Creative, Cultural and Critical: Media Literacy Theory in the Primary Classroom

Media literacy education projects and initiatives have tended to focus on teenagers and to be informed either by social or moral concerns or by a body of theory which has evolved primarily in the academy. Three recent research initiatives to which we have all contributed – Reframing Literacy (RL), Persistence of Vision (POV), and Developing Media Literacy: towards a model of learning progression (DML) – prompt consideration of a different approach.1 All three projects indicate that young children (from age three or four onwards) are already engaging with the kinds of powerful questions that generate the central theories of media literacy; for example representation, audience, institutions, narrative and media language. Our research also indicates that children’s pre-school engagements with non-print texts such as films and TV programmes provide them with a rich repertoire of experience for literacy learning in the form of recognising textual features that contribute to meaning making, and skills such as inference and prediction. Where this early learning is recognised and built on by teachers, children’s overall attainment is substantially enhanced. We present evidence from all three research projects, exploring how children’s existing understandings can be made explicit and how their learning can be extended through further critical analysis and creative production. Furthermore, we propose that by valuing children’s understandings of film and by offering opportunities for using diverse, powerful modes of expression, the hierarchies of classroom achievement can be productively upturned. We discuss some of the implications for pedagogy in the primary school and signal the need for radical change in educational policy.