Educating for the Media and the Digital Age

Federal Ministry of Austrian National Education and Cultural Commission for UNESCO Affairs UNESCO International Conference Educating for the Media and the Digital Age Vienna, 18 - 20 April 1999 Published by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, Department for Media Education, Susanne Krucsay Minoritenplatz 5 A-1014 Vienna In co-operation with UNESCO Edited by Fiona Gundacker, Koordinationsbüro Gudrun Waltenstorfer, Gumpendorferstr. 63g/15 A -1060 Vienna Printed by : BMUK ISBN : 3-85031-057-4 Contents Introduction Susanne Krucsay 1 Media Education- Why? 3 Cecilia von Feilitzen, Sweden 4 Nada Korac, Yugoslavia 12 Jeanne Prinsloo, South Africa 19 Robyn Quin/ Barrie McMahon, Australia 31 Media Education- How? 36 Roberto Aparici, Spain 37 Silvia Bacher, Argentina 44 Judith Benyei-Fazekas, Hungary 55 Evelyn Bevort, France 66 Sonja Bojarovski, Macedonia 73 Sarah Crawford and John Pungente, Canada 77 Ana Nusa Dragan, Slovenia 91 Alexander Fedorov, Russia 100 Ingrid Geretschläger, Austria 106 Olga Linne, United Kingdom 110 Martin Mele, Slovenia 116 Roxana Morduchowicz, Argentina 123 Peter Muyanda-Mutebi, Uganda 127 Kenneth Noyau, Mauritius 131 Alexandra Politostathi, Greece 142 Lilia Raytcheva, Bulgaria 146 Didier Schretter, Belgium 151 Dieter Spanhel, Germany 155 Birgitte Tufte, Denmark 162 Rob Watling, United Kingdom 177 Carolyn Wilson, Canada 192 Chris Worsnop, Canada 205 Media Education - Future Strategies 221 Cary Bazalgette, United Kingdom 222 Costas Criticos, South Africa 228 Bimal Sanjay, India 239 Walter Schludermann, Austria 244 Kathleen Tyner, United States 251 Declaration 272 Susanne Krucsay INTRODUCTION The present documentation is part of a conference package on intensifying media education as well as creating media space for the young. The first medium is a compilation of the “State of the Art”1 in 33 countries, followed by “What is media education?”1, a short video where politicians, teachers, youngsters from eight participating countries are groping for an answer. This impulse video immediately preceded the presentations of the experts from 33 countries at the conference „Educating for the Media and the Digital Age“ organised and co-ordinated by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, UNESCO, Paris, and the Austrian National Commission for UNESCO in April 1999. The young played an active role in the conference, proving that they are able to create media space for themselves. They recorded the entire meeting both in video and audio – the video documentary1 and they made is the next link in the package. Due to its nature, the video indeed captured the atmosphere of the conference, the commitment of the experts, the active presence of the young people and also some of the fun we all had. What it cannot do, of course, is show the wide range of the approaches to the key question – this, obviously, is the function of the last link, the present print documentation – a compilation of the presentations along three tracks: Media Education – Why? attempts to offer rationales for the absolute necessity of integrating media education in formal education. Media Education – How? shows the multicoloured variety of good practices in the participating countries. Media Education – Strategies for the Future? tries to open up new perspectives for the century to come. Positioning the presentations into three tracks does not imply a division of media education into three separate parts – it should merely help to get some focus into the highly complex ‚media matters‘. It is to be hoped that the documentation – alongside with the other links – will contribute as an input and a stimulus for reflections and efforts towards an implementation of media education in school programmes. 1 To be ordered at the Abteilung für Medienpädagogik, Federal Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, Minoritenplatz 5, A-1014 Wien or E-mail: [email protected] 1 Educating for the Media and the Digital Age 2 Educating for the Media and the Digital Age Media Education- Why? Cecilia von Feilitzen Nada Korac Barrie McMahon Jeanne Prinsloo Robyn Quin 3 Educating for the Media and the Digital Age SWEDEN A Rationale of Media Education Cecilia von Feilitzen Introduction Being neither a media educator, nor a researcher specialised in media education, nor a politician, but a researcher working with children, young people and media from different aspects, my starting point for arguing in favour of media education might be a little different from other speakers’. As a researcher I have, among other things, worked with projects on how children are portrayed in the media. The images of the child are often unsatisfactory and depressing. But these media representations can be improved by media education — not any media education, but media education that succeed in bridging the gap to the media, that is, media education that also involves children’s participation in media and in society. With that some moves towards more worthy images of the child in the media, as well as towards increased democracy, could be made. Let me elaborate this thesis in further detail. Basically media education and children’s participation in the media are issues of children’s rights not only related to the media but also in society — rights that are fundamental to increased democracy. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the child shall have access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of his or her social, spiritual and moral well-being (article 17); the child shall have the right to freedom of expression (article 13); and the child has the right to express her or his views in all matters affecting the child (article 12). Media are in the highest degree matters affecting the child, and all the more so, since media and telecommunications is the area in the world that has set the record as regards growth during the last two decades — the media explosion has meant a veritable globalisation. And as media in several respects are prerequisites for the functioning of today’s society, it is not always possible to differentiate between media and society. Of course, I do not mean that media education and children’s participation in the media are the only ways of creating a better media environment, and, even less, the only ways of creating more reasonable societal conditions for children. On the contrary, important efforts are also required on the part of the media — in the form of, for instance, self-regulation and production of an extensive output of TV- and radio programmes and other media contents of high quality that fulfils children’s various needs. The responsibility of parents and politicians is also great, and a whole range of voluntary organisations play an enormous role in contributing to a better situation for children. Media education and children’s participation are, thus, only a few of many roads necessary to go simultaneously in order to realise children’s rights in practice. 4 Educating for the Media and the Digital Age The representation of children in the media The most frequently asked questions about children and the media are how much and in what ways children use the media, and, next, how children are influenced by the media. The influences of media violence are then often in focus. The kind of media violence most often referred to in the public debate and in research is the manifest, physical, visible violence, and the threat of it – murders, blood, shooting, fighting, slaughter, etc. However, apart from these more and more physical elements of violence in the increasing media flow, there are also other types of violence that have been given less attention by research and public debate — the more latent mental and the structural violence, for which perpetrators and victims cannot always be identified and whose causes and consequences are more difficult to analyse, as they often are deeply rooted in culture and society at large. Content analyses of the media output have, for example, shown that different groups in the population in the long run are constructed differently in the media — they are represented differently and in different ways. A general, repeated pattern in the media output as a whole (thus, not especially in children’s programmes, children’s books, and the like) is that children are consistently underrepresented. The younger they are, the more invisible they are. Children are not only seen relatively seldom, their voices are also seldom heard. Furthermore, adults in the media quite seldom talk about children. Furthermore, as is the case for media’s portrayal of adults, certain social categories of children are portrayed more seldom than others. Not only are younger children represented proportionally more seldom than elder children, but there are also fewer girls than boys, and fewer children belonging to the working class, or to ethnic and linguistic minorities, than children belonging to the middle class and to the majority of the population. A widespread interpretation of these recurring patterns is that the culture, of which media make up a greater and greater part, in this way reflects the power hierarchy of society and the cultural weight and value of different population groups. The fact that children (like women, elderly, persons in low-wage occupations, ethnic minorities) appear and are portrayed more seldom in the media than men in middle class occupations, may, thus be regarded as an indication of the fact that less frequently portrayed groups in many respects are attributed a lower value, and that the media therefore give expression to, and exercise, a form of symbolical violence or cultural oppression. However, there is one exception where children are more often represented in the context of media — and that is advertising. The fact that children are more common in advertising than in the media contents generally is a sign of their more highly valued economic-consuming role in society — as present and future consumers and as selling concepts and advertising strategies for products, values and life styles.

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