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Teaching by its very nature is a political act, and teaching media literacy is especially so. Knowledge is socially constructed, of course, including what is in the curriculum. The issues the media focus on, the language used to frame the debates, and what is omitted from these debates are also socially constructed. It is my contention that the general public in Canada has a limited understanding of the role of the media in influencing and controlling discourse, particularly around important social, political, and economic issues. The changing North American political climate, particularly with the rise of a corporate conservatism in the United States and now in Canada, presses upon me the urgency for educators to help students understand powerful social forces and the role that the media plays in all of this. Anyone who questions the power of the media should ask themselves how it came to be that Stephen Harper, the biggest supporter of the Bush administration's agenda in the Middle East, an agenda that most Canadians strongly oppose, is now our Prime Minister.
For 18 of the past 20 years, I have taught in primarily working-class schools in rural British Columbia and Vancouver's multicultural east end. My last teaching position in Vancouver was in a high school where my social studies classes were composed of mostly privileged middle-class students, located in Vancouver's west side. As well, for six years I was an instructor in the Teacher Education Program at the University of British Columbia. Through my experience as a teacher of high school and teacher education social studies courses, I have found that ideology critique has been a most useful concept to illuminate the media's hegemonic function. A quick look at the history of media education will demonstrate the importance of ideology.
A brief discussion on critical media literacy
In Media Education (2003), Buckingham has mapped out the evolution of the field in the British context. He stated that the starting point for media education began with Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (Leavis & Thompson, 1933), which made a case to resist popular cultural forms emanating from the United States and the British working class. In other words, their project, which was very conservative, was to protect the literary...