Mediacy Articles – Volume 17, No. 1
This was the question put to David Buckingham of The Institute of Education, (London, England) during the first session of McGill University's Graduate Summer Institute in July. In his plenary, which was a comprehensive overview of media education classroom practices and their relationship to cultural studies, he addressed the wistful longing for the '60s by posing some critical, and perhaps unpopular, questions about cultural studies and the radical teaching methods of that era.
These questions have evolved from his own history. He has been, and is currently, involved in secondary school media education and audience research. His work reflects strongly on classroom practice almost exclusively with students and teachers in inner-city schools. Here, he regularly confronts the problems of teaching working-class students who tend to resist schooling.
Having established his own pedagogical position, he went on to discuss the state of media education in Britain and its often contradictory relationship with the English curriculum. Media education, he pointed out, wants to challenge much of the English curriculum; however, it also acknowledges that there is much to be learned there about students' perspectives. "The relationship is a fraught one which has become further complicated by current British politics." he said. "Media education could suffer greatly, now that control of the English curriculum has shifted to the right."
Buckingham is relieved that there is strong resistance to this shift, but is still concerned about the overtness of right-wing politics in education in Britain and their effects on media education. In resisting the shift, he offers some arguments which centre on the recognition that there is a widening range of literacies to be considered. This range must include the media and digitisation if education is to be relevant to young people's experience.
In tracing the history of the inoculation approach to media education, Buckingham identified the founding moment to be the work of Leavis and Thompson in 1933. They were committed to weaning children off popular culture and towards the "literary tradition." Their teaching was marked by a defensiveness about advertising and the press with an emphasis on American culture which they feared would undermine the British identity. This fear is now back on the agenda in Britain.
The founding moment for Cultural Studies in Britain came with the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall during the late '50s. All had backgrounds in education; all had a more democratic notion of culture which included previously excluded groups. However, this approach was problematic for while it moved away from elitism, it led to discrimination within each group, creating yet another form of defensiveness. The next watershed came in the mid-'70s which brought the more radical approach of critical pedagogy (a term not used in Britain). Much of the theory that informs this approach, Buckingham argued, remains elitist; the relations between academics and teachers continue to be hierarchical.
What emerges from the Cultural Studies approach is a portrait of the media as agents of the dominant ideology. It promotes the belief that our emphasis should be on training students in semiotics and analysis as well as providing information about the workings of media institutions. Media education, then, becomes a sort of ideological inoculation. Here again, Buckingham points to problematic continuities, for the attempt to demystify may differ very little from earlier approaches, as media education again becomes a way of saving students from the media. Notion of Teacher as Liberator
Too often, Buckingham stated, the notion of teacher as liberator is based on a contradiction. This is particularly obvious in anti-racism teaching, which is based on the belief that racism arises from a lack of rationality. It offers a sense of "empowerment" for the teacher by carving out a dramatic self image for him/her which raises expectations about what schools can actually achieve. This, in fact, is a misleading fantasy.
Giving the discussion a political slant, Buckingham posited that Thatcherism was successful because it connected with what people related to. But Buckingham asks, "For whom does the left speak?" For there is yet another fantasy that "we" can speak on behalf of all minority groups and unite them. The reality is that it is not for the dominators to claim to know what is best for the dominated. In fact, the notion of identity in identity-politics has been blown apart. Evidence of this can be seen in the feminist movement which is fraught with racial tensions. Tensions also exist in the black community as the result of the rise of a black middle class. Racial tensions in the gay community have complicated homophobia. These tensions surrounding the notion of "identity" have come to be recognized in post structuralist and post modernist theory.
In closing, Buckingham stated that media education needs a motivation other than the one offered by critical pedagogy, and cultural studies. He left his audience with a provocative question, "Is being critical a state of grace into which only the academically qualified can be accepted?" This, perhaps, is the unpopular and critical question of the '9O's.
David Buckingham's two-week session at McGill was entitled Media Education: Audience Research and Classroom Practice. His newest book, Cultural Studies Goes To School: Reading and Teaching Popular Media which he co-authored with Julian Sefton-Green is out now. The book is 264 pages and some of the contents include:
The book will be reviewed in a future issue of Mediacy.