The Great Literacy Debate

A Critical Response to the Literacy Strategy and the Framework for English

Andrew Goodwyn, Carol Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136705748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The nature of literacy is an issue of global debate. When the National Literacy Strategy [NLS] was introduced into UK schools it was arguably the most ambitious educational reform programme in the world, and the controversy necessarily intensified. How can the impact of such reforms be assessed?

In its ten year history the NLS affected every primary and secondary teacher in the country and, therefore, every child. The initiative provoked a widespread recognition of the importance of literacy for all children and attracted the attention of many other governments. This book is the first definitive and objective review and evaluation of the impact of these literacy reforms. With contributions from the most respected experts on literacy and English from the UK and from across the world, this unprecedented critical examination explores:

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• How teaching policy and practice were impacted by the reforms

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• How the NLS came into being, how it was operated, what it did and did not achieve

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• What we can learn from its successes and failures

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• The most important aspects of the reforms, from policing grammar to the impact of 'The Literacy Game' and 'informed prescription' on teaching.

Whether you are a policy maker or classroom teacher, this book is an invaluable resource to anyone concerned about literacy. It provides readers from around the world with a genuine and evidence-based perspective on this immense initiative, lucidly evaluating the lessons learned from both its ambitions and its failures.

Chapter 1

Beyond The Heuristic of Suspicion

The Value of Media Literacy

Andrew Burn

Introduction: Histories of Media Education in the UK

A backward glance at the construction of media education in the English curriculum reveals four patterns which make useful starting points for a consideration of what is happening now, and what might develop in the future.

These four patterns follow a common theme set by the first pattern, in which media education has been imagined as what I will call a ‘heuristic of suspicion’. It has been the ill-tempered police officer of meaning, pushing teachers and students into a paranoid scrutiny of newspapers and television programmes to detect bias, misrepresentation and other distortions of some imagined ‘truth’. Behind this uncongenial figure lies a tangled history of protectionist impulses, clearly identified by David Buckingham (2003). Buckingham points to the well-known influence of Leavis (Leavis and Thompson, 1933), whose approach to media education he characterises as cultural protectionism: an effort to protect children from the debasing effects of the mass media. He also identifies the no less rigorous efforts of Marxist ideology theorists to protect young people from the ideological effects of the media by teaching them strategies of interrogation intended to unmask the ideologies of the dominant groups in society and the media industries – strategies which, while their political intention might have been the polar opposite of Leavis’s, look remarkably similar in their form and joyless denial of pleasure. The third form of protectionism Buckingham notes is moral protectionism, again based in reading strategies of suspicion, this time to expose the supposed immorality of media representations of, in particular, sex and violence. While this impulse is considerably stronger in the USA than in the UK (or indeed European media education in general), it is nevertheless a factor in the institutional regulation of media texts for young people, and in the value systems sometimes applied by fundamentalist religious groups to schools’ choice of texts.

The second pattern discernible in curricular constructions of media in English is that it is often imagined as a genre of factual representation and communication: essentially, news media. It is as if the entire function of narrative texts and imaginative fiction is reserved for Literature. Two histories are noteworthy here. One, again, may be Leavis, whose critical readings of media texts for school students never embraced the narrative structures of comic strips or the poetics of film, but rather made advertising their object of attack (Leavis notoriously invented many of the advertising texts he used, the better to exemplify their debased nature). The other history helps to explain how, regrettably, media literacy is again, at the present time, being seen as a matter of how citizens retrieve and critically appraise factual information. This is the history of the computer. As Lev Manovich has memorably described, the computer, from its inception in the form of Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1830s, has developed as a processor of information, in contrast to the history of photography (also beginning in the 1830s with Daguerre’s Daguerrotype), which is a history of cultural representations (Manovich, 1998). As these two technologies have become fused in the multimedia computer, what we may be seeing is the difficulty of information and communication technology (ICT) educators in understanding how the number-cruncher has become a tool of cultural production, while media and English teachers struggle with the implications of the cultural representations which have been their traditional stock-in-trade – films, poems, stories – becoming computable. It is partly for this reason that computer games, a cultural form that has always by definition been a set of computable representations, pose such interesting and challenging questions for media and English teachers as they consider how to teach such a form in the classroom (a question to which I will return below).

In the wider world of policy, politicians and bureaucrats have continued to be trapped by this division of ‘media’ into, effectively, fictions on the one hand and factual information on the other. In Europe at least, the ‘fictions’ have been largely the interest of film educators, who have considered how cinema narratives can be critically explored in schools in much the same appreciative mode as literature teachers deploy in their approach to literary fictions. Meanwhile, the policy makers have been largely preoccupied with how information is conveyed to citizens through electronic media, particularly online. In the UK, where the promotion of media literacy is a designated responsibility of the super-regulator OFCOM, this kind of literacy is seen mainly as a set of competences in handling factual information delivered by the Internet: how to access it, retrieve relevant information, be critically aware of its provenance and trustworthiness, adapt it for whatever purposes might be important to the user.

So, the general effect of this fact/fiction divide in the educational and policy arenas is to overemphasise both the importance and the risks of factual information in young people’s lives, and to almost completely neglect the most important uses they actually make of the media: the music, dreams, fantasies, play, dramatic narratives, whimsical performances, album-making, aspirational self-representation, parodic invention and casual communication which make up most of their online lives.

The third pattern of the ‘heuristic of suspicion’ in the English curriculum is that is represents, essentially, an act of critical reading. Media within English has been located within the reading section of the curriculum, with no equivalent provision made in the writing section. In England, then, it has been mandatory since the inception of the National Curriculum to teach children to read the media (that is, critically interrogate it), but not to write it (that is, produce their own media texts) (QCA, 2007). There is a doubly suspicious stance here: a suspicion, again, of media texts, positioning them as objects of a critical gaze quite different from that envisaged for literature; but also a suspicion of young people’s own media production work, implicitly devalued by comparison with creative writing. There have been, indeed, criticisms of student media productions within the media education community, castigating it as incompetent and derivative, reproducing the very ideologies that teachers seek to expose (see Buckingham, 2003, for an extended account of this). But such pessimistic attitudes have largely been replaced in more recent years by positive accounts of the value of production work, based in rationales of conceptual learning, creative transformation and cultural practices of media production increasingly typical of young people’s informal media cultures (Potter, 2005; Jenkins, 2006; McDougall, 2006).

Finally, successive versions of the English curriculum have demonstrated a suspicion of semiotic modes beyond language. Recent versions recognise the growing argument for a multimodal approach to textuality and literacy (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2000; Jewitt and Kress, 2003); but the occasional reference to multimodal texts arguably produces only internal contradictions within what is effectively a conservative ring-fencing of language, buttressed by an increasingly unconvincing argument for its superiority over communicative modes. This argument takes curious turns. In 2004–5 a ‘conversation’ was held with stakeholders by the agency responsible for curriculum development over the period of New Labour’s terms of office, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), about the future of the English curriculum. In its response document, the QCA argued, in reply to a number of submissions making the case for a version of the curriculum incorporating contemporary media texts, that:

Alongside views that media and screen-based texts [can] have their place in English 21 there is the caveat that these should never be at the expense of our rich book-based literary heritage – a point more fully elaborated in terms of the purpose and value of engaging with verbal language: the study of literature has one conspicuous advantage over the study of film and television media, in that it develops the skills of analysis, argument and discourse alongside language skills.

(QCA, 2005; emphasis added)

This kind of argument can be seen as a diluted residue of the Leavisian attack on popular culture. The authors of the curriculum here display a softened stance on the teaching of texts such as comics, films and television, allowing them a place as part of a wider cultural landscape, but there remains the firm belief that they need to be treated suspiciously, and to be seen as somehow thinner, more insubstantial, less nourishing than literature.

My intention here is to oppose this view, by argument and example. The argument is that there is no logical reason why the study of comic strip and animated film should not develop ‘the skills of analysis, argument and discourse alongside language skills’ just as effectively as the study of literature.

What, then, might the traditions, practices and theories of media education have to offer an English curriculum that might move it away from these limitations and distortions? I will frame my suggestions within the so-called 3-Cs model of media literacy (cultural, critical, creative). These Cs also inform the most recent version of the English framework in England; but the cultural, critical and creative elements there carry different meanings from those which inform media education. My proposals will build on a model developed in 2007 with James Durran (Burn and Durran, 2007), as part of an account of a decade of media education in the first specialist Media Arts college in England.

Culture: Rethinking the Divisions

The real debate about culture in the English curriculum is the tension between what the Cox Report (DES and the Welsh Office, 1989) labelled cultural heritage and cultural analysis. There is no explicit reference to this debate, however, in the curriculum. Culture there seems to mean ‘multicultural’, which, while it is a worthy aspiration to widen the selection of literature included in the curriculum, fails to account for the distinction between the literary canon and the popular cultural affiliations and experience of many of our students. How, then, might we rethink this distinction, and make something productive of the tensions that still exist?

My suggestion is to return to the definitions of culture offered by the influential cultural theorist Raymond Williams, whose work triggered the birth of Cultural Studies in Britain. Williams proposed three ‘levels’ of culture: the ‘selective tradition’; the ‘documentary tradition’; and the ‘lived culture’ (Williams, 1961). It was the third level, the proposal of a ‘common culture’ grounded in the everyday cultural practices of working-class people, which inspired Cultural Studies’ subsequent attention to the politics of the popular, the structures of youth cultures, and the importance of audiences in the determination of meaning and value. The emphasis on lived culture remains a strength of media education, and no one would dispute its importance. Nevertheless, Cultural Studies (and media education) have largely ignored Williams’s other two cultural levels. What would it mean to revisit them? Perhaps the first thing to say is that an attention to the ‘selective tradition’ need not represent a return to the narrow focus on heritage literature. Rather, the ‘selective tradition’ implies a critical focus on the mechanisms by which certain texts are privileged, conserved, sedimented into lasting traditions. This kind of critical attention to the social processes which determine (and contest) cultural value are surely the kind of processes which we would expect our students to learn to understand, and indeed to participate in.

Cultural value is a difficult area for media educators and for English teachers. Both are locked into forms of cultural distinction which they must defend, yet are unable to fully acknowledge or explain. The resistance of media teachers to the traditional values of elite culture is admirable, and the championing of popular culture in a curriculum which has little room for such material must be sustained. But it is absurd to be boxed into a position which is unable to recognise the intrinsic value of texts beyond the popular domain; or to consider the tastes and judgements which recognise (perhaps even construct) such value. Furthermore, it is clear that the texts of popular culture frequently undergo a revaluation by successive generations: yesterday’s trash B-movie becomes today’s cult classic; the arcade games of the 1970s are curated for exhibition in elite galleries; the pulp comic strips of the twentieth century acquire both economic and cultural value as the collectors’ items of today.

But something similar happens in the construction of a literary canon. Through what processes of critical commentary, hagiography and ‘bardolatry’ was Shakespeare elevated into national poet? How are the popular oral cultures of medieval England conserved and instituted by the academy as valued literary works? How does the development of the European novel separate out ‘literary fiction’ from what becomes dismissively known as ‘genre fiction’? How could a value judgement settle the score between the work of Isaac Asimov and William Golding? Philip K. Dick and George Orwell? Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling? Emily Bronte and Catherine Cookson? Interestingly, the spurious work of cultural distinction continues from these literary sheep and goats into successive media adaptations. Orwell’s work produces the art-house films of 1984 and Animal Farm; Philip K. Dick’s stories morph into sci-fi classics starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Harrison Ford, popular blockbusters which nevertheless trouble easy distinctions between popular and art-house cinema; J.K. Rowling’s stories become Warner box office triumphs and computer games, while Philip Pullman’s are first adapted for the stage of the National Theatre (though subsequently into film and a computer game). These processes of evaluation, exercises of taste, histories of shifting judgements usually appear in the classroom as inscrutable features of culture. Arguably, however, English and media teachers have a role, to open up these processes to scrutiny, beginning with a sensitive recognition of the cultural histories of the students themselves.

Williams’s second category, the documentary tradition, suggests how culture at one level is a residue of a society which no longer exists; his examples are the art, literature and architecture of the ancient world. In media education, there is very little history, but rather a persistent focus on the new, which the advent of digital media and, recently, the participatory Internet has intensified into an obsessive neophilia. Williams’s concern for cultural history reminds us that a proper interest in the contemporary moment can be balanced with an interest in the archaeologies of media texts, institutions and audiences. In one school where I am currently conducting research, for example, media teachers are helping students to explore the history of the camera from the camera obscura to the production of personal image-banks typical of modern digital cameras, mobile phones and online image-sharing communities.

English, by contrast, is very much preoccupied with literary history; though not necessarily in the way Williams imagines in his notion of the documentary record. The emphases are sometimes on the development of formal aesthetic features of literary texts, and on celebratory accounts of the lives of writers. However, something approaching an interest in literature as a documentary record of significant world events (the War poets, for example), social conditions (Dickens’s reportage and social critique, perhaps) and the minutiae of social convention (Austen, Swift, Chaucer) can also often be the focus.

So we can see that, in English and in media classrooms, both cultural dispositions and cultural capital are imported ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: ‘informed prescription’ or ‘deformed restriction’?
• 1. Beyond the heuristic of suspicion: the value of media literacy
• 2. What happened to teachers’ knowledge when they played ‘The Literacy Game’?
• 3. Policing grammar: the place of grammar in literacy policy
• 4. The origins, evaluations and implications of the National Literacy Strategy in England
• 5. New Zealand's literacy strategy: a lengthening tail and wagging dogs
• 6. NLS1 and NLS2: implications of a social literacies perspective for policies and practices of literacy education
• 7. The impact of the Framework for English: teachers’ struggle against ‘informed prescription’
• 8. The great literacy debate as makeover television: notes on genre proliferation
• 9. The public, the personal, and the teaching of English, language and literacy
• Index