My Education Reform Wishlist: #2 – interdisciplinary media studies in secondary school.
This is the second in a series that I started for reasons that I explained here.
When you’re in college, you have a huge number of choices in what to study. You can study traditional things like math or history or biology or you can study things that designate themselves clearly as “useless hippie liberal arts programs” by the addition of the word “Studies” at the end of them, like Victorian Studies and Farm Studies and Star Trek Studies. Most of these programs are interdisciplinary, meaning that they are cobbled together by integrating history and English, or sociology and economics, or psychology and film. I’ve always been intrigued by these programs, especially the media ones, which seem like a nice separation from the reality of more traditional majors and minors in some ways – I mean, sitting in a college lecture hall learning about the psychology of Star Trek? Does anyone not want to do that at some point? – but I’ve never felt that I have time to explore them on even a one class basis and I certainly can’t justify majoring or minoring in any of them. They’re interesting, but they’re not “serious” and they don’t connect even vaguely to “jobs” or “real world knowledge.”
It is for this reason that I advocate moving these programs. Instead of trying to engage students in scholarly discussions through media or interdisciplinary studies in universities, where students are supposedly already engaged in their schoolwork, public secondary schools would do well to integrate media studies programs into their curricula (I don’t think that’s the right plural, but there it is), especially in the humanities. Students in American high schools are supposedly apathetic and disinterested. They might improve if teachers were to discuss character arcs in “Gossip Girl” at the same time as those in Jane Austen’s “Emma” Though this might seem like an elaborate method of dumbing down school, when discussed appropriately, modern media can facilitate the same rigorously academic discussions (and assignments, I suppose) as traditional subjects of study. In fact, media studies could open the door to more inter-disciplinary analysis and critical thinking in secondary school.
Media studies tend to emphasize de-trivialization, which is a word I just made up describing the phenomena that follows when students who are asked to think about things they once thought of as trivial in a non-trivial way find themselves thinking outside the box and performing critical analysis at a high level. Essentially, media studies trick people into thinking. Some modern media forms do this more effectively than others. ”90210″ does not have a vast number of metaphors or narrative artistry and study might have to end at a discussion of character development arcs and social norms. However, I often imagine writing lengthy and imaginative papers on the parallels between the Gothic movement in American literature and “Buffy: the Vampire Slayer,” which could become a very complicated discussion if I were allowed to go on for any amount of time. If teachers are even one/eighth as geeky as I am, I assert that they could definitely manage a decent discussion of modern media, whether within the context of English, history, psychology, philosophy, or political science.
That context is, of course, important. When media studies are integrated into “regular” subjects, they function at a higher level than they do by themselves. The real academic discussions are going to become sidelined if a unit is entirely based upon Star Wars. But, in moderation, secondary education programs could benefit from putting modern media into an academic light. As I said earlier, media studies encourage inter-disciplinary thinking. You know what else does? Interdisciplinary programs! While media studies in secondary school are a special interest of mine, holistically, I think that interdisciplinary learning is important too. Understanding of a subject is doubly increased when the extra dimension of another subject is put beside it.
If you are learning about Thomas Jefferson’s political theories in your American Government class (seniors in high school take such a class in Virginia), you won’t fully understand where the dude was coming from unless you have some background. You want to know what the social conditions of the era were, who and what influenced his ideas, and the influence that his ideas had. You might want to know what he was reading at the time and what his writings looked like. You might want to examine the factors in his life that inspired him and check out what “kind” of a person he was. Academic understanding is improved when teachers make a point of the relationships that subjects or ideas have with each other. In media studies, those connections are naturally drawn. In some other humanities subjects, like English and history, those connections are pretty inherent too.
However, I feel that I have to at least touch upon math and the sciences, which I have neglected. There is a lot of dispute right now about the way that math and science are taught, and though I don’t at all feel qualified to go into a discussion of how math and science should be taught, I do feel that the interdisciplinary approach could be beneficial to students in these subjects too. Math and science are easy to combine at a secondary school level in either chemistry or physics; math and art or music make good combinations; science and history can be combined. Media studies might be more a distraction in anything else in the sciences, but used sparingly, modern media could still work as a tool to engage students: watching science-fiction and analyzing the inaccuracies or the scientific principles behind things like Doctor Who’s Tardis would inspire inquiry and application of knowledge.
Integrating radically interdisciplinary programs, especially media studies, into public schools would be a gamble. Students might not enjoy the media franchises that are chosen, emphasis on important concepts and subjects might be lessened, and teachers might dread taking a day to talk about “Star Wars” instead of Jules Verne (I don’t know, I honestly kind of doubt it). But in conclusion, I ask you to imagine one thing. A classroom of eighth grade girls asked to talk about the gender relationships in “Twilight.”
