Teachers who include media literacy in their classrooms often face issues that don’t arise in other subjects. Nothing illustrates this better than the issue of diversity in media. It’s not unreasonable for teachers to see the topic as a can of worms and be concerned about offending students and their parents – not to mention worrying about what the students themselves might say. At the same time, it’s a topic that is simply too important to be ignored: what we see in media hugely influences how we see others, ourselves and the world. As a result, an ability to analyze media depictions of diversity is not only a key element of being media literate, it’s essential to understanding many of the social issues and concerns that we face as citizens. That’s why Media Awareness Network has developed That’s Not Me – a new online tutorial for professional development to help educators and community leaders approach this issue through key concepts of media literacy.

There are a number of principles for media literacy, many of which are formulated in different ways by different writers and educators, but a few are nearly universal:

• first, that media are constructions that re-present reality, created by individuals and shaped by their opinions, assumptions and biases;
• second, that media contain ideological messages, about such things as power, values, and authority, and which – because we base our view of reality in part on our media exposure – may have social and political implications;
• third, that because most media are created in order to make a profit, their creation generally has commercial implications;
• fourth, that media texts do not have a single fixed meaning but are interpreted by different audiences; and
• fifth, that each medium has a distinct aesthetic form, which may encompass things such as the influence of technical limitations on storytelling or the particular stock themes, or tropes, of a particular genre.

To better understand how these principles can help to frame discussions with youth about diversity, let’s look at them in more detail.

Media are constructions that re-present reality

The notion that media are constructions is best illustrated by examining the issue of stereotypes. This is likely the diversity issue with which youth will be most familiar, and students can likely describe a number of common stereotypes – whether about minority groups, particular types of people (athletes, “geeks,” and so on) or about young people themselves. It’s important for youth to understand, though, that just because they are aware of these stereotypes this doesn’t mean they don’t influence attitudes and perceptions: a 2002 study, “Why It Matters: Diversity on Television,” illustrated this by asking young children to “cast” a variety of roles. The children – many of whom were themselves members of visible minority groups – frequently cast African-Americans as criminals, with the explanation that “he just looks like the type of criminal that would probably steal or something.”

Media contain ideological messages

The above example illustrates as well the second principle that media contain ideological messages: as both individuals and a society, our views of different groups are based in part on how they are represented in media – and whether they are represented at all. Roughly one in seven Canadians, for instance, has a disability, but a 2009 study of American network TV found that only one in fifty TV characters did. (There are no similar statistics for Canadian TV, but it seems unlikely that the numbers here are much better.) This near-invisibility almost certainly affects how common we think disability is and how important we consider disability issues to be.

Media have commercial implications

The commercial implications of media creation are what frequently push diversity representation to the sidelines. Though various media have made significant improvements – both in how often and how they present diversity – these improvements nearly always stop short of the top: while supporting characters may be visible minorities, gays or lesbians, persons with disabilities or Aboriginals, the lead character seldom is. Commercial implications aren’t limited to a consideration of the audience: who owns media outlets can be a significant influence on whether and how diversity appears onscreen. Maureen Googoo, a reporter for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, contrasts working there to being at a mainstream network by saying “the atmosphere at APTN National News is no different than any other newsroom… The difference is that the entire news staff is aboriginal and the primary goal is to cover issues and events important to Aboriginal Peoples. I report on these issues… without being questioned about bias or objectivity.”
 
Audiences negotiate meaning

Identity can influence not just how media products are created but how they are interpreted as well. The small number and peripheral status of minority characters has led to a tradition, in many communities, of reading against a text – either “assigning” an identity to ambiguous characters (such as the long-running campaign to have The Simpsons’ Mr. Smithers come out of the closet) or by ascribing greater importance to secondary characters (Bruce Lee, who played Kato on the TV series The Green Hornet, received top billing when that show aired in east Asia, and in some cases it was even renamed The Kato Show.) The principle that audiences negotiate meaning can also help students understand how different groups might view the same character or storyline differently. To mainstream audiences, for example, the character of Artie on Glee – a member of the glee club who participates in club activities despite being in a wheelchair – is seen as a positive, empowering portrayal of a young man with a disability, but many members of the disabled community feel that he embodies many of the clichés and stereotypes associated with disability.

Each medium has a distinct aesthetic form

Understanding the unique aesthetic forms of different media can also help students understand how problematic depictions of diversity can occur. Many media and genres contain tropes, repeated themes and images, which may be decades or even centuries old. While the heroes in the Disney movie Aladdin, for example, have basically Caucasian features, the villain is depicted with exaggeratedly Semitic features – embodying a trope that is at least as old as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.” 

In our digital age, nearly all of us are not just media consumers but producers as well – whether we create videos, remixes, blog entries or just Facebook status entries – which means that to be responsible digital citizens, young people need to learn how to recognize and engage with diversity issues in media. That’s Not Me provides teachers and community leaders with tools to help them do just that.

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That’s Not Me is part of the Diversity and Media Toolbox: a comprehensive suite of anti-hate resources produced by Media Awareness Network for schools and communities. The Toolbox contains classroom lessons and an interactive student module to complement the That’s Not Me tutorial.

In the early months of 2011, the eyes of the world were on the Middle East, watching as the governments of Egypt, Tunisia and other autocratic regimes buckled under the pressure of democratic protest. Among those watching were a group of elementary students in northern Canada, who were able to watch a live Twitter feed of the protestors and other citizens of the region reporting what was happening. Despite their geographical isolation, these students were connected to events happening halfway around the world, thanks to the efforts of their teacher to bring digital media into the classroom.

Few professions in our society have been as affected by the advent of digital technologies as teaching: from cell phones in classrooms, to the use of Wikipedia and other online resources in coursework, to the push to integrate ICT across different subject areas, every aspect of teachers' professional lives has changed. And not only their professional lives: the increasing popularity of social media, among both youth and adults, has made it harder than ever for teachers to keep a clear line between their professional and personal lives.

In 2011, Media Awareness Network began Phase III of its ongoing study Young Canadians in a Wired World. The first two phases, released in 2001 and 2005 respectively, were a watershed in our understanding of how Canadian youth use the Internet, and continue to be relied on and widely cited by researchers and government agencies. To launch the long-awaited Phase III, MNet began with a qualitative research study in which teachers who had been identified as having been successful in engaging their students positively and creating an excellent learning environment in the classroom – one elementary and one secondary teacher from the North, the West, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic region – were asked about the role played by digital technology in their lives and their professional practice. Over the course of a semi-structured interview they volunteered their opinions about their students' abilities to make effective use of digital media, obstacles to teaching youth digital literacy skills, ways of overcoming these obstacles, ways in which emerging digital technologies can enrich students' learning, and strategies for managing the use of digital technology in the classroom.

Adults are often dazzled by the technical proficiency shown by youth in using digital media, particularly their ability to seemingly master new tools almost instantly – moving from MySpace to Facebook, for instance, or learning to use the latest model of smartphone. What our survey group told us, however, is that our impression of students' abilities is often misleading. As one secondary school teacher from the Atlantic put it, “I don’t think students are all that Internet-savvy. I think they limit themselves to very few tools on the Internet and they don’t think it’s as expansive as it could be. They’re locked into using it in particular ways and don’t think outside the box... I’m always surprised at the lack of knowledge that students have about how to search and navigate online.”

In particular, teachers were concerned about how uncritical students were about the information they found online: one elementary teacher from the North referred to an incident in which grade five students researching the Sasquatch myth – surely a topic that called for extra scrutiny – were taken in by a website that had been intended as an obvious and humorous hoax. Much of the misinformation that's available on the Internet, of course, is much less innocent – from online scams to subtle hate sites – which shows just how important it is for youth to learn tools and strategies for authenticating the information they find online.

When asked about the challenges teachers face in helping students get the most out of digital media, our respondents identified five main issues:

• the pressure to teach technical skills instead of digital literacy skills;
• the impulse to revert to “drill and kill” teaching methods;
• the potential for digital technologies to cause disruptions in the classroom;
• the shortage of professional development opportunities for teachers to learn how to integrate digital media in the classroom; and
• the issues that arise with Internet filters and bans on personal digital devices such as tablets and smartphones.

This last was the issue most often mentioned by teachers: many reported being unable to make full use of digital media in their classroom practice due to being unable to access services such as Twitter, Skype and YouTube. One teacher's story highlights both the limits of filtering and the best response to encountering inappropriate content online: after one of his students had stumbled upon a hate site – a type of inappropriate site that often goes undetected by filters – he had the whole class examine it critically: “They didn’t know what they were looking at. I asked them to look a little closer, and some of them started to see it and others still couldn’t. And that interested them, because I could see something they couldn’t. That was a way for them to see, for them to get interested in the idea that somebody was actually preaching hatred and it didn’t even feel like it.”

This example shows how the teachers in our study were able to volunteer strategies and solutions to address each of the issues they identified. All of our respondents told us that they spent little or no time teaching students how to use particular technologies, but chose instead to focus on the skills they need to access, understand and use the content they would encounter using those technologies. An elementary teacher from the Western region, for instance, introduced iPads to her class with no more technical instructions than to tell them “if you don’t like where you end up, press the round button on the side.” Allowing the students to teach themselves how to use the technology gave her the time to integrate it more meaningfully into the curriculum and into her classroom practice.

One particularly interesting finding of the survey was the role a teacher’s age played in the integration of digital media in the classroom. While one might assume that younger students would be more comfortable in using digital media, survey participants said that more senior teachers' experience in classroom management gave them the freedom to take chances and give up some control to students, letting them take the lead and teach themselves – and one another. Many participants talked about the importance of having access to mentors in helping them bring digital media into the classroom, particularly with the shortage of professional development time and resources reported by nearly all of the respondents.

Despite these issues, teachers had no trouble identifying several significant ways in which digital media are already enriching students' school experience. As well as providing access to a wealth of knowledge and learning resources (provided students were able to tell good information from bad), teachers told us that digital media gives students new opportunities to have an impact outside of the classroom, by publishing their work and communicating with people around the world, and to collaborate with their peers both during and outside of school hours. Finally, teachers also spoke of the value of digital media in allowing them to appeal to students' different learning styles – giving math instruction in a visual or kinesthetic form, for example, through a “virtual protractor.” This also held true for students with special needs, such as the student with autism who used a dictation program on his iPad to overcome his difficulties with writing.

Although teachers were generally positive in their attitudes towards digital media, they did recognize that it brought challenges as well – particularly with regards to students' and teachers' privacy. Teachers told, for instance, of colleagues being filmed with cellphone cameras at school dances, causing them to worry about how their actions might be taken out of context later; of feeling unable to participate in social networks like Facebook, despite the opportunities they provide for personal learning and professional networking, due to the fear of blurring lines between their personal and professional lives; and, of course, the disruptions caused by digital devices of all sorts in the classroom.

Despite these issues, our survey participants overwhelmingly felt that digital media provide tremendous opportunities for teachers and students – so long as students are taught how to engage critically with the media they consume and to consider the ethical ramifications of what they do online: as an elementary teacher from the Northern region put it, “the biggest skill they need is a moral compass.” Today's students are not just users of digital media, they are citizens of the online world. This survey makes it clear that young Canadians need to learn digital literacy and digital citizenship in their schools, and that teachers need to be provided with the tools, support and learning opportunities to be ready to teach them those skills.

To view the full report, Young Canadians in a Wired World, Phase III: Teachers' Perspectives, visit the MNet website.

Surely you've heard of Inspector Spacetime, the cult British TV series that's run (with interruptions) since 1962. It has a tremendously active, engaged fanbase that's created blogs, videos and music devoted to it. Oh, and one more thing -- it never existed. It was made up as a thirty-second gag on the sitcom Community, as a parody-cum-homage of Doctor Who.

But that didn’t stop the fans; within days of the episode's airing, a genuine Inspector Spacetime fandom had emerged, devoted to celebrating and debating a show that never was. A message board was created to coordinate the creation of the show's fictional canon, with fans receiving tips from the actor who played the Inspector on Community. The show's producers took note of this response, naturally, and Inspector Spacetime has become one of the show's running gags.

This sort of response is nothing new, of course: it parallels the relationship between Doctor Who and its fans, particularly in the long period when that show was off the air. Nor is the amount of work involved in creating this material that unusual -- fan-fiction has been one of the mainstays of the Internet since the days of Usenet. What is perhaps unusual is that all of this started on Community, one of the lowest-rated shows on American network television and a likely target for cancellation at the end of this season (at the time of writing, it had been removed from the midseason lineup, with no return date announced.) The disconnect is obvious: if Community is so engaging that one of its throwaway gags inspires an entire fictional fandom, why aren't more people watching it? But perhaps the reverse question is more important. Given the commitment that fans have to the show, are ratings measuring the wrong thing?

Of course, Nielsen ratings have come a long way from the days when Star Trek was canceled. As well as raw numbers, they also measure demographic data, and so far as the networks are concerned all viewers are not created equal: Community is one of the top-rated shows among young viewers with college degrees, but only if you count those who watch it after its initial airing (which adds a full 40 per cent to its viewership, an unusually high number). That's a lot of qualifiers, though, and advertisers don't generally count time-shifting viewers on the not unreasonable grounds that they're likely to skip past the commercials. The fact that NBC has not announced if Community will return in the new year suggests that even with both demographics and time-shifting taken into account, the network is not happy with its numbers.

Advertisers may be right to be wary of shows, like Community, with small but devoted audiences: there's little evidence that those audiences are any more likely to buy the products advertised than those who watch shows with larger but more casual viewerships. Even the example of Star Trek, which famously went from a canceled television series to a never-ending succession of movies and spinoffs, should be taken with caution. The short-lived series Firefly has a fanbase that is equally dedicated -- in fact, you're more likely to see a "Browncoat" in costume these days than a Trekkie -- but Serenity, the feature-film follow-up, was a flop.

It would be a shame, though, if a show that inspires so much devotion were to become a victim of mass-market economics. It may be that to support shows like these, networks need to look beyond advertising as a source of revenue. One way to make money off a property with a small but loyal fanbase is through merchandising -- Star Trek lived on in tie-in toys and novels for many years before returning to the screen, and the Wonder Woman comic is essentially a loss-leader to justify the existence of Wonder Woman merchandise. It's only recently, though, that broadcasters have been able to sell niche content directly to viewers. HBO, for instance, has had tremendous success in using high-quality shows to lure subscribers; AMC uses the cachet of Mad Men, which has a similarly small but devoted viewership, to offset its more commercial (and cheaper) offerings of old movies; and Netflix is pioneering the idea of selling TV series directly to the viewer by reviving Arrested Development, a series whose appeal was very similar to Community's. Ten years from now we may look back at Community as an early step in the evolution of how TV pays for itself -- or as one of the last victims of the advertising-driven model.