Constructive Controversies In Media Literacy

1. The European Recommendation 18 December 20061 states the frame of the eight citizenship competencies that schools and longlife education have to develop. In this frame is included what the frame itself defines “digital competence”. This is an interesting turning point for the social reception of Media Literacy: what was previously thought only as one of the many “educations” our school systems should think to, now becomes one of the main competencies we have to provide for the future citizens we are educating. The switch is from an idea of Media Literacy as a choice to a new idea of Media Literacy as a core part of a wider Citizenship Education (Rivoltella, 2008). This is the reason why the European Reccomendation 20 August 20092 can say that “Media Literacy is a matter of inclusion and citizenship in today's information osciety. (…) Media literacy is today regarded as one of the key prerequisites for ana ctive and full citizenship in order to prevent and diminish risks of exclusion from community life”. 2. What does it means to develop a digital competence? Almost three issues: - skills: to be able to use IST (Information Society Technologies) in job-oriented and everyday activities; communicate; produce, find, store, share and evaluate informations; - critical thinking: to be aware of risks and opportunities of technologies; to be able to read and analyse messages; - creative acting: to be able to produce contents, to express itself in these new languages, to be able to use these tools in an innovation perspective. 3. The Recommendation talks about Information Society Technologies (IST). The normal trend is to think about these in terms of: computer, Internet and its applications (nowadays I suppose mostly 2.0 applications such as Facebook, blogs, wikies and all the other Social Network tools). But we don't forgive that, in the Information Society, we have: - some other technologies really belonging to youngsters' and adults' everyday life, like mobile phones, MP3 players and videogame consoles; - some other media, probably not so “new” but “re-newed” by the digital convergence and finally re-mediated (Bolter & Grusin, 2000): television, cinema (now available on a lot of different screens), radio, newspapers. So, when we talk about digital competence, we have to mean this competence in a wide sense. We have to include in this also those media competencies that Media Literacy traditionally ought to be powered about the so called “old media”. In the mesure these media became “new”, making part of the new digital media arena, it should be quite strange do not consider them in the development of the tomorrow citizens' education. 4. The actual media arena is really changed if we compare it with the previous one. This change is well described by Roger Silverstone (2007). The media arena (he names “Mediapolis”) is: - a space of appearence, i.e. a space where the world could appear and an appearence belonging to the structure of the world itself; - not only the extension of the “phisic” social and political arena (as Anna Harendt said), but part of this arena itself; - a space where we can experiment the convergence of discourse and action. Better: in this space every discourse is an action. As I already said in one of my books (Rivoltella, 2003), the media arena is a pragmatic arena where we really understand what John Langshaw Austin meant when he talked about our possibility of “doing things with words”. 5. The media arena is at the same time a space of experience for youngsters, an effective marketplace for industries and a “classroom” for educators. 6. Youngsters' experience in the media arena is characterized by different activities. They use the 1 2

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media in their free-time (mainly videogames and music), they foster their social relations thanks to them (this is the case of instant messaging and mobile phones), they produce messages publishing them in the public space (when they take a photo or make a video and then they publish them in You-tube, in Flickr or in another web space). All these activities aid to describe a consumption profile of the youngsters quite different from those we already knew before. And there are two main aspects that are making new this profile: the first one is that youngsters nowadays are really “dressing the media”, so that their presence is persistent and meaningful representing the natural space for a lot of activities; on the other side, youngsters are nowadays more active, they are less receivers and more authors, being able to produce and publish messages. Here we have a substantial change. Youngsters are no more people we have to protect from bad messages or from the risks they could find interacting with the media; on the contrary they are somebody we have to make responsible for his/her own acts. The change is from protection to responsibility. It's a change forcing us to reconsider our representation of Childhood and Adolescence as an Innocence Age: to educate their responsibility means to consider them citizens and prepare them to be conscious of this fact. 7. The media arena is at the the present time both a chance and a challenge for Media Industries. It's a chance, because the media arena is wide, youngsters are populating it and youngsters are a driver for the market. The problems here – from the education point of view - are concerning the quality of the contents, the quantity of the access, the marketing actions aiming to reach adults using youngsters as a target. Probably we need a new alliance between industries and education. Media Literacy could represent for them a good opportunity for a self-regulation able to balance educative attention and market-orientation. Several are the proposals in this way: the presence of media educators in the corporations, the presence of media professionals in the schools, the research of new quality formats and services for youngsters. 8. We said that media arena is a class-room for educators. And it is true. The problem is that educators – both in family and in school – seem to be not able to stay in this class-room in a meaningful way. Parents are really far from sons' ways of consumption: they don't know what youngsters do with the media, they think that computer and Internet are important for their future but they are very concerned with the risks of these technologies. So, normally they address to the schools the responsibility in educating children about the media: in this way they try to remove the problem, convincing themselves that it belongs to others. The situation in schools is not so better. In this case we have a problem with the curricula – whose preoccupation for technologies and skills is too big, and on the contrary the preoccupation for media culture is too small – and with the teachers. Their training remains a big question: they normally don't have competencies and tend to resolve the matter on the side of technological skills. On the contrary, the problem with media and technologies is a problem of methods and techniques: we don't have to learn to use media, but to transform our teaching behaviours thanks to the media. 9. In all these cases one of the main problems is how to evaluate processes and outcomes. Evaluation is almost about contents. In the old media arena this problem was related practically to the issue of quality: the civil society, the associations of parents and of the media, normally invoked in that situation standards and controls for granting this quality. In actual media arena the problem is really more difficult: social media tend to be considered good even if their quality is bad. So: what is a quality content? Is it good if it informs us about a fact, but its images and sounds are bad? What are the criteria according to which we can evaluate this? On the other side, we've also a big problem in the case of assessment? What does it mean to assess students abou their media competencies? It is not so easy. We cannot use the traditional assessment tools: in fact they normally mesure the presence of informations, and not the quality of a performance. So, we have here to change our way of assessment adopting methods and techniques of authentic assessment, i.e. ethnografic observation, embedded tasks, portfolios, and so on.