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52
The history of media literacy stretches back much further than 1992 and is
hardly specific to the United States. Len Masterman50 and David Buckingham51 have
described shifts in media education from protection toward critical autonomy and
preparation. Buckingham identifies efforts in the United Kingdom during the 1930s
through the late 1950s that aimed to teach students appropriate disdain for mass
culture. Media education was to provide a type of inoculation against the moral and
cultural shortcomings of popular culture artifacts and rituals in the service of
preserving Britain’s literary heritage. Later efforts in the 1950s and 1960s in the
U.K. and elsewhere moved slightly away from the inoculatory paradigm and worked
to teach people to distinguish between “good” and “bad” popular culture rather than
dismissing it altogether.
The 1970s and 1980s introduced “screen theory” to schools. Screen theory is
an approach to media analysis that works to “reveal the constructed nature of media
texts, and thereby to show how media representations reinforce the ideologies of
dominant groups within society.”52 Screen theory brings concepts of representation
and political economy into the forefront of analysis. As Justin Lewis and Sut Jhally
note, these two elements are inseparable. They write:
…an analysis of political economy should not be restricted to a narrow set of
economic relations. The media are determined by a set of social and
economic conditions that involve the key dividing lines of our culture,
whether they be race, class, gender, sexuality, age, or mobility…53
The ideological analysis characteristic of screen theory has carried over to a branch
of media education called critical media literacy, although contemporary approaches
tend to take a more nuanced approach to understanding ideology.
Object Description
| Title | Kids as cultural producers: consumption, literacy, and participation |
| Author | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Author email | rherr@usc.edu; bhs@hri.uci.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Communication |
| School | Annenberg School for Communication |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-08-25 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-10-17 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Banet-Weiser, Sarah |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Gross, Larry Seiter, Ellen |
| Abstract | This dissertation looks closely at the practice of digital media production within a group of special education students and their teachers. Using ethnographic methods of extended participant observation and semi-structured interviews with students, teachers, and parents, along with textual analysis of students' media projects, this work examines the types of learning that emerge from making media at school and the ways in which that learning relates to media and technology use in everyday life. Over the course of one school year (2005-2006), the students who are the focus of this dissertation undertook eight different multimedia production projects, ranging from designing PowerPoint presentations to digital video production and stop-motion animation. Through media production, the students found opportunities to practice traditional and digital literacy skills as well as to explore issues of identity and self-expression.; This dissertation provides empirical support for recommendations made by several media literacy scholars to include media production as part of critical media literacy curricula and contributes a unique case study -- one situated in special education -- to a growing body of work on digital literacy. Three interdisciplinary themes--consumption, literacy, and participation -- are used to organize the description and analysis of the students' media production activities. These themes connect the specific production that took place in the classroom to larger discourses about youth, media, technology, education, and access, working to complicate existing constructions of young people as either helpless victims of manipulative media or naturally savvy media and technology users. Instead, this research emphasizes that the relationships kids have with media and technology are complex, dynamic, intrinsically linked to their identities as consumers and participants in society. Media literacy is thus theorized as a tool for understanding and controlling consumption, participation, and the construction of young people as both current and future citizens. |
| Keyword | media literacy; media production; special education; middle school; digital media |
| Geographic subject (city or populated place) | Los Angeles |
| Coverage date | 2005/2006 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1674 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Stephenson, Rebecca Herr |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Stephenson-2393 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume29/etd-Stephenson-2393.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 57 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 52 The history of media literacy stretches back much further than 1992 and is hardly specific to the United States. Len Masterman50 and David Buckingham51 have described shifts in media education from protection toward critical autonomy and preparation. Buckingham identifies efforts in the United Kingdom during the 1930s through the late 1950s that aimed to teach students appropriate disdain for mass culture. Media education was to provide a type of inoculation against the moral and cultural shortcomings of popular culture artifacts and rituals in the service of preserving Britain’s literary heritage. Later efforts in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.K. and elsewhere moved slightly away from the inoculatory paradigm and worked to teach people to distinguish between “good” and “bad” popular culture rather than dismissing it altogether. The 1970s and 1980s introduced “screen theory” to schools. Screen theory is an approach to media analysis that works to “reveal the constructed nature of media texts, and thereby to show how media representations reinforce the ideologies of dominant groups within society.”52 Screen theory brings concepts of representation and political economy into the forefront of analysis. As Justin Lewis and Sut Jhally note, these two elements are inseparable. They write: …an analysis of political economy should not be restricted to a narrow set of economic relations. The media are determined by a set of social and economic conditions that involve the key dividing lines of our culture, whether they be race, class, gender, sexuality, age, or mobility…53 The ideological analysis characteristic of screen theory has carried over to a branch of media education called critical media literacy, although contemporary approaches tend to take a more nuanced approach to understanding ideology. |
