media education

   The first university courses in film studies, supported by critical debates in Screen and its offshoot Screen Education, were established in the 1970s. By the mid-1990s, some 30,000 young people annually opted for courses leading to public examinations in media studies at age sixteen or eighteen, and many thousands were applying each year for limited, but growing, numbers of university media courses. The notion of media education as a general entitlement for all eight million UK schoolchildren began to emerge in the 1980s. By 1990, schools in all regions of the UK had some kind of curricular requirement (optional in Scotland, compulsory in the National Curriculum for England and Wales) to teach about the media. However, without concomitant resources and teacher training, fulfilment of these requirements is patchy and variable in quality.

   Media education at any level typically involves critical study of a range of media, such as television, film, radio, the press, magazines and popular music. Media forms such as news, advertising and soap opera, which feature in more than one medium, are popular topics of study. Three different but overlapping approaches are commonly used to study media ‘texts’ (such as advertisements or films). Students look at how meanings are produced through close analysis of visual composition, soundtracks and so on; they find out about the institutional and financial background (for example, who produced it and why); and they consider who the audience is and what its responses and interpretations are likely to be. Some kind of practical production work usually forms part of the course. Many older media students want to work in the media, but others regard their study simply as a useful preparation for the modern world. As digital technologies develop, media education is likely to change, becoming more practical and more commonly accepted as part of everyone’s lifelong learning.

   See also: MOMI; Screen and screen theory

   Further reading

    Buckingham, D. and Sefton-Green, J. (1996) Cultural Studies Goes to School, London: Taylor & Francis (detailed and usefully critical accounts of media education in practice).

   CARY BAZALGETTE