Media Teaching: Language Audience and Production

This edited volume is a welcome addition to the extremely valuable ‘Interface Series’, a series of publications from the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, with NATE’s involvement and support.  Overall the volume seeks to review the history of media teaching, in the UK and Australia, principally over the last twenty years, with references to earlier periods, and to examine current practices through some detailed examinations of recent students’ work in mostly secondary English, classrooms in both countries.  Similar issues and debates have occurred in both countries and almost in exact parallel.  As a result the text is not really a comparative study, it is much more a joint exploration of the often vexed but also fruitful relationship between English and media ‘work’, whether conceptualised as media education or as Media Studies; a sub text throughout is the growing  importance and quality of students’ practical work and the particular challenges this poses for English teachers who are not ‘technically trained’ and who also cannot find a real way to acknowledge the success of such work because of a narrowly focused assessment regime.

The volume is top-and-tailed by Burn and Durrant with brief chapters on ‘Media Education: a background’ and ‘Present concerns, future possibilities’.  Each of the key words in the subtitle then has two chapters each.  In Language, there is a case study of video production and the language of the moving image, followed by a review of the development of a meta-language for image/language relationships.  In Audiences, a review of how audiences have been conceptualised over time and then a chapter on students’ production work around music video.  In Production, Andrew Burn himself contributes on teaching media institutions through computer games and the final chapter looks at using film in English, the case study being Star Wars.  The chapters range from the chiefly theoretical, for example Len Unsworth on meta-language, to those which consist chiefly of analyses of practical work, by practising teachers Steve Connolly and Steve Archer.

This is not then, an introduction to media teaching, but rather a very useful and detailed account of aspects of such teaching for teachers with some experience and some real interest in the debates as well as the practices.  Burn and Durrant are, of course, both very much advocates of the extension of English to include media work both of the critical, analytical kind and of that which provides opportunities for in depth practical work.  Burn’s chapter on computer games demonstrates just how broad the field of media has become, with the emergent paradigm of what might now be called ‘traditional media’ like film and ‘new media’ such as games. As advocates they do not spend much of their time trying to persuade teachers to join the cause.  Indeed they start from the position that readers will already support the cause. The examples discussed represent some exciting and intelligent practice, and therefore much of the discussion is about how to theorise these practices within English, exploring how such work can be given validity within highly constrained teaching situations.  There is plenty of valuable reference to other key influences and authors in the field and the whole text is thoroughly well informed.  There is relatively little discussion of recent research about young people and media, both new and traditional, the emphasis being on teaching the media.  However, for both Australian and English teachers of English, this research-based evidence remains key to justifying media work in what is frequently a hostile policy environment, frequently dominated by very narrowly conceived notions of print literacy.

In essence this is a rich and interesting collection, very much strengthened by the international perspective.

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