Reflection on The Seven Great Debates in Media Literacy

Personally, over the past several years, I've thought that schools and families use media incorrectly a great deal of the time and although I enjoy a good movie, I have been an advocate for "turning off TV." This class is challenging the way I've thought about integrating media in the school system, and this article by Ms. Hobbs was quite interesting - I would have never guessed that anyone would come up with seven different arguments or stances on this subject, and it sounds as though there are even more.

Before I read this article, I would have probably sided first with the "protectionist stance," which says that it is important to open the eyes of young people to some of the motives and tactics of popular media so that they can be more objective when taking it in. The article criticized this approach, saying that experience in classrooms has shown this to be ineffective because the lessons can come across to students as preaching that what they like and submerse themselves in is not good, and any response they have might just be what they think will be the right answer for the test but without lasting results. I still think that exposure to some of the background and tactics used is important and wouldn't want to ignore this aspect, but I can see now how unless it's taught effectively, this kind of lesson could be received as another "lecture," by the students - endured for the moment and then forgotten.

I'm only half surprised that the question as to whether or not media production should be an essential feature of media literacy education is brought up. I suppose that I just assumed that it was a given--why would you teach media without allowing the students to try their hand at it? It wasn't mentioned in this article, but I suppose one argument against incorporating a lot of media production into the classroom would be the additional cost for equipment and software. Working as a long-term sub in the art department at a high school, I saw a glimpse of the battle between the arts students and computer graphics students - we wanted digital cameras too, but there just wasn't a budget for it. Another "downfall" of using classroom time to teach video production, etc, would be that it could take away time from other important assignments, like they used in the example about how many classic works of literature will 10th graders be reading?

Integration of media literacy into several or all subjects ties in with the first two stances - if you do integrate it, that means that all of the classrooms will need to have access to the computer labs and other equipment. School boards might object to having media taught as yet another class as many schools are having a hard enough time keeping their art and language programs intact.

The four videos we watched were interesting - I think that all of them approached the political agenda theme. The one about how the News is What We Make It was a cross between the political agenda and the protectionist stance, because it pointed out that the media controls what we hear and see on the television. The one about ordering pizza also seemed to hit both themes - how far will we let things go before our privacy is infringed upon, and are we going to say anything about it?