1. Presentation Script:
Media Studies has long been considered a less-worthy subject to study behind more
established subjects in the curriculum, namely English. Teachers and advocates of the subject
had fought long throughout the subject’s history for recognition for the subject as a solid and
worthy subject to teach and study. Today, Media Education has a firm place within the
National Curriculum, especially in the 14-19-age range. However, despite this ‘Media Studies
is still regarded by some schools as a “soft option” which is best suited to the academic
underachiever; and this definition is reinforced by the fact that it is sometimes offered as an
alternative to less ‘academic’ subjects such as English Literature.’ (Buckingham, 2003: 88)
The aim of this presentation is to show why Media Education is important in schools. By
looking at the history of Media Education in schools, I hope to contextualise why it should be
studied and be a part of a broad curriculum.
Many theorists start their history of the subject in the 1930’s.
‘Media Education is typically regarded as a solution to a problem… as a harmful and
damaging phenomenon that educators must seek to confront.’ (Buckingham, 2003:6) This
idea forms the ideology of the ‘most commonly quoted starting point in this history [of Media
Education]’ (Buckingham, 2003:6) in a book by F.R Leavis and Denys Thompson. Their
book: Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933) sets about the
first set of proposals for teaching about mass media in schools.
Both Leavis and Thompson saw the mass Media as something that young people
needed to be protected from. They pinpointed teenagers especially as a group of people most
susceptible to the Media’s influence. To begin with, Leavis and Thompson said that a
technological change in Britain was damaging a well-established ‘high-culture’ and
newspapers and books were starting to take over in popular culture and were ‘levelling down
society.’
In their study, Leavis and Thompson noted that, in school, pupils are offered a ‘high culture
education’ and ‘are exposed out of school to the competing exploitation of the cheapest
emotional responses: films and newspapers.’ They used this argument as a foundation as to
why Media Education as critical in schools. They thought that young people were to be
provided with the right kind of apparatus to defend themselves against its effects.
In other words, it was the responsibility of teachers to teach young people about the
damaging effects the popular culture they consume has. If they were taught how films and
newspapers were constructed and how they lacked in class in comparison to Literature, it was
thought that young people would begin to choose to leisure in high-culture.
Halloran and Jones (1986) describe this as ‘The Inoculation Approach.’ The idea
being by ‘injecting’ a small-amount of the low-culture in to the curriculum, young people
would be inoculated against it’s damaging effects. (Halloran and Jones, 1986: 55-60)
This approach was supported mostly by teachers of English literature, possibly in a way to
protect their subject, which was at danger of supposedly dying out. These teachers interpreted
the message of Leavis and Thompson ‘as a directive to protect young people against the
corrupting influence of the mass-media, especially the cinema.’ (Op cit.)
Halloran and Jones note in their chapter: ‘The Inoculation Approach’ (1986) that there were
conflicting paradoxes in this view and that ‘some critics agree that not all cinema was harmful
and that some of its products could be viewed as genuine pieces of art.’ The guidelines set out
by Leavis and Thompson could therefore be bended to fit. Classier film products were then
beginning to be shown against ‘less worthy products’ so that ‘young people could discriminate
between products of the media organisations.’
This early shaping of Media Education began to give young people the
apparatus to choose the media they consumed and to understand how mass media is
constructed. They could decipher messages and it was hoped by these critics that by being
‘inoculated’ they could choose more worthwhile products to consume.

2. Richard Hoggart made the distinction between our own lived experience and the
culture we consume. In ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1959) Hoggart notes, in Layman’s terms, that
working class people who live in Northern towns, for example, will consume a different culture
to that of an upper-class businessman from London. As David Buckingham notes in ‘Media
Education: literacy, learning and contemporary culture’ (2003), young teachers were now
beginning to select popular media texts as teaching materials. Rather than inoculating young
people against lower forms of culture, popular films and newspapers were beginning to be
shown to pupils as a way ‘of building upon their students’ everyday cultural experiences.’ (Op
cit.) As Richard Hoggart exemplifies: ‘the Daily Mirror of 1945 was a better paper than the
Daily Express because it was much more in touch with the prevailing mood of ordinary people
and spoke to them directly.’ (Murdock and Phelps: 1973:38-42) What better way is there to
teach young people about the world they live in and are surrounded in by using contemporary
Media?
The Newsom report of 1963 also encouraged the use of Mass Media in the classroom.
‘The report emphasised that popular journalism should be more widely and systematically
studied in secondary schools, and for the first time, recognition was being given to the place
of media in pupil’s lives.’ (Halloran and Jones, 1986: 55-60)
By the 1970’s the shift turned from Media Education to Screen Education. Len
Masterman ‘strongly rejected what he saw as the middle-class evaluative approach of Leavis’
(Buckingham, 2003: 8) His emphasis was to show the construction of Media texts and
encourage teachers to allow students to ‘put aside their subjective responses and pleasure, and
to engage in systematic forms of analysis which would expose the hidden ideologies of the
media.’ This was to encourage students to view media with no bias and to subjectively view
the films in a political and ideological way. Like the study of English, Masterman decided
that the study of Media texts should be deconstructed and viewed with ‘questions of
language, ideology and representation.’ Pupils were now being asked to looks at these texts
and answer why has the creator of this text done that in this way? How are groups of people
being represented here and why are they being represented in that way? The shift has moved
from being taught about higher forms of culture in a way of discriminating about the lower
forms of mass media to looking at texts in a semiotic way. The work of Masterman forming
the Media and Film Studies we have in the curriculum today.
‘The first examined Film Studies courses were introduced in secondary schools in the
UK in the late 1960’s. Communications Studies and Television Studies followed in the early
1970’s. Media Studies has gradually overtaken these other options.’ (Buckingham, 2003: 87)
Media Studies is a popular subject but hasn’t been included in the National
Curriculum as a compulsory subject. The ‘introduction of specialist Media Courses in the
1970’s and 1980’s’ allowed teachers more control in what they teach and how they teach it.
Institutions and exam boards should look at the history of the subject to create a
diverse and broad curriculum for the subject. The course should incorporate semiotic viewing
with subjective viewing in order to allow students to know when to view Media Texts with
for their own pleasure and how to understand how what they’re viewing is a construct of
someone else’s ideology.
I also believe that a stronger emphasis needs to be made on students constructing their
own media texts. Media practice needs to be taught hand in hand alongside Media Theory in
schools. Students should be armed with the theory of Media Education as stated, but being
able to make their own texts will further implant the theory they have been taught. If both
theory and practice had equal weighing in the curriculum, the subject would be more broad
and current for today. Also, Further Education colleges who take a more vocational approach
to the subject need to make sure that their students are armed with a sufficient amount of
Media Theory as to understand the choices they make when constructing their own texts.