Reading Response for Thursday June 4

Reading Beach’s chapter, “Goals for Media Literacy Instruction,” helped me to put the negative perception of media instruction in secondary classrooms into some perspective. I’ve always viewed various forms of media (music, films etc) as especially engaging and enlightening, but I know that this is not necessarily the dominant view and developing a solid, rational justification for using these kinds of texts in the classroom will be useful as I prepare to enter the “real world” of secondary education.

Because of my background in film (an undergrad degree and then a career), I am sometimes surprised to find that some people still view media use in the classroom as non-academic and/or unimportant. I have a difficult time understand how viewing a film is somehow less constructive than the of reading a novel. True, they are very different mediums, and they require different skills and have different benefits, but ultimately they are both extremely valuable tools for educating students. Both mediums 1) are capable of sparking lively classroom debate about the subjets/themes, 2) can be examined for specific literary or filmic devices and techniques, 3) can be examined for their influence on and by other works 4) can be tied to current events in the world…the list could go on and on. While I in now way would argue that books should not be taught, they are only one part of a bigger picture. And while the school where I student taught has taken some steps to meet this changing world (9th and 10th graders don’t take “English” or “Language Arts,” they take “Communications”), there is still a tremendous emphasis on more traditional texts and means of writing in these classes.

One argument against films (and in favor of novels) that I’ve heard is that movies do “all the work” for viewers because they don’t allow the audience to “create a picture of the story in their minds.” Honestly…is creating their own “picture” of the story the central thing we want students to be able to get out of reading a novel? It seems perfectly ridiculous to me. What I want my students to get out of a text (be it a song/movie/novel/poem/website etc) is an ability to think about these messages in a critical way that allows for them to better understand, interpret, and respond to future messages they receive. I don’t just want my students to be able to answer the question, “What is this text saying?” but more importantly, “WHY is it being said?”

I think that one of the major problems with viewing films in classes may be that many teachers don’t know how to engage students in the same kinds of discussions/critical thinking because their own academic backgrounds have not prepared them to do so. So watching a movie becomes a break for the teacher and a break for the class. Movie viewing can be passive if we let it be (but really, so can reading). It’s not the medium that is less valuable, but rather the method in which it is too often used in the classroom.

In one of my classes last year (5007?) we read an article that made the argument that a “back to basics” style of teaching prepares students for a 20th century world, rather than the media rich world that they will actually be entering. Many of the media hybrid texts that students encounter online “involve complex reading strategies” that help them to learn “to communicate in multimodal ways that combine print with visual, sound, and tactile new media texts,” (Beach p3). If these are the kinds of communication that students will be engaged in in their future social, academic, and work lives, educators should be working to help students to create a framework that they can then build off of.