Jack Byrne
NEAR Media Coop & CRAOL

Presented at Media Literacy Education Symposium (Sat 3rd Nov. 2007, Cultivate Centre, Dublin)

Issues of critical media awareness are important right now, and will continue to grow in importance. Tomorrow’s world, will be increasingly dominated by mass media and communications technologies. Generations of the future will need to understand how media influence society. How we are encouraged to accept certain issues while rejecting others. How sometimes, we are encouraged to act against our own best interests.

Media literacy is clearly more than becoming competent in the technologies of communication. Knowing which end of a hammer to hold, won’t make me a good carpenter, or a competent architect. Some of us in community media realise that knowing how to operate Information Technologies without a critical awareness of how the content develops, is missing the point.

I would suggest that similarly, classroom media literacy, without practical experience of developing content, is also incomplete. How can we find the synergies to provide a rounded media literacy education for our citizens? I suspect that most of you here will be more familiar with mainstream formal education, rather than that of a community media approach, so let me briefly explain the ethos of community media in relation to media literacy.
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A Case Study of Media Education in an Urban Irish Primary School

“Study submitted in part fulfillment of the requirement for the award of MA in Communications & Cultural Studies”

Presented at Conference: Media Literacy Education Symposium (Nov 3rd 2007, Dublin)

(c) Conor McHugh 15th June 2007

See the paper in full here in pdf

The Media are an important cultural force through which attitudes, values and beliefs are mediated and shared. It is often argued that, today, the Media have taken the place of the family, the church and the school as the major socializing influence in contemporary society. If this statement is to be taken as accurate then it is only fitting that the Media would be taught or used to some extent in the conventional primary classroom.

Media Education has been part of the primary school experience of many children internationally since the 1990’s e.g. Australia and Finland. However Media Education’s introduction into the Irish Primary School Curriculum has been a more recent occurrence. In 1999 Media Education was introduced as a strand unit of the subject Social, Personal and Health Education (S.P.H.E.) in the Revised Primary Curriculum. Therefore Media Education has been taught in Irish primary schools since 1999 – or has it?

Anecdotal evidence suggesting that Media Education was a neglected area of the Revised Primary Curriculum (1999) prompted the researcher to question whether the Media Education programme is being effectively implemented at primary level and if not why not?
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