but not as we know it.
Anne Looney, CEO NCCA

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

When Gene Rodenberry conceived Star Trek, and the mission to boldly go where no man has gone before…. He was reflecting the anxieties of the US in the 1960’s…. racial tension, civil rights, cold war nuclear threats…. And no matter what happened, no matter what the future threw at the Starship Enterprise and her crew, simple brute force, coupled with some Vulcan cunning always, but always, won out and the captains log always recorded that the old certainties stood the test of time.

The contrast between the crew of the starship Enterprise and the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 could not be greater. Not alone do the latter not know who their enemies are, but they do not know where they are…. They are lost, without reference points, and although there are tantalising glimpses of icons of recognition – literature, science and religion, they remain, along with the audience completely Lost.

In the world of the Federation, curriculum is, as one theorist put it, the set of stories that one generation chooses to tell the next. In the telling, stories change and are re-shaped, but the themes, the narrative shapes, the look and feel of text remains the same. Story-teller and listener inhabit, if not the same world, at least the same universe. The authority of the story teller arises precisely from their superior engagement with and knowledge of that story.

Oceanic 815 offers a different view. We have no certainty that the survivors share any common story, and the sharing of stories is viewed with suspicion by other survivors and much head scratching by viewers. While there are some common themes, and analysts can have a lot of fun playing semiotics with everything from the script to the music tracks, stories are fractured, fragmented and leave us with no sense of everyone living happily ever after. For 815 we cannot be certain about the set of stories, nor can we trust the story telling process.

While the contestation around critical media literacy and the curriculum continues to focus on the importance of the former and the reluctance of the latter, it will continue to miss a fiundamental point….. the school curriculum is transacted between teachers and students who no longer share the same media spaces. Mark Prensky’s metaphor of digital natives and digital immigrants has come under pressure from Internet 2.0. as children and young people invent new means to connect, engage and express themselves as their teachers congratulate themselves on finally cracking the controls on an ipod.

The notion in that context that we can ‘train teachers’ to teach children about media is a fallacy. Children and young people control the space… it’s why they like it, it’s why they spend time there, because we don’t. We finally ‘get’ Beebo, and are then redirected to Facebook, where we belong, thrown out of the playground….!

So what can they learn in school…. .how to understand and create text, how to suspect and interrogate text, the ethics of connecting, engaging and expressing yourself in real and virtual environments….. I think that’s a mission we can share. But as one report recently put it, media is increasingly Their Space and not ours, and the idea that it can be made into a schoolspace is premised on misplaced ideas of what schools can do, and what media is. Countries that have invested far more than ours in IT in schools – in hardware, software and people ware, have failed to make schools a digital space…. Nor have they succeeded in capturing or controlling the spaces where children and young people choose to be….. these have stubbornly resisted becoming curriculum. They will not be captured and tamed into an adult modernist story. They have become the places where no man has gone before.

Schools, curriculum, teachers, parents, have a task. We do need young people to be media literate, and we need a critical literacy. But we probably need to accept that this is a process for which we may provide some skills and tools, but they will control. We will never do it if we continue to demonise their media, and problematise their spaces…. Because these are the spaces in which they will develop and rehearse that critical literacy. And we will never do it if we think we know the stories. We don’t. We cannot tell the stories we did not write, and we certainly cannot tell them if we don’t understand them.

Explorers used to map the uncertain terroritories – the terra incognita – with the words – here be monsters. But our contemporary terrain is – despite the efforts of google maps – even beyond mapping. Old curriculum gave children maps to navigate their way in a well charted world. In this new world, we can give only compasses. They will map, we will follow. It is curriculum Jim, but not as we know it, and in educational terms, one of the greatest challenges we face.