What exactly is media literacy? The British government takes it terribly seriously. At least it charges the UK broadcast regulator, Ofcom, with promoting it. And they chose to promote it with the BBC by putting on a news day – called School Report – for kids aged 12 to 13.
You could retitle the exercise When public sector bureaucracies collide…but they called it Lifeblood of democracy? Learning about broadcast news. Their report puts a brave face on this experiment, but basically it reveals that the prerequisite of media literacy is – well – literacy.
the effects on learning were limited, both in the quality of impact, as well as the number of students displaying significant learning outcomes
58 per cent of students showed negligible levels of learning, 33 per cent moderate levels, and just 9 per cent significant levels. Among the dismal findings:
Weak outcomes generated by the project included:
• Understanding what ‘news’ is…
• News concepts such as impartiality, balance and fairness
• Broadening definitions of ‘news’
• The target audience for news
• The importance of watching news … only one student volunteered that she now saw it as important to watch the news
• Trust and belief in the news … ‘you don’t know, because if the editor has been getting information from people or from the internet or something, internet could just be totally lies like.’
• The role and skills of the editor
• Changes in listening to radio news
• Changes in the viewing of other TV programmes
• Political awareness and informed citizenship
Surely they must have picked up something about the Beeb?
• BBC values – all student interviewees were asked the question, ‘do you think you have learnt anything about what the BBC believes in, what the BBC thinks is important, what its values are?’ – to which only two replied in the affirmative; one had clearly internalised the views of a BBC journalist with whom he had worked: ‘…all they do is honest … it has made me believe more of the BBC stories I suppose you could say, because they have got that reputation.’; the other had learnt that the BBC was not biased…
• Public service broadcasting – this potential outcome did not appear on the radar…
So what was it the exercise really like, then?
Yeah every lesson we had to listen to Huw Edwards at the beginning and he would go on for ages.
He was like… he always said the same stuff and we went over everything he did last week.
So it ended up… at the end of it, it was like three times as long as the beginning one.
And then it ended up being ten minutes at the end, he made this big speech about everything that we had done and what we were going to do, so that was a bit annoying.
That was it really.
Kids, eh – at least one of them was media literate.
3 responses to “Can you make kids media literate?”
“What exactly is media literacy?”
For the MySpace generation media studies courses should just hand each student a mirror and leave it at that.
It’s easy to dismiss children, but they’re our future audience (or lack thereof). And, there’s nothing we can do to make them pay attention to us but provide them with what they want to know about on a regular basis.
Also, kids learn from watching their parents. That’s why I grew up media literate; my parents subscribed to the local paper and read it every day. When I was a kid, the paper was a unique world of reading material delivered daily to my door. I used to have to fight my mom for the features section and grew to love the editorial page more than any other part of the paper.
In the U.S. we see media literacy as an evolving skill over time — starting with simple exercises in preschool moving on to more complex ones as children grow and are able to grasp more complex ideas about how messages are formed, delivered and responded to. An exercise like the one you described should only be one day’s activity, not the ONLY instructional activity. It is unfair to say media literacy is therefore useless when you’re only evaluating one day’s activity in a child’s entire education. Of course some instructional programs are better than others — but don’t judge a whole field of study just because one lesson might need to be reworked. My experience is that media literacy is best internalized when kids have a chance to “do” media — make their own newscast for example. THAT gets them excited and suddenly they’re looking at mainstream media much differently.