Mediacy Articles - Volume 16, No. 2
Screening Images is a delightful book, quirky - just like its author - brief, witty , enthusiastic and impatient with all that theory stuff. It is a modest but useful addition to the literature which introduces people to the field of media literacy. Today teachers need a variety of entry points into this new domain from school text books to the Ministry Media Literacy Resource Guide. And this is where Screening Images fits in so splendidly.
The tone of the book can be best summarized from the author's exhortation, "you learn a lot from fooling around." From sections such as "urban tales" to the war on "orthodoxies", his very personal, at times idiosyncratic approach is generally very refreshing.
In Part One, he addresses the basic theory needed to make sense of the media. It is a distillation of current material on the subject but using different terminology such as "screens" instead of key concepts The diagrams help to crystallize the ideas so that we see the process of media perception as a set of interdependent variables ranging from the practices of the media industry to our individual negotiation of meaning.
Part Two is entitled "Ideas about media (and education)". These range from "Media literacy across the curriculum" to "The camera always lies". Finally, in Part 3, the author gives us dozens of ideas for media education. These are practical, investigative, inquiry centred approaches to the movable pop culture texts of our times from Robocop to Mad Magazine. Occasionally, because these are offered as lists, the pedagogical contexts are missing so that confusion might occur in an activity such as "Explore the possibility that aspects of teen behaviour can be traced to models in the media."
While at times Chris Worsnop needlessly muddies the waters in some of his assertions and there are many contentious statements throughout the book that I would vigorously debate , his views come across full of passion and common sense, surely a great combination in education.