Media Pedagogy in the United States

In the section “Teaching Critical Viewing Skills: Media Literacy Initiatives in the United States” Kearny outlines the three approaches to media pedagogy-integration, production, and analysis-while critiquing the emphasis on analysis, or “media literacy,” in the United States. She traces the prominence of media literacy in the United States to “the late 1920s and early 1930s” when “research on children’s cinema attendance and the effects of film on youth was first conducted,” through the 1950s and the introduction of the “first formal media literacy program” and their rise the 1970s, to their reduction in the 1980s and their resurgence since the 1990s (98).

Kearny associates the protectionist approach of media literacy programs in the United States to class issues first by questioning the influence of the “middle-class adults’” concern over favoring “technical/vocational” skills over “analytical/professional” skills (97). She implies that media literacy is preferred over media production by the middle class because the technical skills necessary for media production are connected to the working class while the critical skills promoted through media literacy are connected to the professional class and in favoring one over the other are privileging professional over working class citizens. She also relates protectionism to class issues by identifying media literacy proponents as part of the “Professional Managerial Class,” a group which developed “as a means for managing and controlling the everyday practices of the working class,” and which only approves of media’s educational function (99). The adversarial relationship between the PMC and the working class, which both devalues and patronizes the working class, and the PMC’s superior political influence ensure that media pedagogy is dominated by the analytical approach.

Kearny also associates media literacy’s protectionist approach, which views “media culture as a cesspool and media literacy as an inoculation against such forces,” to the disempowerment of youth (98). David Buckingham argues that through media literacy “students are seen to be particularly at risk from the negative influence of media… [and] critical analysis [tools] will ‘liberate’ them” (100). He and Kearney contend that by assuming ignorance and naiveté on the part of the students, media literacy programs limit and diminish their engagement with popular media, while at the same time promoting “high culture” (100).While I agree that media literacy programs’ limited perspectives are problematic in many ways, Buckingham and Kearney assume that students’ responses to popular media will be based solely on their experiences with media literacy programs. Today the integration approach to media pedagogy-where media is incorporated into schools through the inclusion of “newspapers and films as supplemental learning materials” and television and the internet as channels of information delivery-is equally, if not more, widespread than media literacy (96).