In Can There Be “Global”
Media Literacy,
Dr. Paul Mihailidis retells how Salzburg Academy students found
common teaching and learning points about media through the process of constructing
curricular products aimed at teaching global media literacy for engaged global
citizenship.
This was no easy task however, as Mihailidis explains: “In
their struggle to find a common language through which to convey new ways to
look at global media, the students were forced to reevaluate their beliefs, and
opinions.”
This past summer
at the first inaugural Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, 53 students
and 12 faculty from 15 countries spanning 5 continents, embarked on an
educational voyage in global media. A contingent of participants from top
universities around the world gathered in Salzburg, Austria, for three weeks to
create a single product: a global media literacy curriculum.
How lofty an
ambition – create one curriculum that can be considered “globally”
representative. Moreover, try bringing together students and faculty from
literally all over the world, ask them to work together in cross-cultural
groups, and in three weeks emerge with a unified conception of how global media
literacy should look, feel, sound—and perhaps most importantly—be taught. This
was no easy task (for the students or faculty). This is, however, a story of
struggle and success.
Media literacy
education has existed for over half a century. It was born largely in
Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and more recently has been expanding
in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. Its broad
definitions commonly include the ability to access,
comprehend, evaluate, analyze, interpret, communicate, and produce media in
all forms. While media literacy has
made great strides in certain educational arenas, its foundations have rarely
been applied in global and cross-cultural settings. One can ponder many reasons
for the lack of global media literacy initiatives, from the difficulty in
locating concrete approaches to a global understanding of media, to finding a
setting and a global contingent of individuals willing to explore the topic at
hand. Fortunately, the Salzburg Academy provided the ideal venue and
participant-base for just such an global initiative.
As students
huddled together in groups during the first week of class, offering their
insights into how a global media literacy curriculum could look, many ended up
with detailed lists of why such a task could never work. Students were adamant
about the practical impossibility of a lesson plan that could, for example,
represent similar media functions and systems in China, South Africa, the
United States, and Argentina.
While their
reasoning was both sharp and grounded, the students were thinking predominantly
in terms of specific media. The root of their arguments always ended up in the
details. What about entertainment
television in Africa. You can’t teach newspapers without blogs in Sweden. In
China we can’t get Facebook. While their train of thought was accurate,
their approach was hindered by thinking in terms of media and not media
literacy. As an overseeing faculty member in this process, I often found myself
on the defensive end of heated debates.
I quickly
realized, through listening intently to their discussions, that I was no more
an expert on global media literacy than the students. I also realized, however,
that I could use my experience in teaching for media literate outcomes to help
them abandon the limiting aspects of their ideas and find perspectives about
teaching media that could represent global outlooks.
Media literacy is
about understanding media’s vast and complex roles and responsibilities in
society. It is about having an awareness of how media influence politics and
culture. In this way, media literacy is about a shift in learning from specific
media practices to media outcomes. I saw this shift occur firsthand in
Salzburg. Students, through much debate, discussion, and occasional
frustration, began to use the foundations of media literacy—access, analysis, comprehension,
interpretation, production—to see global representation.
In shifting their
perspectives from critiquing media functions to creating media awareness, the
students developed their own 5 A’s for Global Media Literacy: access,
awareness, assessment, appreciation, action.
They then used these foundations to create a curriculum that is
globally representative because it is not based on specific media functions,
but addresses the various ways to understand media’s roles and responsibilities
for civic life as we understand them.
A foundation in
media education was built. One that is both transformative and groundbreaking.
The faculty and students at the 2007 Salzburg Academy created a shift in the
way curricula are created. The global media literacy curriculum was built by
students, for students. It was based on an approach that transcends specific
geographic limitations in much the same way that media messages transcend
borders and cultures. In this way, the products created at the Salzburg Academy
not only signified new ways to learn, but also signified progress in how media
education is approached on a global scale. Gunnar Myrdal, over 150 years ago,
wrote in Beyond the Welfare State:
Progress has to rely on education.
The individual must be made to know the social facts more accurately, including
his own true interests and the ideals he holds on a deeper level of his sphere
of valuations…I am quite aware that this prescription is nothing less and
nothing more than the age-old liberal faith that “knowledge will make us free.”
Such words resonate anew in the context of the Salzburg Academy on
Media and Global Change. Students from North America, South America,
China, Europe, Asia, and Africa gathered in July in Salzburg, not knowing what
type of work lay ahead of them. In the end, they created a product that has the
ability to transform traditional models of media education, global education,
and curriculum as we have come to know it.
The participants
in the inaugural Salzburg Academy arrived with certain ideas about information
and media, about culture and ideology. In their struggle to find a common
language through which to convey new ways to look at global media, the students
were forced to reevaluate their beliefs, and opinions. They sacrificed some of
their core values to find a global perspective. This challenge required
intellectual “blood, sweat, and tears.” In the end, however, the product was
beyond expectation. They succeeded, and they did so by abandoning their own
judgments and world views. They shifted their common beliefs about media and
found representation through global media literacy
At the end of the
three weeks, exhausted and ill from all the energy spent on creating this
product, I could smile and find that my own perspectives on global media had
shifted as much, if not more, than the global contingent of creators that made
this possible.