Mediacy Articles – Volume 15, No. 3
I begin with a question because I'm not sure that teachers understand what television can be in the classroom. There is much talk about media literacy. This means giving kids the skills to decode media, to deconstruct it so that it is, theoretically, not manipulating them. All too negative for me.
My idea of media literacy is being able to appreciate the medium for what it can do well, for the power that it has, for its ability to bring so much of the world into the classroom so immediately. Its power is in our ability, as teachers in the classroom, to use the medium well, to control it as we control any of the various media that we use in the classroom: from books to paints.
A fine example of this is commercials. There is so much distress about the power of commercials. Per second, more dollars are put into the production of a commercial than in most other television programs. Arguably, for good or ill, they are the most effective use of television technology. Why not examine them as such? This is not to say that the content is the best. However, I don't believe that all of the negative media literacy activity, analyzing television commercials to death, will give as good an understanding of their power as an appreciation of the artistic quality of these brief pieces of very expensive production. Then, if it is possible, kids should be constructing their own commercials, through the process of concept, story outline, treatment, story boards to production. Knowledge is power. Knowledge of the construction of television commercials gives young people an understanding that removes from commercials their power to manipulate.
It is here that I part company with much of the thought and activity in the area of media literacy. I believe that we are at a stage now where television and video and CD-ROM and all else that is happening so quickly in technological development are so much a part of our society that we need to integrate them into education in such a way that they become integral parts of learning, rather than as mere add-ons when teachers are finished the "important" stuff of print. We are, in our educational systems, still too locked into print, and somehow too opposed to television in the classroom.
So much is made of the negative impact of television on our children. But what of the positive? What of all the well produced programmes like the CBC's Odyssey and Street Cents, and Global's Ready or Not? What of all the documentary material, that can and should be used in the classroom? One of the strongest statements about our society's inability to see all of this as an integral part of the educational process is that teachers cannot legally use most of the best material on television. There is no fair use clause in the copyright act to allow teachers to use anything that is on television. This says that the classroom is not a very important place, and that television is not recognized as the important educational tool that it is. However, our children live in a visually oriented society. Their medium is not print, but rather the image on screens both large and small. They read from the screen naturally. This is not to say that print is not important as a medium in education. It is as important as the visual medium. But neither television nor print is any more important than the other. They each do some things very well.
I want to see teachers using television with as much control and creatively as they do with print. Two minutes of television used in bits and pieces, controlled in a way that the teacher can go over and over the same image, can freeze an image on the screen and use it as one would use any other diagram, finish the lesson, push a button on the remote and have the two- minute segment repeat once again, starting at the exact point at which it began sixty minutes earlier.
At Kipling Collegiate where I teach in a new department called Communications Technology, in which television production is the focus, I am seeing television and the camcorder moving into all subject areas. Groups of students use the studio to produce their presentations of Shakespeare's plays. Visual essays are happening. This does not mean a move away from print and writing. In this course, and in all subject areas, the basic developmental process of concept, story outline, treatment and story boards are essential. Students talk about doing more writing in Communications Technology than in many other subjects. This is my idea of media literacy. I'd rather it be called "media use". Perhaps then we could get away from all of the negatives of media literacy, and move into a more practical integration of television in the classroom. We would then not have to worry so much about the power of the medium. We would appreciate it and use it in much the same way as we appreciate and use Picasso's Guernica, Dickens' Great Expectations or The Globe and Mail.
Frank Trotz is a teacher and co-author of The Penguin Guide to Children's TV and Video. This article is reprinted from the July/August, 1993 issue of Alliance Info, the newsletter of The Alliance for Children and Television.