Neither a Toitler Nor a Follower Be
The question is: Is questioning enough?
Recently, I read where a leader in the field of Media Literacy Education recommended the following:
“Given the current geopolitical landscape, it is imperative that media literacy organizations and scholars emphasize the non-partisan nature of the discipline. The mission of Media Literacy is inquiry—not finding support for any preestablished dogma. This is not to say that the discipline is not political. Media Literacy provides strategies for systematic examination of the media as a reflection of cultural attitudes, preoccupations, and myths. But it is important to stress that what appears through this systematic inquiry is not due to biases in the methodological lenses.”
On its face, that sounds reasonable. And I suppose it’s true, if by “dogma” you are using the dictionary definition: that is, a principle “laid down by an authority as being incontrovertibly true”.
But when I am told “The mission of Media Literacy is inquiry”, I sometimes think I hear an unspoken “…and that is all it is” appended onto it.
If that is what they meant (and maybe it isn't, but I'll continue my point), I would have to reply: No. that's not correct. Because inquiry for inquiry’s sake isn’t pedagogy, it’s a dawdle. At least that's how I was taught to teach.
Although I recently came across an even better (albeit, archaic) word for it.
Toitle = to busy one’s self in a petty manner, with unequal strength;
labouring more in idea than reality.
—C. Clough Robinson's Glossary of Mid- Yorkshire, 1876
Toitle. Isn’t that a great word?
Toitle.
But I digress. At any rate, ask yourself this: what if, at the end of the day, a student uses your particular media literacy process on their media diet of X and TikTok or what-not, and after extensive analysis arrives at the conclusion that genocide and slavery against a particular minority is perfectly fine. In that event, will you be satisfied of the footing, the robustness of your pedagogical process?
If your answer is: 'yes, the process is the process; and it’s completely detached from whatever conclusion a student might arrive at’, then the point I’ve made before still stands…if you have a process whereby there is no predictable, replicable outcome, then your process lacks validity.
And, of course, students will sense this, too. (“You’re telling me that as long as I ask questions, whatever answer I come up with is okay?”) That gets old…
They will sense: it's pointless. That's not a judgment. I mean that literally. Like the line from one of my favorite holiday movies.
Bottom-line: sometimes there are wrong answers. Yes, Right (like “good Art”) can be largely subjective—but some Wrongs are just objectively, well…wrong.
That's why civilizations develop the rule of law, which establishes (as objectively as possible) what is or isn't a crime. And, also, why they don't just allow there to be a strongman authoritarian who is above The Law. And, um…
…
…
—what, too soon?
So, I have to ask: Isn’t there a happy medium between pushing dogma on the one hand and advocating a seemingly feckless process on the other?
Brains Against The Grain
If we are to trust our students to become truly critical thinkers, we should be modeling such behavior. And that includes announcing our own biases and then demonstrating our own analysis against those. For that reason, it’s always been obvious to me (especially as a classroom instructor of children) that we shouldn't be afraid to announce the ethical values that infuse our lessons.
What about this for a process? I was a Social Studies/Comp Sci teacher, and kids love to be 'edgy', so this playbook went over pretty well:
1. Here's the curriculum (ie, textbook).
2. Here's what I think is wrong about it. <ie, James Loewen's "teaching against the curriculum">
3. Here's why <insert statement of values, here>.
4. Here's why some people disagree with me.
5. But this is why what I think it works (for you, for me, for society).
6. So that is what I'm (for purposes of this class) going to consider "correct".
7. I'm the closest thing you've got to an expert right now. So, on my test, either be clever and go with that…or aim for greatness and give me a different answer; but be prepared to defend your contradictory viewpoint (the A students usually did the latter, even when they were wrong).
I grant you: In normal times (you know, back when we all agreed that Nazis were bad, for example), we wouldn’t have to spell out how we are going to “Do No Evil” (as Google famously once false-promised) in our work/research/teaching (my Steps #3 and #5).
We didn’t have to spell it out because it was usually common sense.
But, these aren’t normal times. These are times where the new media (as opposed to the legacy media that doesn’t matter so much, anymore, so we won't mention them)—the social media, from whom students are getting their culture and information now—is largely owned and operated by expressly anti-democratic, post-constitutional, white supremacist, uncaring-for-basic-user-safety, and mysogynistic individuals.
And more and more the platforms reflect that. And, more and more, society reflects the platforms.
So, any media literacy that doesn’t expressly account for all this, and instead self-censors in the name of 'not taking sides', seems problematic to me.
The Knights Who Say…”NI!” (-hilism)
Of course, the pushback against my sort of take on this is substantial.
Some Media Literacy experts cling to a refusal to ground one’s work (one’s research, one’s curriculum, one’s field) in a set of universal moral principles as though that refusal somehow signals their evolution to a higher plane of intellectual existence. They put their reflexive tu quoque analyses out there, again and again, as though it certifies that they and their work are somehow unpolluted with bias.
—As if bias could ever truly be avoided.
No, rather, in my estimation that sort of reflex (“We have to stop putting ourselves out there as the experts. The kids should lead their own learning…I mean, under the direction of this AI Chatbot, of course…”) or ("Students shouldn't be told what the truth is, they should discover their own truth…after all, truth is subjective"), or much like the quote I shared earlier, seem to me best explained by one of two things:
Either 1) it signals that we’ve chosen an apolitical stance in the hopes that the partisans (the ones who are in power, I mean) will somehow reward us for our posture of neutrality.
The thing is: I am aware of no historical evidence that this is true.
But, even if it is, I find that sort of pre-emptive collaboration distasteful—not least of which because this is precisely what oppressors hope for (See, eg, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Lesson #1 (“Do not obey in advance.”)).
Or, perhaps 2) it reflects a darker mindscape: it means we’ve personally chosen indifference over compassion, nihilism over mutual responsibility.
Sure, we might dress it up with new-age, pseudo-philosophical, tech-positive argle-bargle labels (like “Effective Accelerationism”), but in the end: we’ve just chosen to be amoral. Maybe along with a paycheck. Full stop.
Yikes. If that is the case, as beings of love, all the other folks around us should always remain keenly aware of us nihilists within the pack who are running like that…
Why should they be on guard, you ask? Because the opposite of love isn’t hate, folks. Just ask anyone who has gone through a divorce.
No, the opposite of love is indifference.
“Excitement isn’t always good."
Anyone in the field of Media Literacy has heard the following mantra from Media Literacy Educators: “We don’t teach people what to think, we teach them how to think.”1 Which, again, sounds reasonable, but hints as though just getting students to ask questions is the entire job.
Sort of like “Guess and Check”—without that second, pesky “Check” step.
And it also bypasses the emotional aspects of learning. Media today isn’t designed to inform, it is designed to excite. Decoding information takes a back seat until we can process our own emotional reactions (or addictions) to the medium itself—we have to avoid technological determinism and control how the technologies are implemented in our own lives.
So, pair this “We only teach people how to think” approach with the most recent movement to transform all students (hell, all of everyone, for that matter) from life-long learners into mere AI prompters, who dutifully take down whatever answer the imitative AI chatbot has provided—and, well, hopefully we all can see where this is going sideways into the lovely dystopian disinformation cul de sac that Neil Postman warned us about forty years ago.
And what was true about the commercialization of network news in the 1980s is only that much more on point when talking about algorithmic social media today:
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.
—Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (pp. 107-108). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (emphasis added)
Honestly, is there a quote that better describes what just passed for presidential election coverage in the media, especially social media, these past many months? Or, for that matter, of all the media coverage of this past decade?
Anyway, as an “Inside Baseball” aside, this is why I think that Information Literacy is probably the saving grace of Media Literacy. IMO, it is first among equals of all the sub-fields, because, until and unless we return to an era of shared objective facts, none of the rest of this ends well.
Do No Evil
So, this holiday weekend let’s give thanks to all the Professional Educators out there who pour their moral fiber into their curriculae and who wear their ethics on their sleeves for all the kids to see.
Not always, but sometimes—I am talking A LOT OF THE TIME, those living examples, those teachers (and coaches), are the very best role models for our kids.
Not because they are “Great People", necessarily; but mostly because they are being Real for the kids.
Y'know…not toitling or anything.
This, btw, isn’t original. It’s a nearly one-hundred year old quote from the anthropologist, Margaret Mead (Education for Choice: Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928).