In the UK context, media education has been struggling recently after a long period of growth. Most
certainly there is trouble ahead as a reactionary political administration strives to essentialize the educational curriculum and research landscape around STEM. Media education sits precariously on the hostile border territories between Arts and Humanities. We can plead for STEAM (with Arts added, as Prague keynote speaker and guest editor of the last MERJ, Andrew Burn, argues) but who is listening?
In the US, the “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” madness continues along with momentum
for educational technology in K-12 school. Technology companies and venture capitalists see educational
technology as the next frontier, with $20 billion spent in elementary and secondary schools in 2014. We see relentless momentum in many communities, as iPads, apps and 1:1 classrooms are all the rage even though television continues to be the primary technology used in the home, with children ages 2 – 11 spending 22 hours a week watching television as compared to 5 hours a week using the Internet on a computer (AdWeek, 2015).
The gap between home and school uses of media and technology reflects the fragmentation of positions within the domain of digital literacy, a phenomenon that may diminish media literacy’s traditional dual emphasis on critical analysis and student media production. American media literacy educators worry that the appetite for social media and user-generated content may lead our interests in children, youth and mass media (especially news, advertising and popular culture) to be perceived as irrelevant to the practice of teaching and learning.
For these reasons, honing in on civic engagement may have real strategic value. The broad objectives for digital, media and information literacy education set out in various international policy briefing documents and the recent UNESCO declarations are laudable. But they’re ambitious, perhaps crazily so. Still, if we work together to address, in particular, youth disengagement from the public sphere as the kind of outcome of critical thinking and creative media production we might want to achieve, we can also then admit to ourselves that just saying it will happen isn’t enough. With a strong pedagogic rationale, we can work together across sectors and borders to try to achieve it. We’re optimistic that we just might get somewhere.