From Robbie Robertson
Edinburgh
That science is waning and media studies waxing in the curricular sky is a
fact. But your editorial on the phenomenon (“Media studies is the message”, 24
August, p 3) might have had a more meaningful conclusion than the jocular
observation that what science teaching needs are media studies’ “clothes,
hairstyles and a few buzz words”.
Add, for example, “stimulating ideas, variety, humane methodology, and
obvious relevance to its students’ lives” if you want to find more significant
explanations for the popularity of media studies.
Essentially, media studies treats its subject not as a body of external
knowledge detached from life but as a complex human construct set within a moral
universe. Deconstructing its many messages exposes largely invisible but
powerful and ideologically motivated influences on our behaviours. Exchanging
thoughts, attitudes, experiences and expertise between teachers and pupils of
all ages becomes therefore a legitimate way of learning.
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Contrasting media studies with science teaching in terms of organising
principles, methods and purposes may suggest some reasons why interest in school
science is declining.
But this decline seems quite unnecessary. Most young people understand that
our biosphere is stumbling into multiple and profound crises. They passionately
want to know and understand more, to become more engaged. Perhaps they, like
most of us, sense survival imperatives and future conditions which will require
a scientifically literate electorate that is capable of taking informed
decisions.
Yet science teaching, despite such complex needs, eager customers and a
universe of marvels and mysteries as its playground, is not attracting them.
This can only suggest a lack of curricular/political imagination of a quite
staggering kind. But the answer is certainly out there. It might well be in
media studies and its methods. So who’s for a deconstruction of The
X-Files to find out what’s really going on?
