Media education in the UK

Abstract

Education about the media has been developing in the UK for at least 40 years. Various accounts of that history can be found elsewhere; this paper will just attempt to sketch out key features of the current scene, and to point readers to sources of more substantial information. Given that I work for the British Film Institute, a key player in this field, there is bound to be some bias in this account towards the BFI’s perspective: my defence is that, as every media educator knows, no account is ever completely unbiased. La educación en los medios se viene desarrollando en el Reino Unido desde hace ya cuarenta años. El proceso histórico del desarrollo de los distintos proyectos que se llevan a cabo está recogido en numerosos documentos y estudios específicos. Este artículo, por tanto, sólo pretende definir y analizar las principales claves del panorama actual y mostrar a los lectores posibles fuentes que contengan información ampliada acerca del tema.

New concepts of media science in the sociocultural system of the information civilization

“…Thus, an English media educator Masterman, one of the pioneers of this direction, focuses on the fact that the main "concept of media education is representation" and the goal is "the formation of critical thinking of the audience" [17]. Masterman's ideas united many foreign media educators in the 1980-90s: Bazalgette [3], Worsnop [21], Duncan [6], Kubey [13], Feilitzen [8], Hart [9], and others and aroused the interest of Russian teachers.…”

“…Considering different periods in the history of media sphere research, it becomes clear that media problems are a research object of various humanities: history and journalism, the theory of culture and philosophy, political science, and sociology. In pedagogy, at the turn of the 21st century, even a new direction appeared -media education pioneered by well-known Western European experts: Masterman [16], Bazalgette [3], Duncan [6], and others.…”

La Educación en Los Medios Y La Actividad Ciudadana

“…Most of these courses require students to carry out practical work where they develop technical and creative skills through creating a media product. In addition, official examinations give a certain amount of prestige to this area of education (Hart and Hicks, 2002;Bazalgette, 2007a). It is not mere chance that the UK set up a task force made up of the Film Council, British Film Institute, BBC and Channel 4, fostering the idea of drawing up a media literacy charter in the United Kingdom, aiming to provide a unified definition of media literacy (Bazalgette, 2007b) It seems that the institutional support offered to teachers has been a key issue giving great impetus to media education in the UK.…”

Portrait of a Teach for All (TFA) teacher: Media narratives of the universal TFA teacher in 12 countries

“…While these scholars working within critical perspectives have exposed how mainstream media in countries around the world play a key role in legitimating, reinforcing and propagating the particular worldviews, voices and perspectives led by the corporate education reform supporters, the relationship between media and media audiences requires a deeper and more complex understanding. As Bazalgette (1992) argues, "the assumption that audiences are passive and gullible is fast losing ground to the idea that audiences make meanings from texts, rather than having meanings thrust upon them" (pp. 214-215).…”