Mediated Images of Teaching and Learning

Scott SullivanNational Louis University

AMLA ConferenceJuly 1st, 2003

Program Background

• Accelerated Master’s of Arts in Teaching Program, primarily for older, working adults who are changing careers.

• Media literacy concepts taught in an integrated course that deals with methods, history, and philosophy of education.

Examining Inherent and Unacknowledged Teacher

BiasExamine this picture, what do you see? Would this appear to be a successful classroom, or a dysfunctional one? What do you base your decision on? While this is a limited view on a classroom, aren’t most evaluative visits limited, too? What are the keys an evaluator might be looking for?

Where do we learn about students before we enter the

classroom?Discipline is on the mind

of every pre-service teacher; they believe that schools, especially city schools, are violent places. Where do these ideas come from?

How do the media influence our understanding of students and our expectations for their success?

What expectations do we have for students?

Many of the students feel that students today are much worse than they were when they were in school.

They also don’t feel prepared to understand students who are different than them.

Teachers enter the classroom with notions of what successful learning will look like, who will be successful, and why those students will gain that success. What they often fail to examine is where those preconceived notions, those stereotypes, come from.

Often they will also come to school with preconceived and unexamined notions, again, of who will NOT be successful or who will be a problem in the classroom.

The Role of Media in Teacher’s Perceptions of

Themselves

• Clandinin and Connelly, in Shaping a Professional Identity: Stories of Educational Practice (2000) point out that all experiences had by the preservice teacher influences the teacher’s perception of his or her professional self.

• Media is a vast part of our understanding, before entering the classroom as a teacher, what the world of education is going to be like.

Teachers in the Media

Teachers are plugged into a narrow range of roles: they are outsiders, someone brought in to rescue kids who, for some reason, cannot rescue themselves.

What does it mean to be a

“good” teacher?• Devoted to your

students• Progressive,

young, usually (but not always) a male

• Willing to buck the old outdated system to set your students free

They’re saviors, descending down to a school to wrest free the worthy few, while leaving the rest of the “bad” kids to fend for themselves. “Media teaches us that

learning can only take place when discipline has been established, and teaching proceeds in stages, first, get order; then, deliver the curriculum.”-Bill Ayers, “TeacherAin’t Nuthin’ but a Hero”

Good Teachers are Seen to Be….

Outsiders, trying to buck the system…Devoted to their students at the cost of all else in their lives…

Or, hero figures…

Doing a job no one else could, or should, hope to do.

Pre-service Teachers and Media Literacy

After working on and discussing how the media can influence the way we view ourselves as teachers and our expectations of our students, we systematically explore the creation of teacher related forms of media.

The goal, then is to begin a process of discovery for the basic elements of media literacy, how to apply them to our situation, and begin to extrapolate that to pedagogy.

1. All media are constructions… 2. Audiences negotiatemeaning

3. Media contain ideology 4. Mass media is motivated by profit

5. Media all contain codes and conventions

So when it’s all said and done…

Media literacy pedagogy becomes another tool in the pre-service teaching tool kit…

It becomes a criteria for portfolio assessment at the end of the course….

And becomes a focus of lesson planning and creation, text evaluation, and resource development.

Media literacy is reinforced with readings, films, and online research.

Resources for Preservice Media Literacy and Teacher

Perceptions• Images of Schoolteachers in America, edited

by Pamela Bolotin Joseph and Gail E. Burnaford, (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2001)

• The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers and Teaching in Movies by Mary M. Dalton. (Peter Lang, 1999)

• “Teacher Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hero” by Bill Ayers. City Kids, City Teachers (New Press, 1996)