MEDIA LITERACY

 

There is very little contestation to the notion that media representations help manufacture our view and understanding of the world. This affects children and adolescents the hardest.  A K-12 system of education must integrate teaching media literacy into its curriculum. How else can we in a multicultural global society teach our students about the ways in which power generates inequities and injustices. How else can we convey to the audiovisual generation that societal conditions are directly related to issues of  race, class, and gender. Recent studies by Sut Jhally, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Douglas Kellner, Henry Giroux, Robert McChesney, and Riane Eisler  among others reveal the role mainstream media play in perpetuating these unjust conditions, hence helping with maintenance of Eurocentric-capitalist systems of power. Media literacy programs will enable students to look for alternative media, which can greatly help with creating a more diverse and democratic way of constructing images and worldview that could bring us closer to a just global society. We must accept and pronounce the fact that the media  are a powerful form of pedagogy—a social force. Developing a media literacy program in K-12 schooling requires a deep understanding and a critical perspective of the pedagogical role media like television, popular music, cinema, and advertising play in our society. Consider the Internet.  The Internet assimilates various media forms (e.g., books, music, film, animation, advertising, journalism, etc.) and in this cyber paradigm we have much pedagogy. The notion of net neutrality must be taken seriously and defended by educators and concerned citizens. My research is looking into ways in which we can create empowering models of media literacy and education to help our future teachers and civic leaders.  

TECHNOLOGY & HUMANITY

 

Today we live in an epoch of highly sophisticated technological paradigm. From the Internet to the high-tech hybrid automobiles, which take us from one geographic location either virtually physically, we are in daily relationship with technology.

In some parts of the post-industrial/post-modern world of privilege in places like San Francisco Bay Area we experience technology at its most advanced level, yet like the fish in water we may not be aware of technology’s point of conception or its politics of power. We live in a “top- down” technological paradigm. As Andrew Feenberg has astutely pointed out, “ Technology can be and is configured in such a way as to reproduce the rule of the few over the many.” Heidegger had also recognized, in his History of Being, the coming of the hierarchical technological society. American corporations are configured to be top-down organizations in order to benefit the elite that actually own them.

But at its core it is humanity that designs and implements technology. But what to do with the humanity’s power relations? We have seen in science fiction literature and motion pictures where humanity wins over technology’s dominance and in the end turns the tables on the power relations. See, for example, the terminator series for an illustration of such reversal in power relations. But that is simulated reality. In physical and sensory everyday reality the challenge remains. A dramatic transformation is indeed necessary to reverse the top-down into bottom-up relationship between humanity and technology. Technology has brought us the atomic bomb, but it also has brought us the pacemaker. One destroys lives while the other saves them. If we had more of a democratic relationship between technology and humanity, we would have more pacemakers and no bombs– on a global scale. One may wonder to what extent men like Bill Gates and Steven Jobs consider such democratization. Next time you are about to purchase an I-pod think about that—will you? 

PERTINENT KNOWLEDGE & GLOBAL PEDAGOGY

To recognize and utilize what is pertinent knowledge to one’s inquiry is truly a problematic area as is often misconstrued by educators. At the center of this lesson we find the question of “How should we teach mutuality?” We must remind ourselves of the inadequacies of today’s education and keep that reality fresh in our minds for the future. Certain concepts standardize our knowledge. However, these standard notions are instruments that anchor our thinking in a constantly changing world. Our realities must be recognized as global realities. As the world changes so do truths, realities, and ways of knowledge production and learning. Ninety years ago, Dewey acknowledged that although it is easy to transmit standardized knowledge to the world, this transmission of canonized concepts does not contribute much to robust educational practice.  Indeed, this is precisely what we have to teach in this millenium. The important difference, however, is that our discourse must recognize the holographic necessity of planetary pedagogy. Which is to say, a planetary education must have interconnectivity between the part and the whole. The global student as part finds himself or herself connected to the planet as whole. The pragmatists of the past generation were concerned about learning by doing, and did not address the need for a participatory education at the planetary scale, whatsoever. In a planetary era, everyone must be a participant in the discourse. The world is fluid and so is epistemology. The postmodern age is increasingly revealing the interconnectedness of philosophy, art, critical theory (anchored in modernism), architecture, literature, geopolitics, history, and culture. The caveat emptor to the planetary educator is that his or her students know he or she is part of the discourse as much as they are. This is one of the tenets of  global pedagogy.

PEDAGOGY & MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

Within the sphere of complex thinking, in the audiovisual culture, we must embrace Howard Gardner’s concept of “multiple intelligences.” The traditional IQ test is no longer a valid medium of measurement of a student’s intelligence. This idea is especially paramount in an audiovisual culture whereby movies, video games, and Internet graphics transmit ideologies and paradigms to people of various backgrounds and personal histories. As Gardner astutely has theorized, there are indeed different categories of intelligence: linguistic, logical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. Theoretically speaking, we are all amalgams of the mentioned categories, hence the term multiple intelligence. How does this fit into pedagogy? In this type of pedagogical paradigm each student has strengths in some areas and weaknesses in others. Consider a film studies class. For example, a student with strength in spatial intelligence and weakness in linguistic intelligence would easily understand the concept of mise-en-scene—the French term that means “placement in the scene” (a cinematic technique for placement of visual objects in a scene to create a desired meaning). On the other hand, the same student would have a hard time with understanding the latent meaning within a complex dialogue in a film. In a learner-centered environment where there is a dialogical exchange between the teacher and student, the teacher can recognize this condition and help the student by further explicating the “meaning” of the words in the film dialogue. Operating under the assumptions of complex thought, learning must be done in dialogical fashion. For example, when a student responds to a question by the teacher about a particular dialogue in film by saying he or she does not understand the meaning of that dialogue, the teacher can create a dialogue with the student by repeating the same dialogue (from the film) with the student and step by step, word by word, explain the meaning of the words and their connection to the premise of the film. Furthermore, this dialogical process crystallizes the holographic aspect of cinema. That is, the whole (i.e., film) is included in the part (i.e., the dialogue in question), which is included in the whole. If the learner who is at the center of learning process participates directly then chances of that learning becoming transformative are increased. 

KNOWLEDGE IS A SEAMLESS WEB!

An old French professor once told me, “Knowledge is a seamless web.” I couldn’t agree more, and all the more so in the 21^st century. When one considers the context of historical, ecological, sociological, cultural, economical and political, one finds a  knowledge which is the 21^st paradigm of humanity—known as the global. In the global age, which is the present, and given the global conditions of everything under the sun, we have no choice but  to locate our concepts and ideas in the planetary complex. As Edgar Morin has reminded us in the latter part of the 20^th century, to gain access to this seamless web we need a “reform in thinking” [Morin’s words], I would take that notion a step farther and argue that we need a “revolution in thinking”[my words]. I do agree with Morin when he says, “this reform (i.e., revolution) is paradigmatic, not programmatic.” We need a global shift of paradigm, and that can only come as a result of a global education.  The global education of the 21^st century with the Internet at its center has to undergo a structural and contextual revolution. The compartmentalized, piecemeal, disjointed learning is absolutely the wrong method. How could the children of the future adequately understand the realities and problems of the globe? We are hurriedly approaching a transnational age, where race relations, nationalism, and conservatism will have to take a backseat to multidimensionality, transversally, and hybridity of the citizens of our planet. As Morin has articulated it, “Education must encourage ‘general intelligence’ apt to refer to the complex, the context, in a multidimensional way, within a global conception.” So, we must go after knowledge with all of our faculties. Knowledge, this seamless web, must be used to propel us into a better world, a world that is more just. Knowledge must serve the causes of social justice and not militarism, free market economy, neoliberalism, and racist paradigms of world domination. In order to use knowledge for creation of a fairer world, we need profound comprehension and relentless critique of everything. We must crave knowledge and question what we crave. We must take the time to examine a subject in depth. We must embrace diverse perspectives in our knowledge seeking and production. We must look at knowledge in applicable terms. What is the use of a theory if it cannot be applied? We need to learn the abstract as well as the concrete, in order to produce applicable knowledge. To learn about a subject one has to learn about its history—from various perspectives and not the one written by gatekeepers of knowledge within institutions of any given society—and all the intertwining economic and political entities that shape the ways in which that subject exists in our world. Knowledge is not a commodity, but rather the stuff of vibrant life. If and only if, we are to live our lives as citizens of the planet, searching for better ways of living, then we will have to gain knowledge by always thinking outside the box.