My daughter Frida is a freshman in high school. In the first half of this semester, she took an elective class which taught them how to write, film and edit a short movie. For the second half of the semester, her class is learning about Photoshop and how to manipulate images. I imagine the next semester will encompass some other sort of media based elective. For tenth-graders, they have another elective class that studies different film genres: they watch movies, learn about their history and write papers about them. What I want to know is why are we learning about "electives"? Is the purpose for us to simply incorporate some of this into our lessons as English teachers? I find that Buckingham's text could easily be called "Teaching Popular Culture," because that is what he talks about the majority of the time.
Something that disturbs me is how his studies are based in England, which is a pretty different culture than ours. Buckingham talks about the school system there- with their strengths and weaknesses regarding media education- but their system is way different than ours. He also refers to their political parties, which are different from ours as well. Why couldn't we study an author who is familiar with our own culture? I see how I could be opposed in this viewpoint, after all, our class is called "Multigenre Literacy in a Global Context." But I feel that this portion of the class should focus on us as Americans (which I know is anything but homogeneous), looking at the whole world which we can access in a media context, and analyzing it from that perspective.
When I read that last sentence, I think it sounds very wrong.
Maybe I am wrong.
But if we are going to view the world in a global context, a book written by an Englishman isn't going to open up that perspective. We should be studying a compilation of essays by writers of different cultures if that is the case.
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