Beyond Media Literacy: Communicative Ecosystems as a potentially useful metaphor for planning, implementing and researching media and

education.

Beth Titchiner

Foundatio Theoretical approach to doctoral research n: Latin American education and communication theory Educomunicao (Educommunication)

Highlight elements of framework which may be Purpose: complementary to concept of Media Literacy

Exploring: How does Educommunication differ from Media Literacy? What is the metaphor of communicative ecosystems? What can these concepts offer planners and researchers?

Examples: Educommunication project in So Paulo, Brazil My own approach to researching this project

1. How adequate is the concept of Media Literacy for planning and research?

Concept of traditional print literacy: Media literacy is the ability to read and write audiovisual information rather than text. [It] is the ability to use a range of media and be able to understand the information received (Office for Standards in Communication, 2010) Critical literacy: to be media literate [] means, for example, being able to exercise critical understanding over the choices of products, services, information and entertainment content available and to be able to respond, comment or complain (Media Literacy Task Force, 2009)

Skills and competencies needed to operate in a knowledge-based society:

European Model for Media Literacy: Participation in public sphere, freedom of expression, democracy, personal autonomy, creative and production skills (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, 2007:8) giving people the choice to communicate, create and participate fully in today's fast-moving world [...] will help create a society in which everyone is enfranchised - whatever their economic, social and ethnic background - and in which the UK's creative and knowledge economies are able to draw upon the widest possible bank of creators and producers (Media Literacy Task Force, 2009)

Focus too heavily on developing and measuring individual skills, competencies and communicative practices in isolation from the environments within which they occur?

Luiz Ramiro Beltran: If a researcher, in attempting to study the social behaviour of ants, were to negate the inuence that the environment exerted on them, he would be bitterly criticised by his colleagues for this obvious blindness, for the crass articiality of his lens. Nevertheless, when a researcher studies the conduct of human communication with an almost total disregard for the decisive inuence of the organising factors of society, few of his colleagues condemn him. Is this form of carrying out research realistic, logical and scientic? (Beltran, 1985: 3, my translation).

Should we be questioning the impact of practices on environments and vice-versa?

2. Educommunication and the metaphor of Communicative Ecosystems

Focus: articulating the relations [and tensions] between previously autonomous camps of education and communication (Lauriti, 2009) and on the educommunicative environment as a whole.

Management of communication in educational spaces (Horta, 2005; Costa, 2009)

Roots of Educommunication Paolo Freire, Antonio Pasquali, Jorge Huergo, Mario Kaplun, Jesus Martin-Barbero, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Ismar de Oliveira Soares.

Transmission-reception (banking) model Promotion of violence by reserving the condition of subject for some and the condition of object for others, attributing distinct identities to pedagogical subjects and valuing certain types of knowledge and expression over others. Symbolic and epistemic, institutionally prescribed, socially legitimated

How can we talk of a media education which places increasing emphasis on promoting young people as active participants, communicators and citizens in democratic societies, when many of our schools still function according to a 19th century model which allows relatively little space for student voice and active democratic participation?

Focus on: communicative processes inherent in education rather than Education purely as a tool for teaching about communication

The metaphor of Communicative Ecosystems In the relation between Education and Communication, the latter is almost always reduced to its purely instrumental dimension. That which is precisely important to consider is left on the sidelines; that is, the insertion of education in the complex processes of communication of todays society, or in other words, to consider the communicative ecosystem which constitutes the diffuse and decentralised educational surroundings in which we are immersed. A diffuse surrounding, because it is composed of a mix of languages and knowledges which circulate through diverse media devices, but which are also dense and intrinsically interconnected; and decentralised by its relation with the two centres: school and book which for various centuries have organised the educational system (Martin-Barbero, 1998:215, my translation)

New technology for old pedagogies? Old pedagogies for new technologies? Or an interrogation of education:

What does knowing and learning mean in the time of information economies and communicational imaginaries? What epistemological and institutional changes are being demanded by the new methods of cognitive production and appropriation? What do our schools know about the deep modifications in the perception of space and time experienced by adolescents?

(Martin-Barbero, 1998:5-6)

3. Planning: an example Programa Nas Ondas do Rdio USP-SME Partnership Phase 1 (2001-2004) Educom.rdio 455 Municipal state schools Workshops in production skills Discussion forums Allocation of SW Radio equipment Aim: Democratisation of school env.

Phase 2 (2005- onwards) Lei Educom

Objectives: Democratically managed use of radio and other communications resources in a way which favours the expression of all members of P school community Introducing technologies not as didactic instruments or objects of analysis, but as means for expression and production of culture

Beyond curriculum design: Assessing characteristics of communicative ecosystem of school Assessing role of media education activities within that ecosystem

Recognising and considering: Institutional cultures, socio-pedagogical subjectivities, roles and identities Place of school within local, national and global ecosystems Relationships and tensions between inside and outside the institution Porous boundaries, role of project in breaching or reinforcing boundaries

4. Researching: an example Programa Nas Ondas do Rdio Changed the school Changed teacher-student relations Contradictions and conditions of School environment deep crises Little permanency

Enquiry: Shift away from: measuring skills and competencies, media effects, audience Research, didactic (instrumentalist) potentials of technology, success or failure

Towards: exploring articulation of relationships and tensions between educational and communicational practices Communicational dynamics of school space Role of media education in challenging or reproducing relationships Implications on personal and social levels Identity, roles, power relations, epistemologies, institutional culture......

Conclusion

Communicative ecosystems as an added dimension to Media Literacy? Asking: not only what role education can play in teaching about media and communications, but also what role communication plays in education?

What do our rapidly changing educommunicative practices and environments mean for the roles of teachers, students, school and the ways we educate?