Burn, AN; (2017) Revisiting the Popular Arts: Media Education, Cultural Values and Cultural Production. In: de Abreu, B and Mihailidis, P and Lee, A and Melki, J and McDougall, J, (eds.) International Handbook of Media Literacy Education. Routledge

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Abstract

Debates about media literacy raise many questions, in particular about the nature of critical reading of media texts, and about the nature and functions of the production of media texts by young people. A question which rarely rises to the surface, however, is the question of cultural value. The championship of popular culture in media education is almost taken for granted, and can be seen in the context of the academic tradition of Cultural Studies. This chapter argues that media education should indeed promote the serious study of popular culture, taking for granted its equity with elite culture in terms of cultural value. More controversially, it argues that media educators should promote critical investigation of the ‘selective tradition’: the historical process in which judgments of cultural value are formed. A particularly productive approach to this could be to explore how the most elevated of canonical texts (for example Shakespeare) can be transformed in popular media. Finally, the chapter encourages ‘media archaeologies’, in which students investigate earlier cultural moments, retrieving artefacts valued at the time, and transforming them through production practices.

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