educators into the business world. I still think that's possible but we have a long way to go. Perhaps it would help to discuss some of the other ways that teachers are involved with business - and money-making making too -- making textbooks, making learning materials such as a number of us have done in The AML, and outside The AML too.
When you worked on something like Scanning Television - just to give one example - did you ever have the sense that it was a two way street, that in fact, the culture and politics of Neil Andersen, Teacher, flowed into this other world and you (and the teachers behind you) got more from it than money and useful teaching materials?
NA: I think that my personal involvement with media industry - and that would include things like having news crews in my classroom because I wanted my students to have the experience of seeing a news crew, being the object of a news report, seeing that news report after they had seen the taping and then compare it. This was an experience that I couldn't pay for and yet I was able to get that free. That occurred through a partnership. I knew I was helping out that news organization and I did it because I think that what my students stood to gain was far greater than what media organizations got from it.
I have written for media industries - and I've written for magazines, The National Film Board, MuchMusic, Bravo, and Space. (I've also written for four Canadian textbook publishers, for the Ministry of Education and for the Toronto District School Board.) In every one those cases, I have been able to take the experience of working with them and/or the actual product of working with them -- and take that back into my classroom. It has fed back in and allowed me to be a more knowledgeable and authoritative person, rather than, for instance, having to invite a guest speaker in who had been on a television news show or who had had some other experience of working with the media. I could be that person and I could let them know what that was like and when I could engineer industry people into the classroom, the students became those people. One of the things I said in my media book was that being a participant forever changes your "spectating" of a particular sport, event, media experience. My industry involvement gave me a personal experience I could share with my students. I think that that is probably the greatest educational experience I was able to give them because you can tell people lots of things but what you can provide in the way of an experience goes way beyond what you can tell them.
In the case of Scanning Television, the advising teachers chose the final video excerpts from a large pool, so publishers did not have to second-guess teachers' needs, and all teachers gained access to copyrighted videos which were accompanied by a teachers' guide. Scanning Television solved several problems - expensive copyright fees, copyright infringement, and lack of media education training - simultaneously.
***********WS: Is it possible, though, to push this just a little farther. Is there any extent that a teacher, working as you did, could actually "change" beliefs, attitudes, politics, even actions of a place like CITY or CHUM, your publisher or NFB? Or are we deluded and in the long run, exploited?
NA: That is always a possibility. The person I work with at CITY-TV is Sarah Crawford and I consider her to be a more media literate person than many teachers that I know. This didn't happen because she took a course or by a strike of lightning. This occurred through years of conversation, and working and a distinct wish on Sarah's part to understand what we were doing and to somehow try to fit her company in to that. Now that's good marketing, that's smart marketing - but at the same time, for me, CHUMTV really believes in the concept of partnership whereby there is mutual gain and they are willing to compromise so that mutual gain can occur. To give you a case in point, when I write for them, they do not censor, they do not tell me what I can't write. That's one of my conditions with any of the people I've written for. I hold in reserve the ability of critiquing what I'm writing about and I do that with many of the CHUMTV productions and that stays on the guide when they publish it.
WS: Earlier, you talked about YNN and the lack of teacher control allowed by YNN. Lest people think that we are naïve and that there are no pitfalls whatsoever, one of your rules would be then, teacher control?
NA: It's very much teacher control but I think even more important is student benefit. If I really feel the students have really more to gain than to lose in a particular experience, I'm probably going to at least entertain the idea. I have to constantly evaluate those expectancies in each individual case. And so there are some individual CHUMTV tapes which I would use automatically because I am convinced of the students' benefit of seeing those tapes and talking about them even though I realize that CHUMTV is being promoted as a result of that experience.
WS: Ever had any bad experiences where it didn't work out the way you'd hoped? If you haven't had any bad experiences, what about younger teachers who don't have your experience? They might want to get involved -- it would be good for their classes etc -- but they need to know a few things first. Maybe as a sidebar we should give a kind of Tip Sheet for such teachers.
NA: I think it always has to be in the students' best interest. That would be rule #1. It's really useful to know the principles of media literacy and in fact, to apply them to what it is you're looking at. In many cases you look at the content of what you're studying and then you look at the tape itself as an artifact. In some cases for instance some of the most interesting aspects of the MuchMusic tapes is not what's in them but what's missing, or the way the content is structured. So you can look at each individual case -- whether we're talking about a newspaper page, a videotape or a website. You can look at the content of it and try to judge that in terms of its educational merit. But then you can turn around and look at the item as an artifact and a cultural expression itself. This comes back to my problem with YNN. I might do, for example, website deconstruction, but I'm not going to do it every day in my media class for an entire course. It's going to be one thing that happens for a while during my course and then I'm going to move on to other things. YNN insists on being there each and every day. No teachers want to make that a daily part of their curriculum and no student wants to study that every day of the course. So it becomes inappropriate. It doesn't allow for the structure and the progression of education that I would like to see.
WS: I'm afraid we might be giving the impression that all of this marriage of media and business is easy and that this should all be done frequently. We're suggesting that that media literacy means the same for everyone in every situation.
NA: Media literacy does NOT mean the same for everyone, and that's half the fun. Partnerships also don't mean the same for everyone. Most businesses want maximum gain for their efforts - that's part of business. As media teachers, we are often the mediators between the 'secular' nature of the media producers and the 'sanctity' of the classroom. While we prefer the non-commercialization of the classroom, we need the commercials for a large part of our content. This creates a constant dynamic, to some a Faustian conflict, between the two.
I enjoy this dynamic because it causes me to exercise my own media awareness and to evaluate and re-evaluate what I am doing with my students. I open this agenda and this conflict to them, and include them in discussions about my own possible complicity in commercializing the classroom. These discussions not only help me work out my conflicts, but increase their media awareness. Rather than protecting them from media messages, I put the messages into the middle of the classroom and let them discuss and decide.
WS: Very often students, through their teachers will receive all kinds of invitations from corporations across the transom - advertising about an upcoming movie for example: posters, some teaching strategies thrown in sometimes, some homework assignments. In many cases, there is no reference to teacher-designed media literacy support material to go with these field trips. Often if there is some support material provided for teachers, it's hit and miss and it's not written by teachers. Ostensibly, they're really meant to use the teacher to sell the movie or whatever. I think the concern is that a lot of teachers, for convenience, will simply toss those in front of students. I'm thinking in particular of that film version of Great Expectations for example - very loosely based on the novel as it happens. Also, Professionally Speaking, the official magazine of the College of Teachers, has a number of advertisements from media corporations and from other businesses urging teachers to get on board and to enroll their students.
NA: Young People's Theatre does what you're describing as well. Young People's Theatre provides teachers' guides for its plays; Stratford provides teachers' guides. Some are good. Some are just advertising. But all are advertising. Everything you get for a movie or a magazine or a play is promotion. It's very soft promotion and I'm in fact what Naomi Klein would call "a content provider." I'm the one who writes the study guide that, in a very soft way, promotes the movie or the television show. I have to make my own peace with that and the peace I make is that I'm able to use the energy of that movie experience, that television experience, to enhance the media education of the students.
WS: Because you're a qualified media teacher. But I'm thinking of teachers who brought numerous classes to the Phantom of the Opera Tour for example. My understanding is that these were not media teachers very often and they didn't get involved in the media aspects - either through the material that The Phantom people provided or through their own media literacy skills. This material comes so readily to all teachers, but there is very little critical matter - by "critical" I don't mean negative. It's just that teachers are not encouraged to be analytical with their students.
NA: Right. In some ways, however, suggesting to students that something is innocuous is also doing them a disservice. In other words, taking them to The Phantom of the Opera and trying to suggest that it doesn't mean anything and is not worthy of study is, first of all, a meaningless educational activity and secondly, it might be sending them the wrong message because we want students to think critically about most of their experiences - we don't want to insist that they always think that way. But as teachers, particularly if we're working in the classroom, it pretty much behooves us to maintain that critical stance -- and I use that word as you are - where we appreciate and enjoy as much as we find fault or shortcomings.
But more to the point, if teachers are victimized by poor-quality teachers' guides that do not foster critical thinking skills, this is also a comment on their own media literacy. Ontario has weak, if any, pre-service media education, and no in-service education that I know of. If teachers had greater media savvy themselves, they would be able to distinguish between high- and low-quality industry solicitations.
WS: What do you think of the idea of teachers -- in this case media teachers - as being a subversive activity?
NA: I think media teachers, if they're doing their jobs, can't be other than subversive because I don't think you can be a media teacher of quality without somehow dealing with iconoclasm. An iconoclast, I think, has to be subversive unless you're going to take shots at all the easy targets. I would hope that media teachers would be even willing to take a look at their school and their classroom as an object of media communications.
WS: I fear that teachers of the present are finding this sort of thing more difficult to do and I think that when you and I started in the 60's there was a better atmosphere for this. Teachers were freer. Today many teachers suffer from a "chill" -- to put it mildly -- which affects their teaching. In fact this just might encourage them to take material holus-bolus because it comes from some "orthodox" source - like the teachers' own official magazine. That way, there's no fuss, no muss.
NA: As a teacher's load increases, it's easier to take some kind of a template or a pre-made lesson and just deliver that uncritically. I could even argue that maybe some of the Ministry of Education Profiles offer that kind of temptation because they break a course down into a day-by-day bit and they promise to cover the Expectations and therefore everything looks really great. But even those Profiles need to be examined as artifacts with an agenda. It is true - even of my own study guides - they look attractive and they will have an agenda too. Hopefully, teachers will be able to remain
WS: Wild and crazy?
NA: Well, I don't know about wild and crazy but careful. To watch carefully and think critically. When somebody hands you something - whether it happens to be a textbook, a course of study, a Profile or a videotape - just ask those questions about serving the students best interest as well as the curricular goals. If you can find evidence of that, then you might want to continue to use it. If you can't find evidence of that, then you might want to continue looking.
WS: We should hope this continues to happen long after we're outta here.
NA: Partnerships come in many flavors. And that suggests that you've got to take a look at and examine each one on its individual merits. That would even include different study guides from the same company. They're not necessarily written by the same person and even if they are, they're not necessarily of even quality. So teachers have to constantly maintain that critical stance, keep their eyes and ears open and be prepared to extricate themselves from a partnership if conditions change. There must be an escape clause -- which is another problem with YNN. You need to be saying, "Yes, this looks fine and I'm prepared to participate." You also have to be able to say: "I'm sorry, but things have changed. This no longer works in the students' self-interest and we're not going to do it anymore."
NA: Our job is to make the invisible, visible - to analyze it, to critique it, and to help our students develop skills to independently choose what is best for them.