J.C. Couture
Alberta Teachers Association
The article examines strategies students and teachers can use when viewing (and countering) the universal and objective images popular culture diffuses. Focussing on teaching environmental/ecological issues in a Grade 11 social studies classroom and using the ideas and techniques developed by media theorists Douglas Kellner, Jonathan Fiske and Henry Jenkins, the author suggests that students must engage texts by "writing themselves in" to the conversation these texts initiate. Through encouraging active engagement with popular culture, students develop a critical media literacy that encourages social awareness and democratic self-expression
Increasingly social studies teachers are being encouraged to incorporate media literacy into the classroom. In specific curricular terms this involves developing strategies for students to see behind the camera by developing a critical eye that understands how reality is constructed through codes of production that circulate particular ideologies and values. Canada has had a strong academic tradition of media critique from universities such as McGill and York that has been slow to move into the public schools (Straw, 1993). Through magazines such as Border/Lines, Adbusters and Fuse, media literacy has been further advanced. More recently, the Media Awareness Network <http://www.media-awareness.ca/> has provided teachers with a powerfully rich array of strategies for incorporating media literacy into their teaching.
Central to the emerging work on media literacy are two key questions: What is a text? and How can a text be engaged to render new meanings and possibilities? Kellner (1995), a leading media theorist, argues that educators need to create a new generation of students who are prepared to read and re-work everyday texts (i.e. print, music, video) in order to repopulate them with alternative meanings that promote critical thought and social justice. As Kellner suggests, it is a mistake to " turn our backs on the popular" (1995, 340). Yet, in the saturated media environments we live in, what are appropriate texts for teachers to draw on that promote an understanding of global issues? Employing strategies from the work of Henry Jenkins' Textual Poaching (1992) and Adbuster magazine, I will describe activities that were used to engage a group of Grade 11 students in global issues in terms of their personal emotional commitments and identifications.
Like many Alberta social studies teachers, I have explored environmental issues and the deforestation of the tropical rainforests for a number of years. A central difficulty in this work is obtaining learning resources that motivate students to engage environmentalism and ecology. Often the videos available to teachers are so careful to infuse 'teacherly' values of balance and objectivity that they do not connect with students' lives. Like many teachers, I have come to realize that the traditional genre of the educational video produced for students is often an excuse for video producers to sanitize what students watch to the point that they increasingly resent being infantalized. As one student aptly put it, "the videos we watch in school are made to be watched in school - nowhere else would you be caught dead watching this stuff." The student's comment underscores the realization by media theorists that the development of critical media literacy will necessitate a rethinking of the traditional binary that splits the school text and from the everyday or out-of-school texts students are engaged with (Alverman & Hagood 2000).
The breakdown of the binaries between in-school and out-of-school literacies is symptomatic of the postmodern condition. For example, in the media rich world we live in, it is increasingly difficult to maintain a distinction between the serious academic critique we might see in a high school social studies class and the incisive social criticism leveled in an episode of South Park. As Ellsworth (1997) reminds educators, the examination of cultural texts called for by advocates of media literacy will inevitably open problematic spaces that will challenge teachers to question conventional assumptions about what constitutes an acceptable text. I recall an incident one semester when our class was preparing a montage of images that objectified women. A mother called me, wondering why her daughter was cutting pictures out of her Victoria's Secret catalogues. When I explained that the class was working on issues of body image the mother was rather pleased yet half-joked, "Hope my husband doesn't hear about this - I think he will miss having these in the house." As Ellsworth (1997, 35) suggests, "our pleasures...stubbornly refuse any rigid dichotomies between simple, pure acts of highly receptive, complicit reproduction of the positions offered us on hand, and critical resistance to or refusal of those positions on the other." For teachers, developing critical media literacy will open up many difficult questions about what constitutes an acceptable text.
In classrooms, documentary films do have a real value, but they do not offer an opportunity to engage students in visceral and immediate ways that appeal to their values and affective investments (Grossberg 1992). For this reason, a common practice in my work with students is to engage them in the analysis of a genre in popular media that they find very appealing: the music video. The music video brings into the classroom the very same challenges Ellsworth (1997) raises regarding popular pleasures and the opportunities that we need to take up in speaking back to these media forms.
Supermodels in the Rainforest (Astral Videos 1994) is a commercially available video that is an ironic, over-the-top, production that brings the contradictions of popular culture to the classroom. Marketed as a "celebration of music, beauty, and life" the video is a one-hour-long hybrid that melds the genres of the film documentary and the music video. Initially, all that one needs to know about Supermodels is stated in the title: it depicts supermodels posing in rainforest settings against the background of popular music injected with information about the destruction of the rainforest. In my reading of the video the ironies are profound: while criticizing the predatory capitalism of logging companies it objectifies women and positions them as little more than objects of the male gaze. In a postmodern temperament, one could argue that teachers need to consider using problematic texts like Supermodels in order to provide students with the opportunity to examine their own complicity surrounding global issues such as environment and social justice.
Within the global environment we now live in, Fiske (1996, 2) reminds us that there can no longer be construed something framed as a singular media event that is interpreted universally. Fiske has little patience for the debate about what constitutes the true or real event. It is through the representation and mediation of media events that communities of understanding are developed by the language in social use employed by diverse groups. Drawing on the different ways that whites and blacks interpreted the Rodney King video represents a powerful example of Fiske's point. An everyday text such as a video clip on the evening news is not a cultural artifact that viewers engage in a universally coherent way. Fiske argues that texts need to be thought of in terms of how they activate audiences. Texts are not fixed objects of viewing but are points of departure that allow for multiple interpretations.
The threat to the rainforest is certainly a multi-faceted media event that had become a cause celebre. A Seattle based chain of specialty-coffee shops, Starbucks, recently sponsored a coffee symposium at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science that examined the implications of increased coffee exports on Latin America's ecology (Haysom 1997, A1). With half of the arable land in Latin America now devoted to coffee production, pressure to open up marginal lands for agriculture is growing. Yet until the structural inequities in world trade are dealt with, it is unlikely that Latin American countries can withstand the pressures on their land resources. When countries such as Costa Rica attempt to create nature preserves, these too are undermined by the insatiability of foreign tourists who travel to the parks to admire their pristine beauty. Consider Costa Rica's Manuel Antonio Park, a 1,700 acre reserve that was established in the mid 1980s (Rohter 1997, E7). Now with over 600 visitors a day, the ecology of the park is threatened. On the perimeter of the park there are over 100 hotels and bed and breakfast establishments. A marine reserve adjoining the park now attracts sport fishers who pay $800 a day to catch a tuna. Casinos and luxury hotels are now in the works. The entire country is seen as a leader in environmental protection. In many ways, Cost Rica has become a media event-theme park that draws 800,000 visitors a year who contributed $700 million to the Costa Rican economy last year. Tourism is now the country's main source of income. Yet searching for that pristine promise of untouched wilderness has rendered the 27 other parks a desired destination for increasing numbers of well-intentioned people who, by their very presence, destroy the future they want to preserve. The ecology of the park is challenged to the extent that tourists are being attacked by monkeys throwing rotten fruit from the protection of the forest canopy.
Within the image of the monkeys fighting back there is ironic justice. When I related this story to my students I was taken aback by their reaction, many of them found it quite hilarious. One student raised his fist and said, "good for them" in a gesture of solidarity. Another suggested they be called "guerrilla monkeys" to the delight of several other students. "We should let them loose in this place (referring to school) and bring something different in around here" suggested another student. As I listened to these comments I was intrigued by the enthusiasm and energy they seemed to be investing in this story of monkey resistance. Fiske (1996) reminds us that in the global economy "media events are sites of maximum visibility and maximum turbulence" where "clarity is difficult if not impossible" (p. 7).
Textual Poaching: A Carnival of Style
Amidst the misogyny of the Supermodels video and the turbulence of its popular images, there was a space for a tactical response by students. Students in my class were familiar with the notions of spoof ads and ad wars promoted by the Adbusters organization based in Vancouver and featured in the magazine of the same name. "Culture jamming," by developing resistant recodings and revisions of media texts, has been a strategy I have used with students to support position papers and debates on a variety of public policy issues.
Jenkins' (1992, 40) work on textual poaching offers teachers the opportunity to explore how the media draws on our emotional investments and "weave these strategies back into our everyday lives." In a sense, globalization sees the media celebrating a carnival of style. I offered students the opportunity to discus how the video played on popular consumer images of the fashion industry and other sites such as celebrity status. Students were given the opportunity to critique or support the video by offering a response to it by drawing on magazines, television or other media sources.
The steps that I suggested for students were adapted from Jenkins' strategies of scribbling in the margins where students write themselves into the text through recontextualizations, refocalizations, cross-overs and seven other textual reworkings (162-177). Recontextualization involves writing in missing scenes or vignettes to extend the possibility of the action or characters carrying on outside of the offered text. One example was a student who described a story of one of the supermodels travelling to our community to "save our stinky sad little town from the pulp mill." Refocalizations included shifting the emphasis of the text away from the main characters (the supermodels) to the peasants who were only marginally featured in the video. Two students wrote letters to friends in a sort of resistant ventriloquism about the "visit of the stupor-models [pun intended] to our village." Some of these pieces were quite imaginative. One student wrote:
So after two days here the models were so sick of being eaten by the bugs that they were going crazy. Mind you they never stayed out of their trailers very long. The best part was them giving us money to stand in photographs with them, to laugh and sing when the camera was filming.
Cross-overs was the most commonly used strategy by students. Loosely defined, cross-overs involve locating the characters in another story or context. Initially I thought the students would find this the most difficult, but soon it became apparent that this strategy was the most enjoyable for many. By putting the supermodels into circulation in other texts, primarily advertisements, students found ways to locate the underlying commercialization of the video. As one student remarked, "the real message of the video is that beauty sells, so why not make this really obvious? Saving the earth is only a side-show here (in the video)."
Several female students played with the obvious misogyny of the video. One student produced a collage of overweight men cutting down trees with the title "Fat guys in the fir forest." An obvious attack on logging practices in Alberta, her poster provoked a real debate in the class. "This makes fun of people who work hard to make a living," complained one student. The discussion that followed in class raised important questions. What damage does the image of fat guys do? What are different ways the image is viewed by various audiences and different communities? How do images (like ideal body types) act in powerful ways to limit the ways we see the world?
Another student had a tear in her eyes when she explained her poster to the class. A billboard near our community that advertised for Caterpillar Tractors with the slogan "There are no easy answers, only intelligent solutions" especially struck her. She used that advertisement in her depiction of a bulldozer grinding down people's huts with, ironically, the same slogan. Active in the school's recycling program and the local SPCA chapter, she worked many hours on her poster that included sophisticated clip art and digitized photography. "When I saw the image of the peasants trying to stop the bulldozer in the video, I knew right then what I was going to do for a poster."
What are appropriate strategies and textual resources in teaching global issues? As a teacher I prefer to blend theory and practice, believing the two cannot be separated. Supermodels in the Rainforest brought strategies informed by media theorists such as Jenkins, Kellner and Grossberg to the level of the classroom (or should I say 'the jungle'?). Doug Kellner (1995, 336) argues that it is through the engaged critique of the media culture we live in that our students will be able to "promote democratic self-expression and social change." Engaging popular culture through videos such as Supermodels provides the tools to repopulate an extremely problematic text with new and rich meanings. This activity is one example of the work social studies teachers are undertaking. From music videos and hit television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and South Park, social studies teachers can draw on the complex ways that popular media activates students both as audiences and as citizens. Then there is the richness of popular movies. When sublime films such as American Beauty win the Academy Award for Best Picture, perhaps the new millenium is truly upon us as media educators. Of course the use of such media texts raises important challenges for teachers concerning community standards and classroom censorship. As Alverman and Hagood (2000) suggest, we are on the cusp of a breakthrough in media literacy in our schools. Yet, as I have already underscored, the need to address questions of what is and is not an acceptable school text will be only one of many questions ahead for teachers.
Alverman, D.E. & Hagood, M. 2000. "Critical Media Literacy: Research, Theory, and Practice in 'New Times'". The Journal of Educational Research. 93:3, January/February, 193-205.
Ellsworth, E. 1997. Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address. New York: Teachers College Press.
Fiske, J. 1996. Media Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grossberg, L. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place! New York: Routledge.
Haysom, Ian. "Coffee Craze Isn't For The Bords." The Edmonton Journal. February 17, A1.
Jenkins, H. 1992. Textual Poaching. London: Routledge.
Kellner, D. 1995. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. New York: Routledge.
Rohter, Larry. "TheSpoils of Eco-Tourism." The Edmonton Journal. January 5. E7.
Straw, W. 1993. "Shifting Boundaries, Lines of Dissent." In Relocating Cultural Studies: Developments in Theory and Research, ed. V. Blundell et al, NewYork: Routledge.