I’ve come to believe that justifying what we teach is just part of the job description of a teacher. School boards, curriculum review committees, principals, department heads, parents, and students are always assessing the validity of what we teach in our classrooms. And rightly so. So much time and money is invested in education that it just stands to reason that the chief stakeholders would want to know a thing or two about why we do what we do. There have been times in my career, before becoming the enlightened educator that I currently am, where I’ve been downright irritated by these questions and have resorted to some form of the loathed parental copout “because I said so, that’s why.” Too often, I—and I don’t think I’m alone here—have viewed critical examination of curriculum as the questioning of my judgment as an education professional. In my own defense, questions about curriculum are often paired with a loud sigh and a roll of the eyes or the requirement of the creation of a huge binder labeled “scope and sequence” that will get very comfortable on a shelf. Reading the first chapter of Richard Beach’s teachingmedialiteracy.com (2007) has gotten me thinking about the act of justifying anything I do in the classroom and, of course, how that relates to the teaching of media literacy.
Beach begins chapter one with, “As a teacher of media studies, you may often face the challenge of having to justify the inclusion of media studies in the curriculum.” While I don’t consider myself a “teacher of media studies” just yet (I’ve dabbled a bit, but feel wholly unqualified to give myself the official title), I know that Beach is correct. And he is correct because on some level we have to justify everything we teach. Some things are just easier than others. We study Shakespeare because Shakespeare is a brilliant author who has been studied for centuries. We study grammar because we need to be effective writers and communicators. We read To Kill a Mockingbird because it speaks to who we are as humans. Never mind the fallacious appeal to tradition, the ambiguity of the word “effective” when discussing communication, or the lofty but potentially meaningless rhetoric of “speaks to us as humans” these answers seem to suffice. But, as Beech rightly points, out, it’s a different matter when it comes to media literacy. It hasn’t been around long enough to use tradition as justification; we often view media as something to be passively observed rather than engaged with, so thinking that medial literacy can help us become effective communicators seems farfetched at best; and we have a tendency to separate media from anything human, thinking instead of the machines that facilitate this human interaction.
Beach offers five legitimate justifications for the teaching of media studies: building upon students’ active use of media, moving digital literacies out of the bedroom and into the classroom, helping students to learn to communicate in multimodal ways, helping students engage with and evaluate texts, and helping students understand how media constructs reality. I accept all of these. Beach seems to be basing his justifications on the basic premises that media is a huge part of our students’ lives and therefore is a means to engage them in building skills that will help them to become critical thinkers with any type of message and that because media is such a huge part of students’ lives, they ought to be able to be critical consumers of it. I agree wholeheartedly with Beach’s justifications and the underlying tenets.
I think what it boils down to is that studying anything under the umbrella of “language arts” helps us to make sense of ourselves, each other, and the world we live in.
In my classroom this year, students and I wrestled with these ideas through reading Greek tragedies, contemporary essays, Shakespearean drama, Steinbeck novellas, and various other “classic” texts. But we applied pretty much the same skills when we looked at a target billboard boycotted by a group of mothers who deemed it offensive, viewed a Barack Obama ad parodying an old Apple computer spot that aired during the 1984 Superbowl, analyzed the movie Pleasantville, presented various examples of visual argumentation, and planned our own “flashmob” as an example of argumentation through group mobilization after looking at examples on youtube.
When I think about the great conversations that happened in my classroom related to all of these different forms of media, Shakespeare to youtube, it seems like justifying the teaching of media studies should be unnecessary. But, just as the printing press probably messed up the curriculum of schools back in the 1400’s, new forms of media are messing with our curriculum today. And thank goodness they are.
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