DR C’s MEDIA LITERACY:
SOCIAL STUDIES, MEDIA & DEMOCRACY.
“Our Founding Fathers understood.. that a democratic republic could not survive without an informed and participating citizenry.. The responsibility of the citizen is to not only attend and participate in the K-12 education provided but continually work to stay informed throughout life. In this effort, the media becomes an essential component of citizenship ….. It is essential in our citizenship role to view critically, analyze, ask powerful questions and draw our own conclusions from information sought and gained through the media. Media literacy then. is essential to the citizenship role.”.
[Denee Mattioli, President National Council for the Social Studies, 2003]
In the summer of 2003 it was my privilege to chair the National Media Education Conference in Baltimore. I had left the Austin conference 2 years earlier disgruntled with what I thought was a lackluster program theme, one not likely to build the bridges necessary to connect media literacy to established areas of the American school curriculum.
While Media Literacy was making some inroads in state and national standards, particularly in English Language Arts, it was almost invisible in the Social Studies despite its relevance to Civics and the entire notion of informed responsible citizenship. I was gratified when Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, revised their state Social Studies standards and included media literacy.
The theme I proposed for the Baltimore conference was Literacy & Liberty: Rights Roles and Responsibilities in a Media Age.
I was extremely pleased to have Denee Mattioli the incoming president of NCSS attend the conference and make the statement at the top of this page. Denee continued her support for Media Literacy by creating a strand for the NCSS conference that was held in Chicago in November of that year.
The following year I delivered a keynote address in Saratoga for the New York State Social Studies Conference and later that year would work at the University of Texas in Austin, helping Social Studies teachers explore the relationship between their subject, modern media and media literacy.
What is that relationship? Writing in America In Search of Itself, presidential historian Theodore White said in 1982 that the history of television and the history of American politics were so interconnected that it is impossible to tell the story of one without telling the story of the other. Whether television encourages or discourages involvement in the democratic process is certainly debatable.
In his book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam raises serious questions about the relationship between mass media and democracy, concluding, “television is bad for both individualized and collective civic engagement”.
At the very least such a claim demands that those responsible for teaching democratic values and nurturing civic engagement, also address the role of mass media as a social institution, including its impact upon individuals and other social institutions such as the family, the school and our churches.
In the publication, Expectations of Excellence: Curriculum Standards for Social Studies, the NCSS says that Social Studies is:
“The integrated study of social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence”. The primary purpose of social studies, the organization writes, is “to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world”.
Admirable goals indeed! But how might mass media support or subvert these goals and where might media literacy come in to play?
Writing in Democracy Matters, Cornel West articulates a troubling relationship between mass media, young people and citizenship.
“One of the most effective strategies of corporate marketers has been to target the youth market with distractive amusements that saturate them with pleasurable sedatives that steer them away from issues of peace and justice. Hedonistic values and narcissistic identities produce emotionally stunted young people unable to grow up and unwilling to be responsible democratic citizens”.
In 2006, Joe Klein, journalist and author of Primary Colors published Politics Lost. The subtitle of Klein’s book, was How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You’re Stupid. The book tracks the rise of television in the political process, the emergence of the pollsters and consultants. It also comments on viewer/ voter alienation and withdrawal.
In the end Klein hopes for a new day and a new candidate: “a politician who refuses to be a performer…who doesn’t orate. Who never holds a press conference in front of an aircraft carrier or in a flag factory? Who doesn’t assume the public is stupid or uncaring”.
While Klein looks to an individual, a new type of politician to remedy the illness he sees afflicting our body politic, the reality is such as individual would have to be presented to the American public and electorate through the prism of the institution known as the mass media along with its priorities and prejudices.
Another solution, another cure if you will, exists not in an individual or an institution but in a process, a pedagogy and a perspective. As Parker Palmer tells us in, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, “Everything depends upon the lens through which we looks”.
Media literacy offers students and citizens a new way of looking at and thinking about ourselves, the wider world and the role mass media plays in shaping national and international opinion.
Understanding how others see this nation and reconciling those views with the way we see ourselves presents us with a significant challenge. That challenge was taken up by The Pew Research Center’s Global Attiudes Project.
In 2006 it resulted in the publication of, America Against The World: How we are Different and Why We are Disliked.
Authors Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes described their study as “the first and foremost chronicler of the rise of anti-Americanism around the world”.
While unpopular American foreign policy obviously contributes to these negative attitudes the study looked at a broader view of America, including the impact of popular culture.
“There is so much America almost everywhere in the world: from a Starbucks inside Beijing’s Forbidden City to rap beats in the popular music of every continent on the globe; the ubiquitous popularity of the cartoon character Bart Simpson, the global notoriety of Michael Jackson, and the infiltration of American idioms and expressions into every major language in the world.
What is it about American culture and products that make them so attractive, yet at the same time raise such alarm about Americanism and the spread of American power”?
Such questions and concerns are relevant to many of the basic strands and themes identified as pivotal in social studies by NCSS. They include:
- Culture
- Time, Continuity and Change
- People, Places and Environments
- Individual Development and Identity and
- Individuals Groups and Institutions.
In that latter category for example, the national standards state that:
“It is important that students know how institutions are formed, what controls and influences them, how they control and influence individuals and culture and how institutions can be maintained and changed”.
A breaking news story in April 2007, offered a case study, a teachable moment about mass media as an institution, the role of individuals within that institution, the impact and influence of media messages, and complex questions about values and ideology.
The April 23rd cover of Newsweek called the Don Imus story, “the rise and fall of a radio titan’ but their cover headline was, “RACE, POWER AND THE MEDIA”.
That headline would have been just as appropriate in coverage of Hurricane Katrina and widespread suspicion among African Americans [but not whites] that the slow federal response was related to race.
Race, power and the media would also have been an appropriate headline for the story that finally undermined the 2006 candidacy of Senator George Allen – who until that time was thought to be a viable Republican presidential candidate.
Allen made an off -the - cuff remark, with racist overtones that was caught on tape. It was not unlike the remark that a few years earlier had lead to the downfall of Senate Majority leader Trent Lott.
In an era of You Tube, blogs and video vigilantes, someone is always watching or listening and we as individuals have increasingly less ability to guard against and control unwanted and intrusive recording and distribution of our words, likeness and actions.
Whether this represents a more open society, spreading voyeurism, or the end of privacy, as we understand it, is not yet clear. What is clear is the fact this technological trend raises legal, ethical and social concerns about media and society that have increasing relevance to civics and social studies.
Imus, Katrina and the killings at Virginia Tech are all related in some way to media and technology. Incidents like these intrude upon the national consciousness. They stir debate about race, political correctness, gun control, mental illness and social justice.
Coverage of these issues on television, newspapers, radio and the internet affords us a sense of knowing, of understanding. But do we?
Do we ask critical questions about this coverage? Can we distinguish between balance and bias? Do we recognize point of view? Do we understand the marketing of the story, the role of ratings, the rush of anchors to the campus in Blacksburg and sensationalized leads like, “ Massacre at Virginia Tech”?
These are all central elements of media literacy. In terms of the content and the skills it addresses, and the constructivist pedagogy implicit in it, media literacy offers a potentially powerful panacea for the mind- numbing instruction that often characterizes the social studies classroom.
While that no doubt seems harsh to some, just listen to the way it was expressed in The Social Studies [Sept/ October 2002].
At the time a new National Assessment of Educational Progress Report showed 60% of high school students taking the test failed to demonstrate basic knowledge of U.S history. Writing in The Social Studies, William Gaudelli referred to, “the repetitive, wrote and meaningless manner in which social studies is typically taught in schools”.
He added, “devoid of meaning and controversy that would make U.S. history engaging and real, the field has been reduced to a mindless heap of information to be absorbed and regurgitated”.
But it does not have to be this way. Project Look Sharp at Ithaca College in New York has developed dynamic curriculum materials that fuse media literacy with Social Studies and U.S history.
I had the opportunity to serve as national evaluator for their curriculum kit on presidential politics and media literacy. I know from the surveys teachers completed and from the telephone interviews I conducted with teachers that their students were responsive, thoughtful, engaged and questioning when media literacy was integrated into their classes.
The important thing to understand here is that teachers were covering the same content and addressing the same standards they were required to; media literacy simply offered them a different way of approaching that content.
I have also seen media literacy validated within the U.S. government. I had the privilege of working as a media literacy consultant for The Office of National Drug Control Policy [White House] during the Clinton administration and subsequently the Bush Administration.
During the Clinton years the ONDCP looked at media literacy as a tool to employ in the war on drugs. They hosted a media literacy forum at the White House in June 2005 and in September of that year; several members of their staff attended the first National Media Literacy Conference, which I chaired on my own campus at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
During the Clinton years ONDCP commissioned several studies – essentially content analyses that documented incidents of drug use in a range of media including music, movies and television.
The studies implicitly saw a relationship between media messages young people were exposed to and their own attitudes and behavior.
Now transfer that concept to the political sphere and ask how media messages about politicians, democracy, citizenship and service might impact the way impressionable adolescents formed their views about government, the courts, civil rights, foreign policy and a host of other issues.
Taken cumulatively would these media messages be more likely to support or subvert their interest in the political process and their desire to participate, contribute and vote?
By 2001, the ONDCP had broadened their thinking about media literacy. While they still saw it as a valuable ally in terms of protecting young people, they now argued that it could serve a wider preparatory role:
“Media literacy can empower youth to be positive contributors to society, to challenge cynicism and apathy and to serve as agents of social change”.
This is a message I have taken with me on the road for many years now. I have presented programs for The League of Women Voters, for groups like Kiwanis and Rotary organizations. The sessions have been casual and at times formal and full of ritual like my 2001 appearance for The Madison Civics Club in Wisconsin.
At the best of times they have been boisterous and interactive. I was in California talking to high school seniors during the 2000 campaign. They had their piercing their tattoos, their colored hair and their dyed clothes. Put them in a lethargic lump on a street corner in any town U.S.A. and one might mistakenly fear for the future of our democracy.
Get beyond their superficial appearances and their initial understandable monosyllabic answers to an adult, stranger, and they’re worth listening to. They weren’t tuned out on politics. They had opinions and passions. What I remember most about that group in northern California was their belief in one man, Ralph Nader. He was not my candidate of choice but I was not there to tell them who to vote for. I was there to assure them that voting was a right, a duty, a responsibility – their chance to make sure their voice was heard and their vote was counted.
Who knew just how important vote- counting would become in that 2000 election?
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