et’s acknowledge at the outset the controversy over new media: the paradigm shift to digital, multisensory modes of communications has us in a tizzy. As Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan provocatively suggested, we “shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Converging technologies are re-shaping traditional definitions of reading and literacy that originated in a linear print world. As with the advent of the printed word, traditionalists are alarmed. Now, like Mark Bauerlein (The Dumbest Generation), they fear that “the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future” by turning out hypernetworked kids who can track each other’s every move with ease, but are largely ignorant of history, economics, and traditional culture. In his article “School and the Reading Brain,” (Education Forum, Fall 2008), Jon Cowans worries that kids are losing their ability to read the printed word with comprehension and attention.
The 21st century child can be a thorn in the side of the 20th century educator. Nevertheless, visionaries such as Marc Prensky (Don’t Bother Me Mom, I’m Learning) are bold enough to recognize them as “Digital Natives”: They have been adjusting or programming their brains to the speed, interactivity, and other factors in the [video]games…. Children raised with the computer—think differently from the rest of us.
They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential. (Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants)
This child of the iPhone, iPod, Blackberry, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, and You- Tube is a voracious reader and prolific communicator, but in ways monumentally different than ever before. And what is she reading (and producing)? Websites, emails, text messages, online fan fiction, videogame cheats, news online, MSN chat, social networking websites. Not to mention Twilight. And the Harry Potter books, which Professor Francesca Coppa remarks, “…is no longer simply a series of books by one author but an entire creative universe within which millions of people are writing, reading, discussing, reporting, analyzing, criticizing, celebrating, marketing, filming, translating, teaching, theorizing, and playacting” (Writing Bodies in Space). In 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life report “Teen Content Creators and Consumers” indicated that more than one-half of all teens have created media content, and roughly onethird of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced.
The complex, active and dynamic nature of our students’ digital experiences, therefore, interrogate traditional notions of reading and literacy, prompting researchers such as Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell to link this multi-sensory, multimodal, multi-literate experience to new notions of literacy and identity:
The new literacy studies…[make] us aware of our learners in relation to their identities. Literacy learners produce texts—bits of writing and other expressions of meaning, like drawing and talking. They become makers of texts and, as such, infuse their texts with their sense of identity and the everyday life things that happen to people. These include shopping and cooking and watching television and a myriad of other practices, all interwoven into the act of being literate. (Literacy and Education)
Henry Jenkins at MIT calls this multimodal culture a participatory culture, [one] with “relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and…one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another” (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century). Don Tapscott, author of Paradigm Shift, has concluded that in fact Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors. They are more politically savvy, socially engaged and family-centred than society gives them credit for.
New cultural paradigms call for new proficiencies, which Jenkins says, “build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.”
But we must be cognizant of the unique challenges that face the 21st century child: in sustained, comprehensive, critical reading skills; in organizational skills; and most importantly in the critical, reflective use of technology. This generation may surf the Net, but that does not mean they think about how, why and what they are doing. Jenkins reinforces this:
To say that children are not victims of media is not to say that they…have fully mastered what are…complex and still emerging social practices…[The] laissez faire approach…does not address the fundamental inequalities in young people’s access to new media technologies. [It] assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn…
Marc Prensky agrees:
One of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning (either built into the instruction or through a process of instructor-led debriefing) but still do it in the Digital Native language.
It is here that the thoughtful teacher must enter the process. Traditionally minded educators have clung to notions of linear, book-based decoding skills, when the obvious and urgent challenge is to teach students to both decode AND cogently navigate the highly complex systems of new media. It is up to visionary educators who have thought deeply about 21st century citizens to design a 21st century curriculum to meet their needs.
But as leading media education researcher David Buckingham has noted in the introduction to his UNESCO Policy Paper, “[r]egrettably most formal and non-formal educational systems do little to promote media education or education for communication. Too often the gap between the educational experience they offer and the real world in which people live is disturbingly wide.” Welcome to the global village.
Often when media education is adopted, it is wasted through misapplied pedagogy: teaching through the media, rather than about it. This approach ignores the complex contextual relationship between content and form. It is the equivalent of reading a haiku without making reference to its physical structure. Or showing the film version of Hamlet without asking how and why this different medium changes the meaning for its audience. Recognizing the difference is one thing; asking why it is different illuminates the distinction between mere identification and critical thinking.
However, when used astutely, media education can be a model of differentiated curriculum. Teachers from many disciplines can exploit the teachable moments which surface so readily from the immense territory generated by the convergence of popular culture and the new digital media—whether it is discussing 9/11, Katrina, Britney Spears’ meltdowns, debating the pros and cons of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt engaging in celebrity diplomacy in Africa, or their newest YouTube and Facebook posts.
Until recently, popular culture was always contrasted with “high” culture. Opera, Beethoven, Shakespeare and Michelangelo vs. Beyonce, Harlequin romances, blockbuster films and reality television. Academically, we need to recognize that in the last 20 years cultural studies departments have gained a strong foothold on North American campuses, offering rich, academic opportunities for students. Courses focus on the dynamics of gender, race and class and on the social, economic and political issues surrounding the media, including the importance of ownership and control of the media industries. This is reason enough to embed it solidly into secondary curriculum.
Teachers who lack the means or time for formal training in media studies can take heart in knowing that there are fundamentals they can apply easily to any text or topic. Media education is concept driven and there is international consensus on the areas that need to be covered. These key concepts become the organizing elements that give this work the required intellectual coherence and academic rigour. Imagine discussing a Dove commercial, or the Obama campaign, or Facebook, with a class and applying the following key concepts:
- Media Codes and Convention are technical codes such as camera angles, visual design and how they shape the message.
- Values and Ideology concern a set of beliefs about the world. Typical questions: Who has power? Who does not and why? How are stereotypes used in this text?
- Media and Industry recognize the commercial implications of media and that most of the world’s information and entertainment industries are owned and controlled by a handful of media conglomerates.
- Media and Audience are considered in two different ways: How we as consumers become target audiences, and how we as active participants make sense of the media. Ontario has made important inroads into media curriculum: initially a “movement” of enthusiastic teachers in the 1980’s, Canadian media education began to be taken seriously by education policy makers. In 1986,
Ontario became the first jurisdiction in North America to make media literacy mandatory, from K–12. Following that decision, the widely acclaimed Media Literacy Resource Guide was produced by the Ontario-based Association for Media Literacy (AML) and published in 1989. By 1997, the rest of Canada followed suit and media literacy was embedded in provincial policy guidelines for all English/Language Arts programs. The documents encourage a wide range of media activity, from the social significance of tabloids to the study of media conglomerates. It is also important to note that the expectations for Media Studies in Ontario are very different from those of Media Arts; the former soundly embraces critical thinking skills, the latter emphasizes hands-on creative expertise.
Regrettably, few teachers are adequately trained to teach media literacy, but as more teachers receive in-service training through Additional Qualification (AQ) courses, more schools will feel comfortable including it as an essential part of the curriculum. Media Studies AQ courses are offered at York University and the University of Toronto. Teachers from other parts of Ontario should lobby for their availability at other faculties of education. Alternatively, and as a stopgap measure, teachers accessing AML resources could conduct their own research. While only English teachers are required to include media literacy in the curriculum, there are some marvelous opportunities to infuse it into subjects such as history, geography, health, sociology and gender studies.
Ultimately, perhaps we are only tinkering with the old curriculum, for as Marshall McLuhan suggested, “we see the world through a rear-view mirror, marching backwards into the future.” The institution of education has never been known for its vision in anticipating the needs of the next generation. Changes wrought by technology are not always the changes we like, but they are changes we, as educators, must address.
[R]ather than condemn or endorse the undoubted power of the media, we need to accept their significant impact and penetration throughout the world as an established fact, and also appreciate their importance as an element of culture in today’s world. The role of communication and media in the process of development should not be underestimated, nor the function of media as instruments for the citizen’s active participation in society. Grünwald Declaration on Media Education, UNESCO
The naysayers who decry the loss of one kind of reading, while abandoning the many kinds of reading skills that youth need in a complex multi-modal world, are failing those students utterly. 
Barry Duncan is a retired Media and English teacher. He is the founder and former president of the Association for Media Literacy. Carol Arcus is a Media Studies and English teacher at Unionville High School. She has served on the Executive of AML for 15 years.