Media and Bildung

Norm FriesenOulu, May 26, 2009nfriesen@tru.caw

Thompson Rivers University Open Learning

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• www.phandpr.org• Co-editors: Norm Friesen & Tone Saevi

Overview

• Rousseau’s 3 kinds of Education• Mollenhauer and presentation• Media and presentation, socialization,

education of things• School and Media: “media literacy movement”• McLuhan and media: Figure and Ground• “unlearning” as a media strategy

Presuppositions: Rousseau on Education

• Education comes to us from 1) nature, 2) from men, or 3) from things. 1. The inner growth of our organs and

faculties is the education of nature, 2. the use we learn to make of this

growth is the education of men, 3. and what we gain by our experience

of our surroundings is the education of things.

man

nature

things

Rousseau, continued

• Now of these three factors in education, the education of nature is wholly beyond our control; that of things is only partly in our power; the education of men is the only one of which we are truly the master. And even here our power is largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and action of all those who surround a child?

Rousseau: 3 Kinds of Education

• Thus we are each taught by three masters. The pupil in whom their diverse lessons conflict is poorly raised and will never be in harmony with himself; he in whom they all agree on the same points and tend towards the same ends goes straight to his goal and lives consistently. The latter is well raised.

Mollenhauer on Presentation

• Adults are simply "presenting" to children their grown-up "behavioural image" unsystematically & unreflectively.

• this continues today through the way in which we habitually "present" ourselves in our most frequent but unintended and unreflected activities

• This is magnified and distorted in significant ways through media

Media as Socialization

• Media socialize in differentways over time

• Meidation is something thatmakes us human, a part of humansociety

How is Socialization Occuring through these Media?

Media as Socialization: Vygotsky

• The sign represents the paradigmatic tool: “The use of signs leads humans to a specific structure of behavior that breaks away from biological development and creates new forms of a culturally-based psychological process” (p. 40).

• Its “mediating” function is most important• “the central fact about our psychology is the fact of

mediation” • Media are the means by which children develop or are

socialized.

Media, schooling and socialization

• Mollenhauer: the groundrules through which reality is constructed for children are not simply transformed; instead, a whole new system of rules emerges. The culture is no longer presented to the child in its entirety, but only in part: namely, via [a kind of] pedagogical rehearsal or practise, as it would be for someone from a foreign land. This makes certain institutions necessary [such as] schools… orphanages… [and] kindergartens…. (p. 50)

School as Institution for Print

• “The mastery of the alphabet and then mastery of all the skills and knowledge that were arranged to follow constituted not merely a curriculum but a definition of child development. By creating a concept of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills, adults invented the structure of child development… And since the school curriculum the school curriculum was entirely designed to accommodate the demands of literacy”

• Education of Man (human education) as a form based on print media

McLuhan on School & Media

The youngster today, stepping out of his…TV environment, goes to school and enters a world where the information is scarce but is ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, schedules. He is utterly bewildered because he comes out of this intricate and complex integral world of electric information and goes into this nineteenth-century world of classified information that still characterizes the educational establishment… The young today are baffled because of this extraordinary gap between the two worlds. (McLuhan 1995, p. 222)

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, 200

7

Current Approaches to Media for Pedagogy

• “media literacy”: the terminology and the critical arsenal of a previous era of mediality (“literacy”) is directed against what is interpreted as a forces in need of active and vigorous critique and deconstruction (“media”).

• Kellner & Share: contemporary “’media literacy’ movement” which “attempts to teach students to read, analyze, and decode media texts, in a fashion parallel to the advancement of print literacy” (“Media Literacy in the US”)

Current Approaches to Media for Pedagogy

• Giroux: the messages and codes that are “produced by media” form a “public pedagogy” that operates in the service of “dominant elites and corporate ruling interests.”

• schooling is fighting the on the side of literacy, using the critical resources of print as a beachhead in a field otherwise dominated by corporatized electronic or digital mass media.

Balance; teaching complimentary things

• Make education of man consonant with this new education of things

• Engage in a kind of education of things

• This is not an education either in thesense of “propelling” learning or as aformal “pedagogy” of man

man

nature

things

Need a way of understanding Media and Bildung

• not an explicit pedagogical critique• counter the powerful socializing force of

broadcast media through of a kind of “counter-socialization.”

• not explicitly political and conceptual• aesthetic and experiential in nature. • a kind of “training of the senses” to help

students get a “feel” for the more general “structure and properties of situations.”

McLuhan on Media Education

• Let us begin by wondering just what you are doing sitting there at your desk. Here are some questions for you to explore. We suggest that you divide yourselves into research teams of not more than four people, and when you have worked out answers to the questions, present your findings to the other teams for general discussion. The questions and experiments you will find in this book are all concerned with important, relatively unexplored areas of our social environment. The research you choose to do will be important and original. (1)

• The book begins by training students awareness of figure and ground, attempting to focus students’ awareness on their pivotal interrelationship: “The interplay between figure and ground is 'where the action is'. This interplay requires an interval or a gap, like the space between the wheel and the axle.”

Figure & Ground in McLuhan

• focus almost exclusively on cultural, perceptual and intellectual manifestations of figure and ground.

• Can explain how a communications technology, the medium or figure, necessarily operates through its context, or ground.

• examine figure (medium) and ground (context) together

• Neither is completely intelligible without the other

Figure & Ground

• There is no logical connection between figure and ground, but there is always a relationship, since ground always provides the terms on which a figure is experienced. In that relationship, meaning (the effect on you) is generated. …figure and ground are not categories: they are tools that will help you to discover the structure and properties of situations. (21, 31)

Questions for Students

• “As students in a school, do you think you have come to work?” “Or, has schoolwork become a part of the work of the community?” Or focusing specifically on the mediality of the classroom: “How do classrooms affect your learning experience?”

An Experiment

• try holding a class in another room. For example, go to the teachers’ lounge where you can arrange yourselves in a circle in comfortable chairs. Hold a regular class. Towards the end of the class period, take a few minutes to talk about the differences between your experience in the lounge and your experience in a regular classroom.

Simultaneous Perception of Figure & Ground

• This simultaneous perception is, at first, easier for some people than for others, because it requires a certain amount of 'un-learning'… When you see all the figures at once, you are experiencing the sense of configuration; this is the sense that an artist brings to bear on painting, a satirist on situations...

“ Begin your investigation of any medium by making a list of all its forms. Then choose one item from your list and experiment with it to get a deeper understanding of its characteristics. A study of the newspaper, for example, should include a number of scissors-and-paste experiments to determine how flexible a form the newspaper is, which of its elements are essential and which can be left out, and what different effects it can be made to have on its readers. [Using similar techniques] you can… in some sense, manipulate any medium to vary the effects it produces. (32).

How is this different than media literacy / pedagogy?

• solutions not really scholastic or pedagogical are do not understanding newer media as presenting a kind of “coporatist” “public pedagogy” to be opposed via critical classroom pedagogy.

• address these mediatic forms at the level at which they natively operate: implicitly, as parts of the hidden environment, and as means or mechanisms of development and socialization.

“Unlearning”

• “counter-socialization,” its “training of the senses” to give students tools that will help them get a “feel” for the more general “structure and properties of situations.”

• works a level immanent to the opposition/ interplay of figure and ground

• has as its goal a kind of “unlearning” in order to achieve moments of “simultaneous perception.”

Balance; teaching complimentary things

• Make education of man consonant with this new education of things

• Engage in a kind of education of things

• This is not an education either in thesense of “propelling” learning or aconventional “pedagogy” of man

man

nature

things

Conclusion?

• Arguably, such an approach is both more feasible and more urgent in today’s context, with its greater manipulability of mediatic elements, and its significantly higher degrees of media use and penetration.