Keeping an Open Mind

Why do media people hate media education so much? The latest exponent of this tendency is Tim Bell, erstwhile ad expert for the Tories, whose splenetic response to the idea that children might learn to be critical of the media appears in today's Observer.

The sociologist Steve Fuller has apparently suggested that media education could help primary school children be less susceptible to advertising (well, some debate to be had here about how susceptible they already are, and about the effectiveness of media education that only aims at this outcome, but anyway, give the guy a break, it's a reasonable enough question in these times when even the Government has commissioned a study on the impact of the commercial world on children's well being - though why they have still not published the results is a bit of a mystery - maybe they're scared of Tim Bell and his ilk).

The Observer journalist Anushka Asthana got passed on to me for a quote about media literacy in primary schools, poor woman, and got an earful about relationships between moving image and print literacy, children's early acquisition of comprehension skills, you know the sort of thing, which she rendered reasonably well given the limited space she'd been allocated. I don't know whether she took a hint from one of my comments to her about media hostility to media education, but she certainly went to the right place for an example of it.

The fascinating thing is that Bell bases his contemptuous dismissal of media education on the fact that "we need people who are educated and have open minds". So encouraging critical analysis of the media leads to closed minds, does it? Or is it just that Bell fears the effect of such analyses on the PR industry's reputation for objectivity, accuracy and balance?

Ipercoop: consumer wonderland

Having had house guests through the whole of August and September, followed by the London Film Festival and another trip to Italy, I've been distracted from blogging. Now - luckily for the tiny but discriminating minority who do visit this blog from time to time - I have been inspired by a visit to Ipercoop, a gigantic supermarket just outside Modena. In fact I hate to go there, but it is loathsome in a spectacularly fascinating way. Last Sunday morning it was all geared up for Halloween; next week no doubt they will be clearing the aisles for the Christmas Crib Industry, with job lots of wise men and shepherds, crates of plastic rocks and straw, a choice of stable sizes and optional extras like

angels, tinkling streams and seasonal music. But even without the "specials", there is always lots to gawp at for anyone like me who rarely ventures beyond Tesco Metro. Ipercoop is so gigantic that the assistants have to wear skates. There are 52 checkouts, although increasingly the customers use portable scanners to check their goods as they continue to cruise the aisles. The pet foods section is as big as the whole of our local supermarket.

You can pop a bike or a fishing rod into your trolley along with the cornflakes and bread; you can buy a washing machine, a wood-burning stove or a set of garden furniture. The only things that seem to be unavailable are actual houses.

Instead of having the own-label, bargain items tactfully spread around the store, there's a special aisle for people who are so poor or so stingy they don't mind being seen there: hence it is almost deserted.

But it's the fresh food that's really lavish. The fish department consists of a row of almost full-size lifeboats, each bearing great piles of fish, shellfish and various marine animal body parts, lovingly arranged on ice. There are vistas of vegetables, avenues of cheese, whole neighbourhoods of meat.

A visit to Ipercoop always leaves me completely shattered. By the time I get to the car park - which is about the size of Hampstead Heath - and try to remember the colour and make of car I came in, I'm ready to burst into tears. Each time I declare "never again" but somehow, every time I visit Italy, Ipercoop is where I end up.

SMALL FIRE IN ITALY: NOBODY KILLED

UK media coverage of forest fires in foreign parts has developed a fairly standard format: when the fire's out and the dramatic pictures dry up, so does the story. My adaptation (above) of Claud Cockburn's "boring headline" exemplar sums up an approach I've had little objections to - until now.

The photo on the left shows TAS picking grapes, with help from grandson Morgan, a couple of years ago at our son's little house in Liguria. The top picture shows the same scene this week after three hectares of vines and forest went up in smoke. The story you don't get from the media is what it feels like to see your land turned to desert and all your hard work come to nothing.

It seems likely that a neighbour, fed up with cutting brush in the fierce afternoon sun, may have thought he'd just try and burn off a long-neglected bramble patch. Within minutes, the fire had roared through the brambles, jumped the road, demolished eight terraces of vines and ripped through the pine forest at the top of the hill (see "before" and "after" pictures) before helicopters arrived to douse the flames. But that's not the end of the story: when I've seen those dramatic pictures showing tons of water cascading on to blazing landscapes, it's never occurred to me to think about where the water comes from. Why, the sea, of course! So the burnt land is now contaminated by salt water and can't be replanted any time soon.

We all see lots of pictures like this but it's different when you've weeded those very paths, tied back the vines that used to grow on them, picked the grapes and loaded them into the masher. And of course tended the sunburn and endured the wasp stings. It's weird to see a familiar landscape reduced to its bare bones, and I guess it's going to be interesting to see how it does recover, and how long this will take. This fire was an object lesson in hot weather garden maintenance. Ben's other more socially conscious neighbour kept the grass cut all around the building that they share, and this was the only reason that their homes did not go up in smoke as well. Which reminds me: I must go and buy a strimmer, and I think we'll give that garden bonfire a miss this year.

Informal learning, non-formal learning, etc

Well, I went to the event and it was a really good discussion, but also interesting in unexpected ways. Almost all the focus was on how informal or non-formal learning (some distinguished these; some didn't) differed from formal education, and it amounted to a blistering attack on how formal education in this country has become mechanical, risk-averse and obsessed with outcomes. There were few people there with actual current experience of secondary or primary schools and to some extent schools became the default scapegoat for educational failure. Although there were some voices pointing out that a laissez-faire approach to education has its own dangers, most seemed to argue that experiential learning in the real world, or self-directed learning on topics of personal interest was better, more effective and longer-lasting than what's on offer in schools. This got a bit unfair on schools - many are much better than this, and no-one had a ready alternative for the opportunities offered by schools to disadvantaged children.

Nevertheless, all the examples of what's good about informal learning reminded me of recent struggles I've had in persuading teachers that there's a value in listening to children, that "child-centred" doesn't mean pandering to a child's every whim but recognising where she's at now and where she might be with some nudging and encouragement.

It also reminded me of my recent discussion with George Head at Glasgow University, who suspects that media education requires a different pedagogy. I'm not convinced: I think you can teach anything badly; but I can see that the when the balance of knowledge and experience between teacher and child is different, as in media education, then a different pedagogy can emerge. But obviously this will only happen if the teacher recognises the child's baseline knowledge and knows how to build on it. This requires not only a different pedagogy - listening to the child, looking for evidence that she is already addressing issues such as genre or modality, and being able to respond to it - but also knowing media education issues well enough in order to build on the child's prior learning and take it forward. This is a big ask for non-specialist teachers. It's why teachers get anxious at the prospect that "they know more than me!" and why teachers embarking on media education with younger children can often fail to challenge them enough.

Anyway, it's clear that media education offers a particular and significant "take" on the relationship between formal and informal learning. I hope the RSA/Youth UK project will be able to explore this.

Non-formal learning - what is it and who gets it?

I've been invited to attend an RSA event about non-formal learning called "Vision not Division – Learning for all in the 21^st Century". We’ve been offered a definition of "non-formal learning" as “…a process of social learning centred on the learner that is realized through activities outside of the formal education system” (World Development Report 2007), and we've been asked to make notes beforehand on our own experiences of this sort of thing. To help us do this, we've been given these examples: "playing in a local sports team, attending a youth club, undertaking voluntary service”.

This has set me wondering. First of all, why does the World Development Report use the term ‘social’? I see no necessary link between ‘non-formal’ and ‘social’. Then the three examples we've been given seem to me to comprise a very traditional, old-fashioned view of non-formal learning as something socially/morally acceptable with an emphasis on communal values: safe, nice activities that would keep us off the streets. I've got nothing against such activities, but if we were to confine our discussions to this sort of thing we ought to narrow down the definition to read “…a process of social learning centred on the learner that is realized through organised activities outside of the formal education system”

Even so, we ought be able to acknowledge that people often make conscious and purposeful decisions to learn something when they:

• · watch a documentary on TV or at the cinema
• · buy specialist magazines
• · visit websites
• · use a library
• · visit a museum, theme park or zoo
• · use a tourist guide to go sightseeing

These activities all involve learning and are often driven by people's incessant desire to learn things or at least to acquire information and/or techniques. They may of may not be 'social', but they're certainly informal, and they are 'centred on the learner': the providers in each case probably don't use the word 'pedagogy' but that's what they're doing.

The agenda for the event looks as though it's going to ignore things like ‘the digital revolution’ and ‘the information society’, even though these dominate other kinds of discussion about 21st century society and culture. I hope we don't end up just talking about condescending, socially-controlling versions of non-formal learning and ignoring the ways in which the media and leisure industries are thriving on people’s obvious and growing interest in all kinds of non-formal learning, achieved in pleasurable, unthreatening and often entertaining ways. Watch this space!

Ironic TV

There is no shortage of patronising TV these days. I've wiped from my memory files most of the endless sequences of fussy editing, naff drama reconstructions, silly effects and hammed-up commentaries I've drowsed through before summoning up enough energy to reach for the remote control. What a pleasure then to turn to Oxford Film and TV's lovingly crafted hatchet job on English Heritage, a series that expects its audience to be at least as intelligent as the filmmakers themselves.

The company has a track record in exposing corporate complacency in the arts and the media, which makes it all the more remarkable that English Heritage were dumb enough to let them in the door. Anyone looking for a model of media illiteracy should check out EH's CEO, Simon Thurley, on their website: "Conventional wisdom says that having a TV crew following you around while you work isn’t a very good idea," he says. "But in the end I agreed to the project because I think English Heritage will benefit from revealing itself more."

At the beginning of Friday's programme (The Queen, Her Lover and His Castle) we hear Thurley's eager prattling about "...the ultimate point of anything to do with heritage is it will improve the quality of people's lives". But we hear this in voice-over as a taxi whisks Thurley away from a photo call: what we see is a measured, ironic pan revealing a Deloitte strapline, "Clear Business Direction", emblazoned on the taxi doors. Right away, you know you are going to see some posh nitwits eagerly snatching at the rope with which to hang themselves.

Those of us who have worked in the publicly funded arts sector watch with horrified recognition as Thurley's steely-eyed wife Dr Anna Keay (no conflict of interest there, then) asserts her determination to spend £1.5 million of public money on an Elizabethan garden squeezed in between the backside of Kenilworth Castle and a busy main road. "I suspect sums of money of the scale of what we'll be spending at Kenilworth are spent all over the public sector every day on things that will have far less impact on people's life and happiness than Kenilworth Garden" she snaps. You can almost hear director Patrick Forbes licking his lips here as he inserts a clip from the BBC's 1971 Elizabeth R and lets it run for three ponderously naff seconds before Samuel West's narration resumes with "The omens...are not good."

If I'd ever delivered a project a year late and 35% over budget I'd never have heard the last of it, however good my excuses (and there are plenty on EH's own website). I suppose it just goes to show what you can get away with if you own enough castles.

I suppose it's my fault then?

It's a hard life being an EastEnders fan. There are too many occasions on which one has to endure watching Charlie Brooks flick her tongue to the corner of her mouth, roll her eyes and attempt to look evil, or listening to Adam Woodyatt squeak his way through yet another completely implausible emotional switchback.

John Altman is another tongue-flicker; I daresay not many people have spotted the similarities between nasty Nick Cotton and former Education Secretary of State Kenneth Baker, but they both use exactly the same little snake-like flick of the tongue in and out, and to pretty much the same effect: "Do not trust a word I say!" I am wearily awaiting the return of yet another dastardly Nick plot to destroy Dot's faith in the powers of redemption: how much more interesting it would have been - for Altman as well as for us, I'd have thought - if Nick really had come back as a reformed character and had to struggle to convince us all.

The surest indicator of an EastEnders scriptwriter scraping the bottom of the barrel is when they resort to moving a scene on by having a character retort "I suppose it's my fault then?" - always guaranteed to generate shrieks of horror and disbelief in our house. However, I am happy to report that I haven't heard it for a while. In fact, since we finally got Danielle's risibly contrived death out of the way, the last two episodes have been on top form. What do I mean by this? Well, there are several strong but psychologically plausible stories on the go, interwoven and thematically related, but otherwise not dependent on each other and, crucially some of the best performers getting their teeth into cliche-free scripts: Tanya and Max circling warily around each other again; the Fox family and Lucas perplexed by Patrick's intransigence; Stacey sulking on the sofa; Rick and Tiffany edging towards a false revelation. None of these problems is simple or has an obvious outcome; in each case the behaviour is subtle and complex with many different possible motivations: it keeps us fascinated even when hardly anything is happening.

Monday's episode, directed by Clive Arnold, was a little gem, despite featuring the tediously gullible Dot Cotton and Charlie Slater. Instead of the grindingly obvious set-piece weddings, dinners and funerals that EastEnders seems to pride itself on, we had almost everyone slopping about aimlessly on a damp Bank Holiday Monday, wondering what to do, and it was riveting. It reminded me of Arsenal's recent apparent return to form: you remember that they really do have a lot of brilliant players after all - and we weren't even seeing Nitin Ganatra or Kara Tointon, two other endlessly watchable talents.

Of course it won't last. My nightmare EastEnders episode would feature Janine, Ian, Pat, Peggy, Billy and Mo all shrieking "I suppose it's my fault then?" at each other, interspersed with shots of Ronnie, Roxy and Jack glaring inscrutably from behind curtains at first floor windows or from behind half-open doors. There'd also be candles guttering to extinction on a guestless dinner table; a lavish bouquet, a revealing postcard and a fried breakfast all crammed into various rubbish bins, and at least one scene would take place at that ridiculous allotment. If I could just get that Diederick Santer on my sofa, we'd get it sorted out in no time, I know we would.