Media literacy and neo‐liberal government: pedagogies of freedom and constraint

Abstract This paper examines relations between media education discourses and teachers’ reflections on their work with students around media. Based on a reading of curriculum documents and scholarly debates about media literacy, as well as conversations with teachers in Toronto, I ask how – and whether – formal discourses, common sense and local practices are connected in teachers’ talk. My assumption is that media education forms a set of discourses that are ‘made up’ in part through statements and debates, circulating through professional and academic journals, books, curriculum documents, courses, workshops, conferences, web‐sites, electronic communication and so on. Competing claims are made to establish what counts as media education and to assert what good media pedagogy should do and be. I then ask what teachers make of such claims and how – and whether – they are influenced by them. The first part of the paper traces some features of media education discourses over the past thirty‐plus years, while the second reports on group interviews with teachers. I show that teachers do not passively adopt or adapt to notions of media education that circulate in formal discourse. Rather, they actively constitute notions of media, youth, earning and pedagogy through their practices and through their conversations about their work with students. The paper concludes with a speculation that the media education classroom may be a particularly fertile site for the production of neo‐liberal subjects. Keywords: media educationteachersneo‐liberalism Acknowledgements This paper began with a presentation I made to the seminar, ‘What Does Pedagogy Mean to You?’, organised by the editors of this journal and held in Manchester in February 2007. Another version was presented to the Centre for Media and Culture in Education in April that year. I am grateful to the participants in both seminars for their feedback and suggestions. Adding to what was a series of speculations and questions about media education pedagogy, I conducted interviews with Toronto teachers in June and July 2007. I am grateful to Colleen McLay, who provided insightful, timely and well‐organised research assistance, Kris Ericsson offered advice and technical back‐up and the University of Toronto’s Small Scale Grant programme provided financial support. I am grateful to the teachers who took part in focus groups and interviews, and to Barry Duncan for allowing me to interview him in June 2008. Notes 1. In this paper I use media education and media literacy interchangeably. There is some regional variation in usage and much debate among practitioners and scholars about these terms, as well as the term media studies. It might be more precise to suggest that the media literacy of students is the aim of media education, considered as a practice, while media studies encompasses research and analysis of media content, forms, technologies, ownership and so on. 2. I should note here that I draw from conversations with a small group of teachers, rather than from ‘direct’ observation of classrooms. Thus, I make no attempt here to evaluate teachers’ statements against an external ‘real’ space – the classroom – nor do I assume that what is being said in an interview corresponds directly with what teachers do when they interact with students (Morgan Citation1998a).

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