Whose responsibility is it to teach D&ML skills? What issues and challenges do they face?
Digital Media and Technology are pervasive and endlessly plentiful in the modern world, and are involved in a growing number of tasks we engage in everyday. We witness them and their messages, sometimes passively, other times unwittingly, and even other times unwillingly, everywhere. They are embedded in the entertainment we watch, the format of the websites we visit, the presentation of political messages and pamphlets, and in logos and branding. But our relationship with digital media is personal and subjective, and its role in our lives can range from well-managed to extreme and harmful.
Ultimately, the responsibility of educating people, especially vulnerable communities like children, around digital media literacy and creativity rests with everyone, especially those in the immediate circles around them whose dynamics often involve them or are impacted by them. Increasingly, digital media and technology are incorporated in aspects of daily life like childcare and schooling, and more and more in spaces that might not be known to include them like church or doctor's offices. YouTube as a helpful distraction during wait times in pediatric offices, bus ads during commutes to the grocery store, journeys through links and and pages online for school homework -- all yield interactions with digital media in rapid succession.
But until we reach a healthy and effective place societally with regard to our relationship with the internet and digital media, whose role is on the frontline in leading this change? To me, educators and other prominent figures in the learning experiences of children are the likeliest candidates, primarily because their role is often overtly connected to notions of transformation, learning, and skill-building. But what would it look like for educators and learning leaders to take on this task, and what challenges do they face?
Awareness and Literacy
When it comes to the learning and understanding of digital media and children, it can be useful to think in terms to two major arenas. The first is awareness and literacy. Like with other subjects like science and mathematics, equipping youth with the ability to identify and to engage with digital media and the various parts of it can have lasting utility and meaning in their lives. Knowing how visual elements work in tandem with audio cues, word choice, and design are all valuable for children to gain awareness around, so that they can derive messages and subtext from these forms of media with thoughtfulness and precision. This can help children to avoid psychological or emotional triggers or side effects that can come from subliminal messages or from the strifes and inequities of representation or thematic storytelling. Knowing that these kinds of media and resources are often produced as a means for profit, or solidifying consumer or voter bases, or propagandizing messages are all necessary things for critical thought and development.
As George Lucas states in a conversation with Edutopia, media and literacy are aspects of communication, and are just as relevant for learning as grammar, syntax, and argumentation (Edutopia, 2012). In this way, formal classroom educators are the most sensible people to become practitioners of curriculum around literacy, and classes that have traditionally been called English or Language Arts should instead be called Communication so that these subjects can be included in more intentional ways rather than viewed as electives or optional issues for study and learning.
Overhauling curriculum that has long been around, however, is very challenging and would require extensive amounts of buy-in before these changes could be implemented, especially at the school board level. In the interim, librarians and administrators can be valuable stakeholders for engaging youth in questions of awareness and literacy. Librarians already occupy spaces and time slots in the schoolday that center around media, often books but other more visual forms of literature like magazines or comic books are also in the purview of their work, and these spaces could include more visual aids (posters, handouts, etc.) that ask provocative and elucidating questions and tactics that could help children apply practices of dissecting and deconstructing these forms of media that children can apply to the rest of their lives. Administrators in schools can utilize interstitial spaces on campuses like hallways and bathrooms to also make sure children are prompted to give the advertisements and media they see a second or even third look, to assist in their breakdowns of these things and to supplement their messages with others that uplift them and allow them to see aspirational and more human-centered designs. Riffing on the conventions and tropes of a movie poster, for instance, but including the faces of young people doing amazing things, or representing issues of DEAI, or demonstrating the power of learning or creativity can all recontextualize visual media design to support the aims of schools and teachers.
What kinds of visual and digital media do you think are necessary for schools to include on their campuses or in their virtual spaces to help youth feel more welcome, or to develop critical thinking skills? What kinds of media or visual information do you recall from your own experience of being a young learner? What made them so resonant?
Creativity and Innovation
Once children have a foundational understanding of how digital media is constructed and works, especially within the minds and senses of audiences, there is also the question of how these things can be wielded in intentional and creative ways.
Afterschool educators are to me the most equipped kinds of educators to be able to take advantage of these tools for children's learning that can bring more joy to these resources and artifacts, and also provide spaces and experiences that can support children's creativity and experimentation with them. The world of afterschool and informal learning spaces tends to be much more flexible than the formal schoolday, and the expectations and policies around their content and facilitation are also relatively freer and less constricting. And with intentional design and communication between afterschool educators and formal classroom teachers, these experiences can work together to form a strong collaborative ecology where children can learn and also be supported through construction and design processes of their own.
When I picture this in action, I visualize youth referencing the posters, handouts, and conversations around media literacy from the schoolday, from their teachers, from the librarians, to their afterschool investigations on producing their own podcasts, or analog constructions of posters or pamphlets using marker and paper, or even simply in roundtable discussions as YouTube videos, tv shows, or movies are played in these spaces during downtimes or as families and guardians begin to arrive for pickup. Afterschool STEM classes can focus as much on how to use programs on computers to making original media or remixing existing media as they do on robotics or slime recipes. Depictions of chess on tv and in cinema and how these images and themes interplay with our larger culture or society, or sense of personhood, can be just as thrilling and rich as teaching youth how to play the game or win at it.
The freedom of the world of afterschool learning can be positioned to suit the needs of youth who are developing as consumers of media, but also as content creators or influencers and how they can retain healthy habits when cultivating a digital self. Though their value is immediate and apparent, these kinds of explorations can be difficult to implement into the schoolday since teachers already carry a heavy burden of educating youth on topics already as diverse as mathematics, history, science, and language. Until schools become places where other considerations like civic engagement, housekeeping, the tax code, or digital media are implemented into the curriculum, they are well-suited to the learner-centered designs of informal spaces.
If you were designing an afterschool program around digital media, what would you create? What kinds of explorations or activities would you have enjoyed as a young learner?
Edutopia. (2012, May 10). George Lucas on Teaching Visual Literacy and Communications [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwDXlA_6usI
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