Manifesto

If you have a few moments to spare over the next few weeks, you could check out the Manifesto for Media Education site, where educators and media specialists from around the world are being invited to post their thoughts and ideas on best practice, learning philosophy and the future of education, all around the context of media. Here are Pete Fraser and John Wardle, the minds behind the Manifesto project:

"This project is an attempt to develop a shared understanding, some shared reasons, for media education. We hope it will stimulate discussion within course teams and with students. We imagine it will lead to conversations about how we teach and what specific things we teach, but those are secondary questions. We believe we may uncover many reasons but it seems better to have articulated many as opposed to none and as Postman says ‘A definition is the starting point of a dispute, not the settlement’.

"On this website you will find a variety of writers’ summations of their reasoning for media education. These will be context specific and at times may feel at odds with one another. However we hope that by the end of the process we will have a better, more sustaining understanding of the purpose of what we do and that we will be able to draw on this understanding to keep us on track in the classroom and in defending and advocating our subject in the future."

With contributors such as Stephen Heppell, Henry Jenkins, David Buckingham and Natalie Fenton, it's a thought provoking set of readings which should get you reaching for your laptop to respond.

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