Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture

Abstract

Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture David Buckingham (2003). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 216 pages. ISBN 0-7456-2830-3.Today, scholars are engaged in a conversation about the changing face of art education. Freedman and Stuhr (2004) identify four conditions that they believe have led to changes in art education in an increasingly visual culture: (1) changing ideas about personal and communal identities; (2) children's focus on new media, especially visual technologies; (3) the fluid nature of disciplinary boundaries and the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge; and (4) the recognition of the importance of critical interpretation. The continuing influence of visual technologies, especially on children, has created a pedagogical dilemma for many art educators who wish to move beyond having students primarily use computer software like Photoshop® to create or manipulate images.As we have moved into the 21st century, technologies have changed how we think, learn, and make art. The reality of increased interaction with new identified by Freedman and Stuhr is a crucial topic for educators today and will be referred to throughout this review simply as In a report on a Kaiser Family Foundation survey (2005) of children's use, with a national sample representative of more than 3000 children, children 8 years old to 18 years old were found to use for over 6 hours a day, primarily time spent outside the school day. Many of today's students engage with on a daily basis, whether through text messages, e-mail, computer games, virtual web spaces, recorded music, magazines, television, newspapers and other forms, becoming what the Kaiser report refers to as media multitaskers (p. 37). Children are surrounded by and, on average, live in homes that have three televisions, three tape players, three radios, two VCRS, two CD players, a video game player, and a computer (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005).Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture by David Buckingham offers art teachers a comprehensive perspective on education, identifies basic concepts, provides an analysis of classroom practice, and discusses key issues that have shaped the current discourse. Buckingham is a Professor of Education at the Institute of Education and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth, and Media at the University of London. He has written several books on media-related issues, played a major role in the development of classroom-based research in education in the United Kingdom, and directed a number of research studies of children and their interaction with electronic media.Although Buckingham's research is grounded in the history and politics of education in the United Kingdom, he examines issues that parallel those art educators across cultures are grappling with today, including whether to teach about or teach through media, and how to facilitate critical learning. He examines forms of education in the past, contemporary education pedagogical strategies and learning, and future challenges. Questions Buckingham explores throughout the book include: (1) How can students learn to actively engage with that surrounds them? (2) How should education respond to challenges in an increasingly mediated world? (3) How can educators prepare themselves to teach children about art in an increasingly visual world? and (4) What are the contexts that surround the pedagogy debates?In Part One, Buckingham explores various definitions of and education and introduces key issues that are discussed in depth in the other chapters. He believes that previous definitions of education have been problematic primarily because they focused on either teaching children through or with the media. He explains that the intertextual nature of various forms, where one text refers to other texts and then back to itself, often in ironic ways, is important in understanding education. …