TECHNOS

August 21, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Winter 2002 Vol. 11 No. 4

Your Media, My Literacy: A Curriculum Model Considered

By Jack Barwind and James Piecowye

“Media literacy education is at a watershed moment around the world.”

—Robert Kubey, author of “How Media Education Promotes
Critical Thinking, Democracy, Health, and Aesthetic Appreciation”

“Life is difficult.” So starts M..Scott Peck in his international best seller, The Road Less Traveled. A curious start to a paper that argues for the development of a communication literacy curriculum within the Arab world, don’t you think? But, life is difficult because life is complex, baffling, and ever changing. Nowhere is this more true than in the rapidly developing Middle Eastern societies, where the wedding of local and global life is negotiated daily.

Relationships & Systems

We currently work and live in the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. is comprised of seven traditional and separate Emirates with a total estimated population of 2.94 million, and a growth rate of around 6.5 percent a year. This is expected to slow to 2.9 percent by the year 2005, when the population will number around 3.48 million. U.A.E. citizens account for a little over 20 percent of the population, with the remaining coming from the rest of the Arab world, the Indian subcontinent, the Far East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. (United Arab Emirate Government Information Service, 2002) With internationalism* inherently comes “foreign ” culture, carried by individuals through interpersonal and mediated contacts (communication), serving to magnify and accelerate the baffling, changing, and complex nature of society. Thus, the society “exists ” not as a closed entity but as a living organism (system) comprised of other living organisms (people/systems) held together by a web of personal and mediated relationships. Systems are hierarchical, bounded, and self-maintaining. That is, systems are comprised of a complex web of smaller systems, can be identified (one can establish where a system ends and its environment begins), operate to make order out of chaos (are sense making), and are dynamic. When we use the word “communication ” in a systemic sense, we are including all processes by which organisms make sense out of their interactions with the systems and subsystems of their environment. Communication is thus a macro term including, but not limited to, interpersonal relationships, personal contact, face-to-face messages, person-to-group messages, mediated messages, etc. There are several “sensibilities ” to the concept of communication. Likewise, when we use the term “literacy ” on the macro level, we recognize there are several different literacies — the ability to read being one, the ability to engage in conversation another, the ability to understand and operate with environmental complexity still another, and so on. Communication literacy implies an ability to understand, appreciate, critically appraise, and navigate the complex web of social/societal interrelationships that help an individual toward self-regulation and self-determination.

* Authors’ note: We use the term “internationalism” in place of globalism, as it implies that the many subcultures that make up an international population, as is seen in the U.A.E. whether in large cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi or in a small town like Rae, attempt to preserve elements of their unique culture.

Media Ecology

If we were to paint a picture of the Emirates 40 years ago, we would be struck by its similarity to itself from decade after decade; people have commented on how little change appears to have taken place over the preceding decades. Though certainly not a closed system, the Emirates of the past did not reveal the quantum changes that seem to operate on a yearly, monthly, even daily basis in contemporary times. The U.A.E. is a system of hyper-change. Life in an Emirati’s past was difficult to be sure, but its difficulties were expected and predictable and were based on an individual’s interaction with a known, albeit severe, environment. The environment, as pointed out in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, was the predictor for the society as it emerged. It takes no great insight to recognize that physical ecology historically determined to a great extent the nature of the society it bounded. Society was still a living system albeit less complex on the magnitude of the difference between a fruit fly and a person. It is important to note here that in all living systems there is a self-reflexive loop between elements of and within the system. To put it simply: just as the environment impacts individuals, individuals impact the environment. People simultaneously produce and are produced by their ecology. We use the term ecology for its implication of holism and its connotation, which goes beyond simple, physical environment.

We wish to argue that the important ecology to recognize, and the ecology which puts so much strain on people, is, for the most part, borne out of internationalism (or better yet — non-parochialism). This ecology is both personal and mediated in nature. Life is difficult in a “media ecology ” because media accelerate change and add complexity through the mass and rapid production of symbols and signs. To make matters “worse ” (more complex) many, if not most, media traditions are transplanted from outside the culture — in this case, confusion, complexity, and change become alienating and normative. Individuals become “foreigners ” within their own culture as long as they are unaware (illiterate) of the media ecology in which they are immersed.

Our title, “Your Media,My Literacy,” suggests a state of confusion and alienation as long as people cannot or do not understand the dominant environment in which they live. By understanding the desert, early Emiratis could survive with their cultural values intact; however, not understanding the media ecology will alter, in a few years, what lasted generations. And, this will occur without choice. Developing, on the other hand, a communication literacy with concomitant media literacy provides individuals with the tools to make choices about the culture in which they wish to live.

Communication Literacy

Increasingly we are finding ourselves living in a media-centric world. As media become progressively pervasive throughout not only the United Arab Emirate society but also societies in general, there is a growing realization among educators that there needs to be a coherent program in place to teach people how to understand and live in a mediated world. This

The women students of Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, bridge the cultural gap between West and Middle East. Courtesy of Zayed University, Dubai, U. A. E.

coherent program is what we are calling communication literacy. In other venues, this phenomenon may be called critical media literacy, media ecology, or media education — but regardless of name or label, all promote a fundamental understanding of the media and how media create, disseminate, and ultimately influence consumers’ understanding of a message and ultimately their behavior through empowerment and participation.

Life is difficult in a “media ecology” because media accelerate change and add complexity through the mass and rapid production of symbols and signs.

The United Arab Emirates as a case study for media ecology and communication literacy issues is interesting because, for the most part, media ecology and communication literacy education is absent from all levels of study from kindergarten (KG )through post-secondary education within the national curriculum model. At Zayed University we are proposing, through the curriculum of the College of Communication and Media Sciences (via the general education program and the Zayed University Learning Outcomes model), to incorporate a “liberal ” education into the curriculum mix. We hope to induce communication competence in the widest definition of that concept within the predominantly skills-based education model of the U.A.E. While critical thinking skills are allegedly being promoted at the post-secondary level, it is our suggestion that this process needs to be started as early as KG. What’s more, the concept of media ecology (media literacy) needs to be expanded to a communication literacy paradigm. What we are suggesting is a fundamental recasting of an element of the U.A.E. kindergarten through post-secondary curriculums.

Our suggestion for the need to recast the U.A.E. curriculum to encompass communication literacy from as early as KG is problematic in that it could be read to suggest that “all media and all communication processes are understood the same by all peoples within all societies.” This is not our belief. In fact, communication literacy is above all a complex structure of many interwoven literacies, which are fundamentally influenced by the ecological structures of which they are a part. In this sense, communication literacy can be understood as more than the development of skills; it involves the complex acquisition of knowledge structures, which are imbedded in and flow through the culture. (Christ, 1998) These knowledge structures are intimately tied to an understanding of communication and the media as an industry, how the media operate, and the manner in which they are held responsible to the society in which they reside.

Western and Middle Eastern Culture,
Communication, and the Media

The problem that we are alluding to, put simply, is that a Western conception of communication and the media and a Middle Eastern conception of communication and the media are not necessarily the same. The discriminator in this case is society and the incidental as well as organized education that is taking place.

Thus, what begins to emerge is the question of whether communication literacy/media literacy education can be applied to a society if the precepts upon which that education is premised are not from within that society itself. In the case of the U.A.E., this is a very real and unaddressed issue. Fundamental questions arise concerning culture and its transportability.

In order to understand the difficulty in developing a communication literacy curriculum in the U.A.E., one must grapple with issues related to the concept of culture. Culture needs to be understood as something that is threaded throughout all of society’s practices, making it the sum of a society’s interrelationships. By defining culture in a broad manner, as Williams (1976) suggests, we might best understand culture as the general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development of a society in general. What Williams’s broad definition motions towards is a starting point from which it becomes possible to consider how culture is the result of society’s macro-relationships as put forth in our earlier discussion of systems.

Bennett (1986) builds on Williams’s definition of suggesting that for any definition of culture to be useful it must be flexible at the conceptual level, allowing for change to take place over time in the physical constitution and organization of culture itself. Culture is thus hierarchical, reflexive, and dynamic.

Bennett and Williams might be read to suggest that culture represents something that is being constructed both physically and psychologically simultaneously, a signifying system of both artistic and intellectual activities (Williams, 1981). Culture becomes for us an evolving complex of political, economic, and social ecologies found within all contemporary activities. In this sense, culture might be defined as, “a state or process of human perfection, a description of a particular way of life which expresses meaning and values not only in art and learning, but [also] in institutions and ordinary behavior.” (Hall, 1993) Part of the problem in defining culture is the fact that culture is constantly evolving as the society it is found within evolves. In a mediated culture of rapid change, the problem escalates.

Defining Culture

Additionally, what is needed is a broad, evolving definition for the term “culture,” one that can also accommodate specificity. The problem with defining culture, as has been pointed out by the Council of Europe (1997), is the policy-driven tendency to restrict the definition, thereby reining it in from a wider developmental point of view to satisfy very specific political and economic objectives. This reining in process tends to dilute the integrated nature of the definition of culture and reduce it from something that is very comprehensive to something that is very specific and exclusive, thus creating another set of impediments.

Williams (1981) posits the notion that it might be necessary theoretically to separate culture, as a signifying system itself, from the other systems to which it relates in order to allow for any meaningful consideration of culture to take place. His suggestion is based on the idea that the meaning of culture is bound to the converging systems of organization of which it is inevitably a part. The problem that Williams is trying to address is the possibility of misunderstanding and consequently ignoring obscure manifestations of culture, which might be concealed by more obvious cultural manifestations.

Dr. Don Love and Dr. Adel Jendli conduct a group discussion with the “girls”— their women students at Zayed University. Courtesy of Zayed University, Dubai, U. A. E.

But by looking at culture in an isolated manner, what is returned to is the original problem of the limiting and inevitable directing of the definition of the term itself. There are extreme contradictions in the understanding of culture. If culture as a way of life is informing social institutions, then in all probability, a separation of culture, as a signifying system, from the organizations it informs could actually hinder constructive analysis because it could lead to culture being examined in an artificial environment free of the actual influences on it.

We’re Not in Kansas

If you were to sit in on one of my classes, close your eyes and listen, you would be hard pressed to tell whether you were in the U.S. Midwest or the Middle East. You would hear idle chat about perfumes, the clacking of computer keyboards, the faint melody of Shania Twain’s latest single in the background, laughter about the latest Antonio Banderas movie and the relentless complaints about too much homework and reading to do. But when you were to open your eyes, you would realize you definitely were not in Kansas! For three years I have been teaching Arab national women in the United Arab Emirates about mass media. My students prefer to be called girls, even though they are between 17 and 25 years of age, and they refer to me as Mr. James. Zayed University, at five years old, is the newest federally funded university in the United Arab Emirates. Zayed University has a number of distinguishing characteristics: it is a women’s only University; it employs an outcomes-based learning model; it has a 7:1 student-to-faculty ratio; and is arguably the most technologically advanced institution in the region. Every student at Zayed University has a personal laptop, unlimited access to high-speed proxy-free Internet while on campus as well as laser printers and proxima projectors in virtually every classroom.

While Zayed University students have gone through intensive English language training, they need to have a Test of English as a Second Language (TOEFL) score of 500, the top end of the scale, to enter the degree programs and at least two years of college readiness training to prepare them for the Western-style education they are embarking upon, they are still very much rooted in the evolving culture of the U.A.E. Virtually every student at Zayed University still wears a traditional Shaila (the black head scarf), and Abaya (the black gown) over their often colourful and ornate dresses. Many girls also wear jeans and slacks, to the chagrin of their parents.

I teach in Zayed University’s College of Communication and Media Sciences. The College offers two streams of study:integrated communication (public relations and marketing), and news and new media (journalism). I teach a variety of courses across both streams of study ,including introduction to communication and comparative international journalism, a.k.a. media and society.

Male professors conduct a discussion group of all women at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Courtesy of Zayed University, Dubai, U. A. E.

Some of the differences between the teaching environment at Zayed University and an institution in the West are subtle, others are not. I absolutely never make physical contact with my students, not even a brush of a hand or shoulder when walking in a crowded hall. There is a very clear and present comfort zone, even with respect to the distance one stands from students. I never lean over their chairs, shake hands, etc. Some differences are more apparent .While my students are being educated in a Western style, they are not Westerns and have not grown up with the West’s influences that are so much a part of our lives that we take for granted. For instance, as educators, we often make reference in passing to things, such as films, which we deem to be significant in some way — take the Wizard of Oz, one of the first films to use technicolour. But many of my students have never seen or heard of this film. Many of my students do not go to the cinema, period! I recently used an audio clip of a popular Beach Boys’ song to illustrate an example in class, and many of my students had never heard the song before or even of the Beach Boys — which is surprising given that English radio in the Emirates is dominated by Canadian and American tunes right down to Rick Dees’ American top 40!

My students are walking a very delicate tightrope between the past, present, and future of the U.A.E., which is little more than 30 years old. They are, in many cases, the first women in their families to be obtaining a university education. It is not uncommon to find that my students come from Arabic-only speaking households and use English infrequently outside of school.

Like any Western students, however, mine are as informed or misinformed as they would like to be about world events. As would be expected, issues about Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine/Israel are hot topics of discussion. But, unlike Western students, my students can watch, listen, and read both Arabic and English reporting and then turn around and compare what is being said. It is the combination of the com mercial development of Dubai, and the U.A.E. in general, and the open, truly Western-style education that my students are receiving that makes education about the media so imortant. What becomes interesting from an educator’s standpoint is how the cultural past and present of the U.A.E. collide to influence my students’ decoding of the messages in the media. A constant problem I am faced with is the messages of the media being encoded with different cultural foundations than those my students are using to decode with.

As a male teacher, I often have to avoid discussions about sex, boyfriends, even smoking, because this society simply does not tolerate their open discussion between males and females. I recently had access to the PBS broadcast of the Merchants of Cool, which I felt was appropriate for my class. I forgot about the scene in which Howard Stern had a groupie gyrating on him! The class had very divided views of the content of this video. One group said that this was nothing different than what they watch on MTV, while the other group felt that Merchants of Cool was offensive. In the end the feeling that prevailed was that my students did not feel uncomfortable about the video as much as they felt uncomfortable about my being in the room while they viewed the video. We proceeded to have some very insightful discussion. But what these discussions are continually punctuated by are even more fundamental cultural issues.

For instance, the girls I teach are not so much class conscious as they are tribe conscious — all local families are part of local tribes, and different tribes have different degrees of status. Unfortunately, those girls who come from tribes of greater status are almost always yielded to in discussions and seldom contradicted, creating a very interesting classroom dynamic which takes some time to figure out. Thus, in short, teaching at Zayed University, an all- women’s university in a Muslim country, can be both rewarding and frustrating but is certain to lead to the betterment of the students as critical thinkers and my betterment as an educator.•

— James Piecowye

Culture and the Self

Bell (1976), like Williams (1981), asserts that culture is a process through which the individual undertakes to cultivate himself. Any communication literacy program must of necessity view the self as a central cultural construct. Cultivation of the individual takes place through the creation of a conception of the self that is relevant to the environment of which the individual is a part. Culture, in Bell’s interpretation, is understood as an internal logic, a dialogue within one’s self. To him, culture and communication are inseparable. The point that both Bell and Williams are making is that culture should be understood as an evolution of the spatial and temporal situation to which the individual is privy. In this sense, culture might be better understood as a form of change and adaptation within the self, perpetrated through what Williams (1981) calls the two aspects of culture: 1) the known meaning and directions in which members of a society are trained; and 2) the new observations and meanings which are continuously being offered up and tested.

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1972) discussion of the theory of practice builds on the discussions of Bell and Williams and offers a compelling logic for the acceptance of culture as a systemic social construction based on a competition between ideational, actionable, and material elements within society. Culture as a definable idea, as it relates to the individual, is derived through social structures which are influenced by society’s overlapping sub-systems. Culture might thus be best defined as a non-uniform series of complex and evolving social relationships.

To repeat: communication and culture are inseparable. In the U.A.E., the issue is at what stage are these relationships in their developmental cycle? These relationships might be more easily described as a series of overlapping individual, familial, societal, and global assumptions fostered through a complex communication environment. The inner circle is the self or self-concept. The self-concept is the most contentious, resistant, and difficult to change — but it is precisely that self-concept which a communication literacy program attempts to impact.

The Zayed University Program Model

On a university level, the Zayed University Program Model attempts to alter the self-concept of a student by working on the communication competencies inherent in the constructs of critical thinking, leadership, globalization, teamwork, information literacy, and technology.

While the self-concept is core, family, group, and national and international thought structures are informing that self. These structures involve the values,beliefs, attitudes, and opinions of all components of the system. Complexity exists upon complexity. As we develop a program for communication literacy, an issue which we as educators need to consider, and as suggested by Christ, is not only how broadly should media literacy be conceptualized, but also from whose ideological and paradigmatic foundations should it be considered? If communication literacy/media literacy is to be considered as the development of skills and the acquisition of knowledge structures which lead to the cultivation of the critical thought process, do we not also need to consider which knowledge structures are being cultivated? What this question leads us to is the fundamental debate within curriculum development between advocates of skills training and advocates of a liberal education.

Any communication literacy program must of necessity view the self as a central cultural construct.

According to Albermann and Hagood (2000) what we increasingly see taking place today is “trans-media inter-textuality.” We are suggesting that this inter-textuality is taking place not only at the level of the media but also at the very foundational level of education about the media through the educational process itself — a process which is oblivious to the issues of habitus involved in the larger socialization process and understanding of the media itself. As Joshua Meyrowitz (1998) suggests, we need to be aware of the multiple media literacies, and by association multiple ecologies, that feed into an understanding of the media. At the same time, we must be aware of the macro and micro issues that are inherently involved. It is more likely that the issues being worked through with respect to media education in the U.A.E. are being bogged down here. They may be your media — but they are my literacies.

References

Albermann, Donna, and Hagood, Margaret. (Jan/Feb 2000) “Critical Media Literacy: Research, Theory, and Practice in ‘new times.’” In The Journal of Education Re-search.

Bell, Daniel. (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Bennett, Tony. (1986) “Rethinking Popular Culture.” In T. Bennett, C. Mercer, and J. Wollacott (Eds.). Popular Culture and Social Relations. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1972) Outline of a Theory of Practice. London: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986) “The Production of Belief:Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods.” In R. Collins, J. Curran, N. Garnham, P. Scannell, P. Schlesinger, and C. Sparks, Media, Culture, Society: A Critical Reader. London: Sage.

Christ, William. (Winter 1998) “Media Literacy, Media Education, and the Academy.” In Journal of Communication.

Council of Europe. (1997) Culture in from the Margins: A Contribution to the Debate on Culture and Development in Europe. Germany: Author.

Diamond, Jared. (1998) Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Great Britain: Vintage.

Garnham, Nicholas, and Hall, Stuart. (1986b) “Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture: An Introduction.” In R. Collins, J. Curran, N. Garnham, P. Scannell, P. Schlesinger, and C. Sparks, Media, Culture, Society: A Critical Reader. London: Sage.

Hall, Stuart. (1993) “Culture, Community, Nation.” In Cultural Studies. (7).

Kubey, Robert. (2002) “How Media Education Promotes Critical Thinking, Democracy, Health, and Aesthetic Appreciation.” In Cable in the Classroom’s Thinking Critically About Media: Schools and Families in Partnership. Retrieved 10/23/2002 from http://www.ciconline.com/.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. (Winter 1998) “Multiple Media Literacies.” In Journal of Communication.

Peck, M. Scott. (1978). The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. New York: Simon & Schuster.

United Arab Emirate Government Information Service (2002) Web site, http://www.uae.gov.ae/.

Williams, Raymond. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, Raymond. (1981) Culture. Great Britain: Fontana.

Jack Barwind is the assistant dean for the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). Formerly the chair of speech communication departments at Syracuse University and Montana State University in the United States, Dr. Barwind's main research interests are in the areas of the biology of communication and media literacy. James Piecowye is an instructor in the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University. He has been involved in the creation of that university's Center for Media Research and Training and is currently working on a foundational project to introduce media literacy to the U.A.E.