QUALITATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA EDUCATION

QUALITATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON MEDIA EDUCATION

Three features of much qualitative research are particularly relevant for its practical applications. First, qualitative studies normally attempt to interpret the concrete analysis with constant reference to some comprehensive theoretical framework. This has been a major aim of the cultural studies tradition (for a statement of this tradition, see Williams, 1977) from which the work reported below grows. One assumption here is that the center of inquiry lies not in the media themselves, their texts or audiences, but in the social and cultural practices in which the media are embedded, and which serve to orient mass communication. For example, media representations of “race,” ethnicity, and minorities must be linked to broader issues of migration, racism, and social policy. Similarly, cultural studies address both the dominant and the emerging forms of culture that are articulated in media, as well as the historical and policy changes affecting media over time. The center of media education also may lie outside the mass media.

Second, qualitative research takes an interpretive approach to social and cultural practices, studying the everyday, lived realities of people. Cultural studies specifically draw on both the humanities and the social sciences, because the field is concerned both with the meaning and the power respectively of media and their users. It thus may engage

222 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

the reality of students who are simultaneously media users and social agents.

Third, and perhaps most important, much qualitative research is committed to making explicit its own political foundations and implications, what Habermas (1971) calls the knowledge-interests of different forms of scientific inquiry. This does not imply that all qualitative research is by definition “critical.” Who is researching what on behalf of whom and why, may suggest more salient criteria. Nor is it implied that qualitative research should necessarily move in the specific direction of action research (see the discussion and references in Chapter 2, this volume). However, qualitative methodologies may have a specific explanatory value and utility in the context of education. The following passage may suggest the predicament that qualitative researchers and students of media education share:

What we are reaching for is a mode of work which will acknowledge a complex situation that can be simply stated: cultural studies is a reflection of the fact that the culture we study is our own and, because of that, we are responsible for making it as well as analyzing it.

(Cook, 1986:136)

A simple statement of a complex situation in media education is to say that it asks children to talk, for example, about what they see in a photograph; how it comes to appear in the media; what differences might arise in other photos of the same subject; how captions suggest

a variety of meanings; and why some people might enjoy the picture or find it offensive. Such critical discussion can be, first, collaborative, and, second, it can suggest alternative ways of representing people and ideas (for concrete examples, see Development Education Centre, 1989, and Building Sights, 1989). Interviewing offers special possibilities for developing reflexive and collaborative activities in media education.