ROBERT KUBEY Rutgers University
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 46 No. X, Month 2004 1-9
Abstract
This article discusses the critical importance of media education to the teaching of civics and social studies and examines approaches to civics via media literacy. Useful Web site resources are also given. This article argues that in a representative democracy, people must be educated in all forms of contemporary mediated expression and well beyond the print media. The state of media education in the United States, relative to other countries, and the growing presence of core curricular frameworks in the 50 states that call on teachers to help their students become more media literate are also discussed. Keywords: media literacy; civics; social studies; democracy; television
In the most recent presidential election, 89% of 18-year-olds did not vote, meaning of course that only slightly more than 1 in 10 did. It is interesting that a general decline in voter interest and turnout has occurred during the past 50 years, coinciding with the unprecedented rise in media and information technology, all manner of which bring important political news right into our homes. There is a multitude of reasons for the public's all too anemic attitude toward politics and civic involvement-too many to recount here. But all too much evidence suggests that nowhere is there more disinterest than among young voters. The good news is that there are solutions, not just to improving voter interest but also to increasing critical analysis of the media. The solutions include schools and other groups encouraging students to read the newspaper, to attend to all forms of mediated news, and to become media literate (i.e., to actively analyze, evaluate, and produce media in all their forms).
Democracy, it is said, depends on an informed public:
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power. (Thomas Jefferson)
A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. (James Madison, from a letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822)
It is interesting, however, that our nation's schools still do relatively little formal teaching on and through the media, the precise means by which citizens receive nearly all of their information about political processes and elections. One can scarcely even think today about civics, elections, government, the constitution, or the Bill of Rights without also thinking about the media through which we learn of one issue, conflict, or campaign after another.
For more than four decades now, both young people and adults in our society have spent the majority of their leisure time in contact with the electronic mass media, yet all too many schools still operate as if the only forms of expression worthy of study are the textbook, the novel, the short story, and sometimes the newspaper and the Internet. But what about television, radio, magazines, and film? And even with the interest in the Internet and World Wide Web, how many students are being taught to carefully scrutinize Web sites or the sources of information therein?
Taking television by itself, with most Americans viewing from 3 to 4 hours a day, it takes only a simple calculation to recognize that most people will spend from 9 to 12 full years of their lives watching television. Most people, after all, are awake only for roughly 50 of the approximately 75 years each of us is given. And this estimate applies, too, to people in most every developed,Westernized country in the world. At this rate, the average American viewer will spend 2 years of his or her 50 waking years watching television advertisements.
Meanwhile, support for media literacy generally and as it relates to civics education has come from the highest sources in the educational and broadcasting establishment. Ernest Boyer, then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, wrote 15 years ago in Turning Points: Preparing Youth for the 21st Century (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989) that it is no longer enough simply to read and write. Students must also become literate in the understanding of visual images. Our children must learn how to spot a stereotype, isolate a social cliche, and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from banter, and important news from coverage.
In an interview for the Public Broadcasting Service program "Media Literacy: The New Basic?" (On Television, Ltd. & Rutgers University, 1996), Walter Cronkite, long the most "trusted man in America," advised educators,
Go multimedia. Use television and buttress it with reading. That's the only way we're going to get a population intelligent enough to exercise its franchise knowingly. We should teach skepticism. That's what needs to be taught in all media. To be questioning about what you read. Question what you hear, what you see on television.
In the same program, veteran ABC News personality Hugh Downs concluded,
It's extremely important, I think, if democracy is to survive, that the people who vote have access to the facts and sort out biases, where they can know whose axe is being ground, they can know the political climate, they can know the economic considerations of messages being hurled at us all the time.
Yet when it comes to the delivery of media education, the United States lags behind every other major English-speaking country in the world (Kubey, 2003, 2004). Since the mid-1990s, in contrast, Australian language teachers have been mandated to teach nonprint media from kindergarten through 12th grade. Canada now also endorses media education nationwide. In England, approximately 25,000 students recently took their GCSE exams (for 16-year-olds) and some 8,000 university-bound 18-year-olds took their A-level (advanced-level) exams in media studies.
HOPEFUL SIGNS: KIDS VOTING
There are hopeful signs, however, that media education in U.S. schools is finally on its way but frankly, less so in civics and social studies than in language arts and health. Yet as will be shown, research demonstrates that there is considerable value to including media and media literacy curricula in civics education.
Among the most impressive and effective media education programs that get students involved in civics is Kids Voting USA (www.kidsvotingusa.org), a program headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. It is an innovative, K-12 curriculum with exercises that can be used in all kinds of classes, especially during an election campaign. The program integrates civics education and preparation for voting with newspaper reading and media analysis and now reaches an estimated 4.3 million students, 200,000 teachers, 10,600 schools, and 20,000 voter precincts.
Students are taught about the history of voting, voting laws, and how one goes about voting. A mock ballot is used at polling places so that students can accompany their parents and vote on the same issues. Kids Voting was inspired by three Arizonans who observed 80% voter turnout in Costa Rica during a fishing vacation and realized that the act of children's entering the polling booth with parents was particularly significant.
Kids Voting arranges to permit children to vote with their parents, and students are also encouraged to analyze and critique political advertisements, news stories, and candidate debates. Students also often hold in-class debates on issues or candidates. The late media and politics researcher Steve Chaffee (personal communication, February 2000) told me that "it is a political socialization program, and it potentially hits all the buttons."
Chaffee and his colleagues' careful studies of Kids Voting show that after children are involved in the program, there are strong increases in newspaper readings, paying attention to campaign and related news on television, and discussion with peers and parents (McDevitt & Chaffee, 1998). Students also begin to solidify their opinions, answer "don't know" less often when asked about issues, and develop stronger party identifications with decreased percentages being uncommitted. There were also positive improvements in their civics knowledge and more awareness of current political news. And some of these effects held up when measures were taken 6 months after an election. Reading of the front page of newspapers, for example, remained impressively high 6 months later. As Chaffee (personal communication, February 2000) reported, newspaper reading is key, and "if they get into that habit, political socialization proceeds in an upward spiral."
And Kids Voting appears to get parents voting more by a factor of from 5% to 10%. Said Chaffee (personal communication, February 2000), "Having a student in Kids Voting classes didn't just increase the likelihood of a parent's simply voting, it otherwise seems to have increased the parent's competence as a voter in a variety of important ways."
Another program that focuses first on newspaper reading and then on civics shows similar and convincing results. Here again, the late Professor Chaffee studied students, this time not in the United States but in Argentina (Chaffee, Morduchowicz, & Galperin, 1997). Sixth- to seventh-grade classes whose teachers were using the newspaper once a week in school were compared to same-grade classes where teachers did not participate in the newspaper reading program. The researchers found the strongest improvements in interest and knowledge of voting and politics to occur in the classes that were encouraged to read the newspaper.
WEB RESOURCES
First, for a number of excellent general media literacy Web sites, the reader might wish to look at the Rutgers University Web site and check the left navigation bar for various media literacy sites.
A source for teachers that links civics education to media analysis and media education, School City offers free, Web-based tools and curriculum-focused content along with online projects and ideas, many particularly designed for elections.
An especially noteworthy service for students and teachers-indeed for all citizens-is Project Vote-Smart, an unbiased, issue-oriented project and site cofounded by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. It contains precise information on candidates' positions for state and local races, as well as their voting records, and assessments by advocacy groups of candidates running in national congressional and senate elections.
In addition, there are a variety of news-oriented organizations and companies that have created media and other resources designed for classroom use. These include Newspapers in Education, Cable in the Classroom,CNN Newsroom, CSPAN's In the Classroom, and the National Television Academy's (formerly National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) National Student Television project.
The Buck Institute in California focuses its educational outreach work on innovative problem-based learning approaches and has online and other resources that can help teachers think about how to engage students in multiple stage problem-based learning projects. They have developed materials in civics and in media literacy.
CREATING MEDIA
Let us look at a few examples of effective media literacy assignments that can catalyze civics education. Among the media production activities that media educators around the world have found especially effective is to provide opportunities to students to create media stories, documentaries, and news for others in the school or in the community to experience. In many ways, this is no different from the experiences that students have had in journalism classes throughout most of the previous century. The differences have to do with the infusion of media education across numerous subjects so that the entire spectrum of students receive and experience news and media production experience. And students need to learn about all the media through which people communicate. It can also be very instructive for students to be asked to create a political advertisement for a candidate-fictional or real-and in any medium that suits the teachers' and the students' proclivities.
Costas Criticos (1997/2001), one of the leading media educators in South Africa, has been very successful facilitating a very simple but powerful news writing assignment he first created in Natal province 15 years ago and that he calls the Giant Newspaper. In short, students in civics and language arts classes function as reporters and publish issues of the front page of a newspaper about their own school and contemporary issues affecting the school. Their final writing products are displayed as a huge newspaper on one of the largest walls of the school, approximately 20 feet in height by 14 feet in width. To read the results, other students, teachers, and administrators in the school stand before the huge newspaper and read the stories, each with a student's byline in large type. This magnified version of a newspaper engenders far more interest among students in writing well, because others truly read the stories and they read them in a public place. The usual and otherwise private experience of reading the typical school newspaper is expanded, and as the issues in the paper deal with the school, a sort of special political import, energy, and sense of community travels in and through the student body.
Another important development that can enhance students' sense of civic and community participation, particularly in their own school, is for them to participate in and help produce a daily television broadcast. An increasing number of schools in the United States are now doing this. One school that can serve as a model is Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Benjamin Franklin Broadcast News (BFBN) has been on the air for more than a decade and every eighth grader knows that at some point, they will help produce the program for one semester and that they will also appear, on camera, in a program. The programs are produced almost entirely by the students, with a bit of adult supervision, and the whole project is well interwoven with a social and emotional learning program introduced to the school by noted psychologist Maurice Elias (see here). It is nothing short of inspiring to watch these young people working in the control booth of their school's television station, punching up stories and rolling tape to the rest of their schoolmates.
This is one of the best ways to enhance a sense of community and civic responsibility both in a school and in a community, as students make the announcements about what is going on in the school and interview teachers and other students. And for the daring school, students can debate the issues of the day. In Ridgewood, the sense of community involvement is especially strong because each morning's daily program is also available via the town's public access cable channel, and many parents make watching the daily brief broadcast part of their morning routine. Thus, parents frequently run into another parent or teacher, say at the supermarket, and mention an important event later in the week that they heard about that morning on BFBN. Participation in school activities, by the community and parents, is substantially enhanced, and parents can also learn more about who the students, teachers, and administrators are in their child's school by watching BFBN.
MEDIA LITERACY GAINING A CURRICULAR FOOTHOLD, BUT NOT AS RAPIDLY IN SOCIAL STUDIES
So, there are lots of resources and unmistakable and hopeful signs of great developments in media education in the United States. Not many years ago, only a mere handful of states had curricular guidelines that called for media education. In 1999, Frank Baker, past president of the Alliance for a Media Literate America, and I examined the educational frameworks for all 50 states and found that all state curricular frameworks now contain one or more elements calling for media education (Kubey & Baker, 1999).
These dramatic changes are the result of increasing numbers of state departments of education, school boards, principals, and teachers recognizing that they can no longer ignore the incredible importance of media in our everyday lives. Moreover, curriculum standards have changed by virtue of directly involving teachers in the writing of these new standards. To complete the study, Baker and I examined the curricular objectives and educational goals from each state's frameworks that we could obtain by direct query to state departments of education and via the Internet. All but a few are on the World Wide Web, and we have listed them with direct links to each state here.
We also assessed whether the media education elements we found in the frameworks fell under one of three broad curricular categories. The considerable presence of media-analysis goals among the state educational frameworks in the subject areas of health and consumer skills surprised us. For example, 39 of 50 states (78%) had media-education elements in their health and consumer education frameworks, all 50 states (100%) had media-education elements in English and language and communication arts frameworks, but only 32 states (64%) called for media elements in social studies, history, and civics (Kubey & Baker, 1999). This is an area that needs special attention in the years ahead and is one of the key reasons that I chose to write on this topic for this special issue of American Behavioral Scientist.
WHAT MEDIA LITERACY STATE STANDARDS IN CIVICS LOOK LIKE AND WHAT WE MUST DO
Let us look at how one state couches its focus on media, social studies, and civics. California's History/Social Sciences Research Framework for 9th to 12th graders is among the most complete in the United States. Here is one section:
Students evaluate, take and defend positions on the influence of the media on American political life, in terms of: 1) the meaning and importance of a free and responsible press, (2) the role of electronic, broadcast, print media, and the Internet as means of communication in American politics, 3) how public officials use the media to communicate with the citizenry and to shape public opinion. (California State Educational Standards, n.d.)
Still, no one should misinterpret that these frameworks and goals in media education are being adequately met in any state. They are not. Educational guidelines and mandates do not always mean implementation, quality, or systematic evaluation. But it is certainly the case that a variety of social and cultural forces have caused hundreds of educators in most every state to recognize that instruction in the traditional print media is no longer adequate. As I pointed out in an Education Week article some years ago, we need "educational leaders to recognize that the way we communicate as a society has changed enough in this century that traditional training in literature and print communication is no longer sufficient by itself" (Kubey, 1991, p. 27).
Clearly, we must provide teachers with sufficient in-service training so they can integrate media education into their teaching. And education schools throughout the country have a lot of catching up to do, as only a few formally incorporate media education or media literacy instruction in preservice teacher training. The U.S. educational establishment still has not fully grasped this fact or adequately assisted teachers in developing ways to teach about and through the media so as to prepare students for democracy and the lives they will lead beyond school.
My own informal survey of graduate schools of education indicates that some education schools still think it is adequate to tell teachers that they can use film or video in their classes or merely show students The Civil War video series by Ken Burns. Quite a few go further in instructing future teachers how to have students complete an assignment using multimedia. But there remains precious little teaching of our nation's future teachers about how to encourage and catalyze analysis and evaluation of media products and little recognition that instruction in the techniques of persuasion and propaganda must extend well beyond print. And issues of source credibility, long taught in journalism classes, have taken on even greater import today with so many students now relying on the Internet for their knowledge, news, and information and likewise sourcing a tremendous proportion of what they put in their school essays from the World Wide Web.
And so in closing, although there have been impressive developments in curricular frameworks, the U.S. educational establishment is still too often mystified as to how to retool and retrain to educate students and future citizens for the new realities of communication. If most students are going to continue to spend close to 2,000 hours each year of their young lives with the electronic media, and another 2,000 hours every year for their entire adult lives, is it not time for educators to learn new ways of teaching and to engage in formal media education?
REFERENCES
California State educational standards. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.med.sc.edu:1081/statelit.htm
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. (1989). Turning points: Preparing youth for the 21st century. New York: Carnegie Corporation.
Chaffee, S., Morduchowicz, R., & Galperin, G. (1997). Education for democracy in Argentina: Effects of a newspaper-in-school program. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 9, 1-23.
Criticos, C. (1997/2001). Media education for a critical citizenry in South Africa. In R. Kubey (Ed.), Media literacy in the information age: Current perspectives (pp. 229-240).New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Kubey, R. (1991, March 6). The case for media education. Education Week, 10, 27.
Kubey, R. (2003). Why U.S. media education lags behind the rest of the English-speaking world. Television and New Media, 4, 351-370.
Kubey, R. (2004). What is media education and why is it important? Television Quarterly, 34(4), 21-27.
Kubey, R., & Baker, F. (1999, October 27). Has media literacy found a curricular foothold? Education Week, 19, 56.
McDevitt, M., & Chaffee, S. (1998). Second chance political socialization: Trickle-up effects of children on parents. In T. J. Johnson, C. E. Hays, & S. P. Hays (Eds.), Engaging the public: How government and the media can reinvigorate American democracy (pp. 57-74). Boulder, CO: Rowman Littlefield.
On Television, Ltd. (Producer), & Rutgers University (Producer) (with New Jersey Network, Producer). (1996, December). Media literacy: The new basic? New York/Washington, DC: Public Broadcasting Service. ROBERT KUBEY is director of the Center for Media Studies and professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is editor of Media Literacy in the Information Age, edits a series of research volumes on media education for Lawrence Erlbaum, and has authored Creating Television (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004) and coauthored Television and the Quality of Life with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990).
________________________Author's Note: Selected portions of this article were previously published in "Media Literacy: Required Reading for the 21st Century," The High School Magazine, 7(8), (2000).
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 46 No. X, Month 2004 1-9 DOI: 0.1177/0002764204267252 © 2004 Sage Publications
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