Bazalgette argues that one of the main errors made by Scottish teachers lay in their failure to comprehend that her swingeing attack on media education was not meant to apply to media studies. She did not argue, as Murphy alleges, that media studies is confused and contradictory. She "argued that media education is confused and contradictory. When I use the term 'media education', as the paper makes clear, I am referring to media education in the mandatory sector and the still unrealised goal of making it a universal entitlement. This is not the same as Media Studies, by which I mean optional specialist courses post-14, which are taken by a minority of students and where the arguments are quite different. Media Studies has successfully gained ground; media education hasn't. I think that's a problem".
The "error" of Scottish teachers in failing to grasp Bazalgette's highly idiosyncratic definition of media education is certainly understandable. It is not a definition which her paper makes clear, as she asserts (there is no reference to it in my copy). And whilst the exclusion of media studies from the term 'media education' might have some claim to be an original linguistic contribution to the field, it is not, I fear, a useful one. Words cannot simply mean what we choose. In the real world they have a currency and logic both of which collapse in Bazalgette's usage. "Media education has to be seen as an umbrella term, which includes media studies courses and indeed any other forms of teaching about the media" as Cary Bazalgette put it in 1989.
The problem for Bazalgette is that her response will look to many like an inglorious retreat from her arguments in the face of teacher criticism. In backing down, however, she has replaced an intellectually untenable argument with one which is, frankly, gibberish. Her argument now appears to be that whilst media education is confused and contradictory, media studies is not or may not be. At first sight this seems to be an absurd position, and a better example of "confused and contradictory" argument than any that media educators have ever produced. It certainly requires some elaboration, justification or even minimal explanation. Bazalgette provides none.
In fact media studies and media education share a common conceptual framework. In the words of the BFI's own Secondary Curriculum statement "the basic premises and conceptual structure of media education and media studies should be substantially the same". It is a framework which, with minor modifications, has been coherent and persuasive enough to command the allegiance and underpin the practice of media teachers across the globe. This has been a remarkable and major achievement carried out (pace Bazalgette's protestations of failure) in the short space of fifteen years and in the face of an almost universally hostile and conservative educational climate.
Bazalgette's belief that "media studies has successfully gained ground; media education hasn't" strongly suggests that media studies is not vulnerable to the charges she lays against media education. The problem for Bazalgette is that her criticisms of media education were primarily theoretical ones: "it's incoherent, it's unmanageable, it's a theoretical hybrid, it's trying to do too much. It can never form the basis of a coherent model of learning" (my emphasis). To sustain her revised position Bazalgette would have to demonstrate that there are theoretical differences between media education and media studies which are of such magnitude that they have made media education incoherent whilst media studies has remained successful. Since, if such major theoretical differences did exist Bazalgette would almost certainly have mentioned them, the suspicion must exist that she has simply failed to think through even the most immediate consequences of her position.
Bazalgette's paper to AMES is very similar to a number of others she has presented over the past few years. An examination of these papers does suggest a shifting of position. Addressing the London Media '98 conference in 1998, Bazalgette did explicitly make a distinction between media education and media studies courses. However her criticisms of conceptual confusion seemed to apply to both:
"The purpose of specialist media studies courses is not substantially clearer (than that of media education). With the Marxist project relegated to collective amnesia, few teachers can offer a cogent and convincing case for studying media institutions or for continuing to struggle with vast ranges of media within a single syllabus."
In a paper written for a conference in Vienna in 1999 Bazalgette presented her now familiar criticisms of what she this time called 'the media education project' . Here she made no distinction between media education and media studies and it is reasonable to suppose that her international audience, like AMES teachers, will have assumed she was including both in her criticisms.
On the basis of these three papers it does seem as if Bazalgette intended to make a broadly based attack upon media education, from which media studies had not been excluded, and that in the face of criticism from teachers she has retreated to a position which hinges on a crucial distinction between these two "fields". Precisely what this distinction is, however, she does not specify. Her retreat, far from being a safe haven, has opened up theoretical problems so formidable that they render her argument unintelligible.
Bazalgette's now "clarified" position poses further questions both for her and the BFI. If media education is so lacking in rigour, if "it can never form the basis of a coherent model of learning", then why has the BFI been advocating it for the past fifteen years? Has it suddenly become incoherent? Or has the BFI been responsible for leading teachers up the garden path for all of this time? And as the institution which has arrogated to itself a leading role in the development of media education in England and Wales over the past decade, might not the BFI itself bear at least a smidgen of responsibility for some of the failings of the movement, and for some of the criticisms which might legitimately be made of it?
The Strange Case of Stuart Hall
Another of Cary Bazalgette's responses raises some genuine puzzles. This is her attempt to set the work of Stuart Hall against my own. Bazalgette takes Margaret Hubbard to task for these words:
"In the beginning media education was at the radical cutting edge. Growing out of sociology and film studies combined, Stuart Hall and Len Masterman saw its function to be that of educating students into understanding that texts are productions within their political and economic time. The canon of literature would not be replicated in media education . . . Hall and Masterman have been ridiculed and marginalised. Yet nothing has replaced the simple common sense arguments contained in their initial premise"
Bazalgette finds fault with this. "To lump Hall and Masterman together under the revolutionary banner of 80s-style media studies, as Hubbard does, is somewhat disingenuous". Bazalgette has "re-read The Popular Arts (has Hubbard?)", in which Hall and his joint-author Paddy Whannel "actually argue in favour of discrimination amongst popular cultural forms, for which they are roundly castigated by Masterman". It was this point - my alleged implacable opposition to The Popular Arts - which Bazalgette had been at some pains to stress in her presentation to AMES:
"By 1984 Len Masterman was launching an all-out attack on the model of media teaching proposed by Hall and Whannel"
As evidence of this Bazalgette quotes directly from my book Teaching the Media:
"It is impossible to examine the short history of media education without recognising it as an essentially middle-class, defensive and deeply paternalistic movement, unjustifiably confident in the assertion of its own standards and judgements, and largely contemptuous of, and bent upon 'improving' the tastes of students."
Bazalgette overstates her case. As the quotation from Teaching the Media makes clear, my words did not specifically relate to Hall and Whannel, but were an attempt to summarise the 50-year history of media education, most of which had been dominated by more traditional Leavisite approaches. Whilst I was concerned to demonstrate the lines of continuity between, and the problems shared by, the approaches of Leavis and Thompson, and Hall and Whannel, I was also at pains to stress The Popular Arts' contemporary importance and significance. Indeed I did so in somewhat eulogistic terms ("The classic text on media education in the 1960s . . . excellent handbook . . . major step forward . . . The most impressive articulation. . . of what was to become the conventional wisdom among media teachers for the remainder of the 1960s.")
What Bazalgette terms "an all out attack" was actually an appreciation of the contemporary importance of The Popular Arts and an acknowledgement of the real step forward in the thinking and practice of media education that it signified. It was also a retrospective analysis of the book's legacy carried out with the benefit of the hindsight of the following two decades.
For what had to be analysed, twenty years after the book's publication, were some of the unforeseen consequences of the Popular Arts movement - a movement of which, as a practising teacher at the time, I had considered myself an enthusiastic if inconsequential part. The movement privileged film and unwittingly contributed to the com
tive neglect of television and the press for an entire generation of school students. It produced no coherent philosophy for understanding or teaching about the media as a whole. And following an initial flurry of activity in the late 1960s, it led media education into a period of prolonged fragmentation and uncertainty. After Brian Firth's Mass Media in the Classroom (1968) no full-length classroom-based book on media education was published for another seventeen years.
What I find puzzling about Bazalgette's argument is her apparent belief that Stuart Hall's ideas about the mass media and popular culture can properly be derived, without modification, from a book which he co-authored in 1964. Bazalgette may have re-read The Popular Arts but has she not read anything written by Hall since then? In fact, in the very year that The Popular Arts was published, Hall's career was already following an entirely different trajectory. Richard Hoggart appointed him as his deputy at Birmingham University's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) for what Hall called "my knowledge of the Leavis debate and my interest in cultural politics". By 1968 Hall was Director of the Centre, the Leavis debate was effectively dead, and the dynamic expansion of cultural studies around questions of culture and politics, ethnicity, ideology, class, gender and identity had begun. A glance at Teaching the Media will reveal my own debt to the work of CCCS. Hall is the single most cited source in the book, whilst the work of such CCCS alumni as David Morley and Dorothy Hobson is strongly featured within it. Morley indeed was my editor at Comedia, the book's publisher. The debt which my own work owes to Hall and his colleagues is very clear. Bazalgette's attempt to set up some kind of polarisation between them is odd. Even odder is Bazalgette's attribution to Hall of ideas and theories which he has spent the past twenty years not simply repudiating, but demolishing.
Which raises an interesting question: why should Bazalgette wish to disinter and re-examine a model for media study which has already been comprehensively buried by one of its authors? The answer is simple. The Popular Arts privileged the study of film, the medium deemed to have the most serious credentials as art in the 1960s. This, the very reason for the movement's failure, is the source of its attraction to the BFI now. In arguing for a reorientation of media studies around the moving image media alone (and principally, one suspects, film), Bazalgette is unable to muster any support from the wider academic and educational community. Even Making Movies Matter did not make such a suggestion. Bazalgette has to go back to the 1960s in order to re-discover a model which gave to film the pre-eminent position she now wishes it to have. Unfortunately for Bazalgette this simply re-awakens memories of a legacy of failure: of the Popular Arts movement itself, and in particular of film studies in schools in the 1970s. It also draws attention to the BFI's own role in that catastrophe. Bazalgette's proposals for moving image education cannot be taken seriously until she has presented some analysis of that historic failure, shown precisely why it will not happen again, and explained why no one outside of the BFI shares its institutional vision - not even the man whose work she cites as its inspiration.
Other contributions in this debate
©2001 Len Masterman