new media, new sites of learning buckigham

8/8/2019 New Media, New Sites of Learning Buckigham

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NEW MEDIA, NEW SITES OF LEARNING

Presentation for 'Media Literacy Citizenship andDialogue': Brussels 28.1.03

Professor David Buckingham

Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and MediaInstitute of Education, University of London, UK(www.ccsonline.org.uk/mediacentre)

In this presentation, I focus on two of the three mainthemes of the conference: media education and citizenship;and the role of media education in developing 'synergy'between formal and informal education.

Citizenship

There is a common view in industrialised countries that weare living through a crisis in citizenship. Levels ofpolitical participation are at an all-time low; fewer andfewer people are inclined to vote in elections or to joinpolitical parties; and levels of political knowledge andinterest are rapidly declining.

This view is often tied to broader arguments from 'socialcapital theory', for example in the work of the US writerRobert Putnam. Here it is argued that local social networks

and community-based associations are in decline, as we movetowards more individualised, privatised forms of existence.While these tendencies may be more advanced in the US, theyare increasingly apparent in Europe also.

The media are often seen to be to blame for this state ofaffairs. Putnam, for example, argues that television inparticular has led to a growing disengagement from thepolitical process, Crudely, the more people watch TV, theyless they are interested in going out and associating withothers.

Advocates of this view also offer evidence of a declining

interest in 'serious' news media. TV current affairsprogrammes and broadsheet newspapers are steadily losingtheir audiences; and this is not a fixed generationaldifference, but a long-term decline over decades.

This argument about disengagement, or the decline ofcitizenship, is also particularly applied to the young.Critics argue that youth culture, or popular culture morebroadly, encourage a form of apathy and cynicism among young


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people a sense that there's really no point in botheringto get involved.

However, it is possible to offer another interpretation ofthese developments, which I considered in my book 'TheMaking of Citizens'. Rather than a decline in citizenship,

what we may be seeing is a process whereby traditional(modernist) forms of citizenship are giving way to new(postmodernist) forms. These new forms are based not so muchon geographical location but on the new forms of communitymade possible by electronic media.

My research suggests that, far from being uninterested inpolitics, young people are able to show a developedawareness of and engagement with social and politicalissues, albeit not necessarily in the terms that adultsmight wish. Insofar as they are active participants, theyopt for single-issue campaigns and do-it-yourself movements,rather than conventional political parties.

I also argue that it is false to equate cynicism withapathy. Young people may be alienated from the politicalprocess or, more specifically, from the actions ofpoliticians but that does not necessarily mean they do notcare about social issues. Indeed, they may have very goodreasons for being cynical.

This argument leads to a view of young people not asapathetic and lazy, but as disenfranchised. The problem isnot with young people, but with the fact that politiciansand political discourse make no attempt to address them. Andwhen it comes to news media, the problem is not that youngpeople have abandoned these media, but that traditionalforms of news media have abandoned them. Thus, one couldargue that news media are making no attempt to addressthemselves to young people, or to reach out to youngpeople's experiences and life worlds. The gap in social andpolitical communication that arises is being filled by newmedia, and particularly by the internet.

This argument poses a challenge for traditional news media,to find new ways of reaching out to young people. But italso challenges us to re-think our conception ofcitizenship. It implies that old ideas of citizenship based

on duty, deference and responsibility are giving way to newideas, which are more diverse and fragmented, moreinteractive, and more tied up with consumption, includingmedia consumption.

Here, therefore, are two contrasting interpretations of thechanging relationships between young people, media andcitizenship. Yet despite the differences between them, theyare bound to agree that the media are central to the


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political process, to participation in society, tocitizenship, and to the formation of social identity.

Media education

To this extent, we would expect media education to beplaying an important role here. Arguments for mediaeducation traditionally employ the rhetoric of citizenship.For example, international documents like UNESCO's GrunwaldDeclaration of early 1980s, or its Seville Declaration from2002, clearly define media education as a means of fosteringdemocratic participation.

In practice, however, this is often seen in rather limitedways, as a matter of producing 'critical consumers'. Forsome, media education seems to be allied to a rationalistic,old-fashioned notion of citizenship: it is about creating'good little citizens', who will do their duty, act

responsibility, and make sure they are appropriately well-informed. Thus, there are some who see media education asbeing primarily about telling the difference between factand opinion in the press, or detecting media bias andimplicitly, about encouraging children to stop reading nastytabloid papers (if indeed they read newspapers at all) andto move on to 'serious' newspapers.

Experience in the UK would suggest that this approachdoesn't really work, because it misses the target. It failsto engage with children's experiences of media, or with whatthey find significant; and it is implicitly moralistic,offering children a model of citizenly responsibility whichthey may well be inclined to resist. In my view, we need tosee the role of media education in rather broader terms.

Firstly, we need to begin by engaging with children'sexisting uses of media with their agenda rather than withours, with what they find significant rather than with whatwe think they ought to be doing. If we do this, we may wellfind there is rather more going on that we might haveimagined. We might find that citizenship and participationfor young people might have rather more to do with rap musicor skateboarding or soap operas or chat rooms than it doeswith the news. This is not to suggest that we simply

celebrate what young people are doing merely that this isthe place to start.

Secondly, we need to recognise that participation involvesmore than critical consumption: it also involves production.Media education needs to involve both critical analysis (orreflection) and practical, creative production. This is notto say that it is a vocational enterprise for example,about training the TV producers of tomorrow. However, it isabout giving children access to the means of cultural


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production and expression, and encouraging them to use thosemeans in a thoughtful and critical way.

Bridging the gap

So if media educators wish to promote participatorycitizenship, they must find ways of bridging the gap betweenthe school and what happens out of school.

In fact, historically, media education has often been seenas precisely the opposite as a means of helping childrento resist, or to defend themselves against, what are seen asthe negative or damaging aspects of the world beyond theschool.From this perspective, media education is a defensiveoperation. It is about exposing the false values of popularculture, and thereby leading children on to the true valuesof high culture. Or it is about helping children to see

through the bad ideas we imagine they get from the media andthereby leading them on to the good ideas that the teacherwill offer them. This is an argument that takes many forms,but at the moment it is particularly apparent among thosewho see media education as a form of inoculation againstviolence or sex or commercialism.

At least in the UK, a different view began to emerge in1960s. It was part of a wider movement in schools to try toengage with the realities of working-class children's lives.It was argued that the school was offering a form ofacademic knowledge, or cultural capital, that many childrensaw as quite irrelevant to their lives outside school. Itwas suggested that such children's experiences and cultureswere not recognised by the school and indeed that thefunction of the school was often to define those experiencesand cultures as illegitimate.

And so it was argued that schooling needed to become morerelevant to real life outside school. Teaching needed tobridge the gap between children's popular everyday knowledgeand academic knowledge and that children's experiences(particularly those of working class children) needed to berecognised as valid and legitimate. Rather than leavingtheir culture outside the school door, children should be

encouraged to bring their culture into the school, to usetheir culture as a basis for investigation.

Of course, this is not to say that this is the end of theprocess. There is the danger that the school might simply beseeking, in a more subtle way, to colonise children'sculture, to use it for its own purposes and this is asomething children may well recognise and resist. On theother hand, there is also a danger that we end up simplycelebrating media culture, and remove any grounds for


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judgment. This would be little more than an empty gesture,which would effectively leave children where they alreadyare. The key issue in terms of pedagogy, in classroompractice, is how this relationship is worked through.

The development of media education in the UK which has a

very long history can be seen as part of this broadermove.However, it is clear that this task of bridging the gap isbecoming more difficult and more complex now than it was inearlier times.

Over the past decade, we have seen significant changes inchildren's media culture changes that are not justtechnological, but also economic and political. We have seena move away from the traditional public service ethos, inwhich children were often addressed in very paternalisticways, towards a global, commercially-driven, multi-mediasystem. Children are now growing up in a much more diverse,

complex, demanding media environment than was the case eventwenty years ago.

Children's media increasingly address them as autonomous andactive individuals. The media require participation; theyare not necessarily respectful of authority; they areplayful and ironic; they offer a diversity of conflictingvoices. They are the media of Bakhtin's carnival, in whichtraditional values are often inverted.

New media digital media like computer games or theinternet - involve a whole range of informal learningprocesses, in which participants are simultaneously'teachers' and 'learners'. Children learn to use these medialargely through trial and error - through exploration,experimentation and play; and collaboration with others -both in face-to-face and virtual forms - is an essentialelement of the process.

Playing a computer game or participating in a chat roominvolves the ability to switch between modes ofcommunication, to rapidly figure out rules and conventions.These are 'multiliterate' activities that carry uniquechallenges and demands, which is why most adults find themincomprehensible.

Meanwhile, school systems in many countries seem to beheading determinedly in the opposite direction. The rapidpace of change has led to a growing sense of panic aroundchildhood and education and the response to this is oftento retreat to a kind of 'educational fundamentalism'.Educators are urged to move 'back to basics', as though thebasics had remained unchanged. Politically, there is greatpressure to reject and disavow the innovations of the 1960sand 1970s, in favour of an insistence on traditional forms


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of knowledge, traditional teaching methods, and traditionalrelations between teachers and students (or adults andchildren).

Arguably, the advent of new technology in schools has notmade much difference to this. ICT is used mostly in the

service of traditional pedagogy in fact, of regimes oftesting. Opportunities for genuinely flexible, interactivelearning are very limited.

Furthermore, a new division is emerging between uses of ICTin school and children's uses of ICT out of school whatsome of us are calling the new digital divide. Outsideschool, children are using new media for computer games, forchat rooms and SMS messaging, for surfing the internet notfor 'educational' information, but for information abouttheir other media enthusiasms. Yet in school, much of whatthey do is basic word processing and spreadsheets; and ifthey are allowed to surf the internet, they have to cope

with the ridiculous obstacles posed by filtering software.

To be rhetorical, one could argue that schools largelyfailed to acknowledge and use the most significant media ofthe 20

thcentury film and television. Now, at the start of

the 21stcentury, many of them seem to be trying to head back

to the 19th. This divide or gap between school and the world

outside school may in fact be growing or at least the taskof building bridges may be getting harder.

New sites of learning

I want to focus now on the role of media production,particularly in informal, out-of-school contexts.

Media educators have often seen production as a means ofenabling students to reach out of the classroom to the realworld, to make their voices heard in a wider public arena.Production obviously lends itself well to students doingprojects with their local community, and thereforecontributing to community life.

As long ago as the early 1970s, the British researchersMurdock and Phelps were arguing about the potential for

students to make media for real audiences, beyond theclassroom. More recently, the Canadian media educator BobMorgan has argued for taking media education 'back to thestreets', for example by encouraging forms of mediaproduction that might 'make a difference' to localcommunities. By enabling young people to be other than'school pupils', such approaches may encourage them toassume a greater degree of autonomy and control over theirown learning.


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This is more possible now with new technology. Thistechnology is accessible, both in the sense of being lessexpensive and in the sense of being easier to use. It ispossible for quite young children to use digital cameras andediting software to achieve relatively professional-lookingresults.

We have also seen a growth in informal, community-basedmedia centres in recent years. There is an interestinghistory here, although the situation will vary betweendifferent European countries. I can recall some of theenthusiasm surrounding portable video in 1970s, and theinteresting work done using photography with young people in70s and 80s in Britain. In the past decade, we have seen aburst of new funding for such work. Informal arts activities including media work are seen as a way of addressingsocial exclusion, engaging disaffected young people, andtransforming disadvantaged communities. While there isreason to be sceptical about some of these claims, there are

also important new opportunities here.

Meanwhile, schools are also being urged to develop communitylinks. In the UK, specialist secondary schools are requiredto work with neighbourhood organisations, to bring thecommunity into school, but also to get students out into thecommunity and again, arts and media seen as valuable wayof making this happen.

There is also some evidence that this is happening globally.The UNESCO Clearinghouse Yearbook from 2000 contained arange of accounts of children's participation in media,ranging from very developed digital video work to quite lowtech activities using radio or print media. This work isoften seen as part of a broader emphasis on children'srights to cultural expression, contained in UN Declarationon the Rights of the Child.

Some unresolved issues

While welcoming these opportunities, I would also like topoint to the dangers of a kind of romanticism here. Researchon these uses of media in 'informal' settings points to someunresolved problems:

On the one hand, there is a danger of 'curricularising'leisure of transforming leisure into an educationalopportunity, and then assessing and credentialising whatpeople do. The emphasis on 'training', and the wider ethosof competition within education, can result in a formalisingof the informal.

On the other hand, there is a danger of being toounstructured. Out-of-school sites like youth clubs and


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after-school clubs have historically acted as a form ofchild-minding, or even 'soft policing' a way of removingpotentially dangerous youth from the streets, and keepingthem busy. In this context, there are often low expectationsof what will be achieved. What happens is not seen to beabout learning, but about hanging out or passing the time

and this approach can be justified by appeals to a non-hierarchical pedagogy, or a romanticisation of youthculture.

So there are some difficult questions about what is beinglearnt here, and how it is being learnt. What do we mean by'informal learning'? How is it different from formallearning? How do we make informal learning more productive,without simply undermining it? And how can schools buildupon what is taking place in these informal settings?

This leads into broader questions about evaluation. Much ofthe evaluation of this informal media work has been about

head-counting about quantity rather than quality. It wouldseem important now to be thinking about quality, both of thelearning experience itself and of the products that aregenerated. Yet the most appropriate methods of evaluationremain to be identified.

Following from this, there are questions about who getsaccess to such opportunities, and what they do with it.Working-class and middle-class children may be in a verydifferent position when it comes to making use of theopportunities that these kinds of settings represent. Theidea that they offer a route for disadvantaged young peopleinto employment in the media industries, for example, isquite questionable.

It is clear from research in the UK that several needs inthis sector have yet to be adequately met. The most urgentof these are for systematic training of staff; fordistribution, that will enable children's work to reach awider audience; and for longer-term funding, so that workcan be sustained, rather than constantly starting fromscratch.

Towards deschooling?

These are all quite local specific issues, but they relateto broader questions about the future role of school as aninstitution. Is the institutional form of the school anylonger relevant to contemporary society? Can the school aspresently constituted continue to provide for citizenship orsocial participation in the context of a high-tech,'mediatized' or 'knowledge' society? Do we need newinstitutions, that will create new opportunities for the newkinds of learning that are now required?


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In this respect, it is worth looking back to the work ofIvan Illich, first published 30 years ago. In some ways,Illich's arguments are strikingly contemporary. He arguesthat the institution of the school is effectively redundant and indeed that it is anti-educational. He suggests that

we learn best through active participation through what wemight now call informal learning or situated learning.

It is also interesting to revisit Illich in the light ofcontemporary arguments about the network society, and theinternet as a kind of postmodern alternative to schooling.Illich has a vision of new technology as a means of creatinglearning exchanges, and looks to computers as a way ofachieving the decentralised learning society he imagines.

Ultimately, however, Illich is a romantic anarchist, whosevision requires a kind of post-capitalist utopia. We couldargue that under capitalism, knowledge is inevitably a

commodity: and indeed that in the 30 years since Illichwrote, we have moved much more quickly towards a kind ofprivatised educational consumerism, which is veryundemocratic in its consequences.

So there are good reasons to be wary of arguments about newmedia replacing the school, or doing things schools arefailing to do. The school is perhaps one of the last publicsector institutions, and its publicness is under threatalmost everywhere we look.

Indeed, despite my scepticism about traditional, modernistnotions of citizenship, I would argue that it is the role ofthe school to guarantee the health of the public sphere, tocreate the conditions for rational public communication and that media education, insofar as it assists in that, hasto be a fundamental guarantee of citizenship.

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