By Rick Shepherd

This is part of an article by Rick Shepherd, past president of Ontario's Association for Media Literacy and longtime proponent of an early integration of media education into the classroom. Rick writes about the practical process of providing elementary teachers with in-service media education training, and provides a framework within which teachers can approach media studies with their students.

As is common with many new areas of study, most of the early development in media literacy has been at the secondary level. In Ontario, media literacy is now well established in secondary schools, where it occupies a mandated portion of the English curriculum, and is supported by a number of good textbooks and other materials. Nonetheless, there is a growing realization on the part of media educators that secondary school, or even the transition years (7, 8, 9), is far too late to begin a field so central to our culture, so much a part of the lives and development of our children, as media studies. Many of the issues media literacy naturally addresses - such as gender stereotyping, representation of racial and ethnic minorities, consumerism - need to be dealt with far earlier in students' lives than in early adolescence. If media literacy is worthwhile at the secondary level, it is doubly worthwhile at the elementary.

Elementary teachers work hard, attempting to deliver a curriculum that seems to become more complex and overloaded every year. If media literacy is presented to them as yet another add-on, there will be little hope for its adoption. If, however, media literacy is presented not just as something that meets student needs, but something that will meet teachers' needs to integrate the disparate elements of a broad curriculum, then it stands a good chance of becoming an important feature. In fact, media literacy functions so well as an integrator that it would be worth using even if it were not as intrinsically important as it is.

Curriculum Integration

A class engaged in media study is invariably involved in language work, both written and oral. But it goes beyond that. If we put the child at the centre of the curriculum, and recognize children as first and foremost makers of meaning, then the centrality of media education is obvious. Children have vast amounts of information thrust upon them - much of it from media sources, much of it verbal or written, much of it visual, much of it manipulative. It is the child's task to make sense of it all, to construct reality from this information. But information is never neutral; and language, oral and written, remains the central tool for the kind of conscious processing of mass media that is essential if children are to think and reflect critically about their media and popular culture experiences. The goal of media education is critical autonomy. Our job is to produce good citizens, not good consumers.

The study of media forms and institutions is also directly connected to social and environmental studies - particularly if we consider the role played by media in current affairs, in leisure, in the transmission of values, in the presentation of historical information, in consumerism, and in a host of other topics. One could well argue that it is not possible to adequately approach this area without an examination of the role of the media. Arts education is also clearly connected to media education, in the creative work that students do in their production activities, as well as the critical work they do in assessing media productions. There are even opportunities to infuse math activities into the media program - conducting surveys of viewing habits and expressing the results, examining the costs of advertising and programming, evaluating the claims in advertising, demographic and sampling concepts, etc.

Teachers concerned about thinking skills can clearly see the benefits of media programs, which are built around critical thinking. Media literacy typically involves both analysis and synthesis, as students move from the examination of media products to the production of their own, and back again. Media literacy also typically moves back and forth between the cognitive and affective domains, as students explore their reactions to a media text and attempt to discover how those reactions were generated. Psychomotor development also takes place during production activities, as students learn to manipulate still and video cameras, as well as other equipment. It also becomes clear, when we look at new concerns teachers are being asked to deal with in the classroom - such as violence, anti-racist education, gender stereotyping and other aspects of popular culture - that these cannot adequately be dealt with without examination of the media. One of the elementary consultants I work with calls media literacy "the perfect curriculum," and I think she's right.

All that sounds wonderful, of course, but what do we actually have to do to realize some of these possibilities? What do elementary teachers need if they're going to begin to use media literacy as a program integrator? Perhaps most important, how do we ensure that the media are studied critically, rather than just being used as a tool for teaching other subjects - which would be teaching through rather than teaching about?