Page 266 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Med a L teracy: Creat ng Better C t zens or Better Consumers? |

used to viewing every day on their television screens and computer monitors.
Advocates of media education for citizens rather than consumers believe that
students should also be asked to consider how technology may be used to either
resist or, more commonly, reinforce systems of social control. These students
would be asked to produce their own media that comment on or go against the
grain of the commercial media forms that they are so used to seeing.
Media educators’ positions on popular culture in the classroom likewise can
be understood as an expression of their overall stance on the central underlying
issue of consumerism versus citizenship. Critics argue that we should acknowl-
edge the pleasure that we derive from popular culture. But, they say, we cannot
ignore the ways in which so much of popular culture encourages a consumerist
relationship to the world, and discourages critical thinking about social issues,
while simultaneously reinforcing politics of divide and conquer that turn citizens
against one another based on differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Rejecting popular culture outright, however, as vulgar and trivial, ignores the
crucial role that it plays in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the
world we all inhabit. Media educators who are concerned with fostering citizens
who are capable of thinking critically about key issues facing our society (war,
the environment, poverty, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) believe
that they must engage with the popular culture that shapes our deepest under-
standings of these issues.
Educators’ perspectives on whether media literacy is primarily about creat-
ing better consumers or better citizens also play out in the debate over whether
media literacy is best promoted in traditional school settings. While the pur-
pose of schools in democratic nations is purportedly to prepare students to as-
sume an active role as participants in their societies, critical education scholars
have argued that this is primarily a myth. From a critical perspective the real
mission of the U.S. education system is to teach students to willingly accept
their preassigned social roles based on the socioeconomic, racial, and gender
groupings to which they belong. Those who advocate for a critical sort of media
literacy aimed at developing citizens who can challenge established power rela-
tions are thus more prone to advocate that media education should take place
on a large field encompassing many sites in addition to and outside of tradi-
tional school settings. They also contend that in the current media-saturated
environment a well-developed sort of media literacy is needed not just for
schoolchildren but for adults as well. Community groups, alternative media
organizations, religious institutions, libraries, and other public spaces all repre-
sent potential alternatives for media education.
However, because schools will invariably play a central role in the devel-
opment of media literacy efforts, advocates from both perspectives also debate
on how best to implement media education in schools. The question of whether
media education should be focused in courses specifically about the media
or integrated throughout the curriculum may also be understood within the
framework of consumerist versus citizenship approaches to media literacy.
Those who advocate for a sort of media literacy that is concerned with the re-
lationship between media and democracy would seem to be naturally in favor