THE (RE-)MAKING OF MEDIA EDUCATORS: TEACHER IDENTITIES

IN CHANGING TIMES

David Buckingham

Published in P. Benson and A. Chik (eds.) Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Teacher Education:
International Perspectives London: Routledge, 2014

ABSTRACT

Media Studies is one of the most important disciplinary contexts in which educators around the
world have sought to integrate popular culture into school education. The professionalization of
Media Studies teaching also raises interesting questions about the ways in which teachers'
engagements with popular culture as subject matter are linked to the development of their
identities as teachers. This chapter explores how and why individuals become Media Studies
teachers, and what might this tell us about teachers' professional identity more broadly. It draws
on in-depth interviews with practising secondary school teachers conducted as part of a larger
project on learning progression in media education. The chapter considers three dimensions of
these teachers’ professional identities – personal, institutional and subject-related. This analysis
is set within a broader account of the changing nature of contemporary schooling, and the
history of Media Studies as a specialist subject.

Introduction

How and why do individuals become Media Studies teachers? How do they construct
and define their identities as teachers, in relation to their personal history, their
institutional location and the ‘subject culture’ of Media Studies? And what might this tell
us about the changing nature of teachers' professional identities more broadly? In this
chapter, I address these questions by drawing on in-depth interviews with practising
teachers conducted as part of a larger project on learning progression in media
education.

Teacher Identity and Media Studies

As Beijaard et al. (2004) suggest, the notion of ‘professional identity’ in relation to

teachers is somewhat ill-defined. Recent work in this area tends to adopt a
poststructuralist approach: identity is seen here as fluid, flexible, even fragmented - but
also as contingent and contextual (Beauchamp & Thomas 2009). Research suggests that
the widespread marketisation of education and the incursion of new corporate
approaches to management are creating new definitions of professional identity (Ball
2003). Nevertheless, how these changes work out ‘on the ground’ for individual
teachers will be very variable, not least depending on the cultures of specific subject
disciplines.

1
Media Studies provides a revealing case study in this respect. Although there are
elements of media education within ‘subject English’, Media Studies in England and Wales
is an optional subject, taught in award-bearing courses at the upper end of the
secondary school. However, most Media Studies teachers are trained as, and remain,
teachers of English. The only specialist training most receive is in the form of one-day
sessions provided by examining bodies or commercial providers; and schools often find
great difficulty in recruiting teachers with even a minimal level of experience in the field.
Meanwhile, the subject is regularly vilified in the media and by politicians, for whom it is
synonymous with ‘dumbing down’ and the decline in academic standards. In most
schools, Media Studies is perceived to have low status; and lower achieving students are
often guided into selecting it as an option at 14+ in preference to more ‘academic’
subjects. As such, media teachers have almost by definition been relatively marginalised:
schools are unlikely to have a Media Studies ‘department’, or at least one that consists
of a cohort of trained specialists.

All these factors might be seen to result in a degree of uncertainty or insecurity in these
teachers’ professional identities; and in this respect, Media Studies has much in common
with other low status subjects such as Design and Technology and Physical Education
(Paechter & Head 1996). Historically, media teachers have tended to compensate for
(or perhaps to rationalise) this sense of marginalisation by recourse to a view of their
work as inherently radical or oppositional. This self-defined sense of radicalism is of
course partly political: at least in the 1970s and 1980s, Media Studies was strongly
aligned with a leftist (Marxist, feminist, anti-racist) critique of the media (see Bolas
2009). However, it also embodied a kind of educational radicalism: advocates of Media
Studies frequently engaged in a ritualistic critique of the apparent elitism of its parent
discipline of English (e.g. Masterman 1985); while others saw it as an even broader
challenge to the ‘knowledge politics’ of traditional schooling (e.g. Alvarado & Ferguson
1983). The stridency of these arguments has mellowed significantly in recent years, for a
variety of reasons that cannot be explored in any detail here; yet it remains a latent
force that often resurfaces in response to public vilification.

In terms of teacher identity, this can lead to a rather romantic – perhaps even
vainglorious – view of the media teacher as an individual subversive, resenting but also
finding a kind of affirmation in their own marginalisation. This subversive self-image
emerges quite strongly from Chris Richards’ illuminating qualitative study of media
teachers (Richards 1998). However, Richards understands this self-image to a large
extent in relation to the subjective biographies of his interviewees – especially their
experience of their own schooling. Their particular institutional settings and the wider
political context are largely missing from his account, except perhaps as an oppressive
force to be resisted. This absence may have been explicable in a context of greater
teacher autonomy, but it is difficult to justify now, fifteen years since Richards’ study was
conducted.

While the radical political ‘edge’ of Media Studies to some extent abides, at least for its
older practitioners, the era of the Media Studies teacher as a pedagogical guerrilla – a
lone, embattled educational revolutionary – has largely passed. There are several

2
reasons for this, which partly reflect broader changes in the politics of education. Thus,
we have seen a general ‘de-professionalisation’ – or perhaps ‘re-professionalisation’ – of
teaching, through the focus on standards and effectiveness, and the intensification of
performance management and surveillance (Day et al. 2006). To a large extent, this has
led to a reduction in individual teacher autonomy: spaces and opportunities for
‘resistance’ appear to have been squeezed. At the same time, the marketisation of
education has led to growing competition between schools, in which aspects of ‘public
relations’ have become increasingly significant (Kenway & Bullen 2001). It has also led to
the emergence of new types of schools, including ‘specialist schools’ that have been
granted additional government funding to develop strengths in particular curriculum
areas.

These developments have had ambivalent consequences for media education. The three
secondary schools in which we conducted our research were all specialist schools for
Media Arts, and they were among a group of more than 50 such schools nationally
designated in this way (more have since been created). Meanwhile, in the intensified
competition between schools, the use and public display of media technology has come
to serve as a kind of symbolic guarantee that a school is providing a cutting-edge,
modern education (Buckingham 2007; Kenway & Bullen 2001). On one level, both these
developments would imply that – at least in our research settings – Media Studies would
no longer be perceived as a low-status option for low-status students. Yet while Media
Studies enjoyed a high level of official endorsement and support from senior
management in these schools, it was also inflected in particular ways. Those with a
longer history in the field might insist that Media Studies is not the same as Media Arts,
which seems to place a primary emphasis on creative media production; and while it
may well involve the use of technology, nor is it the same as ‘Information and
Communication Technology’ (ICT). Even in these apparently auspicious institutional
settings, then, the status and identity of Media Studies remained somewhat unclear and
ambivalent.

Identity talk

The interviews on which this chapter is based are drawn from a much more extensive
project, which was conducted in seven schools over a three year period. Constraints of
space preclude a detailed account of the contexts of the three secondary schools,
although more detail can be found elsewhere (Buckingham et al. forthcoming).
However, it should be noted that these schools were in highly contrasting catchment
areas. Hillfield is located in a very socially disadvantaged satellite town south of London,
while Orchard is in the centre of one of the most affluent cities in the south of England.
Babington, with which Orchard is ‘federated’, is in a more socially mixed, suburban area
of the same city. (All names used in this chapter are pseudonyms.)

The data presented here are drawn primarily from in-depth interviews with sixteen
secondary school teachers, conducted in the early stages of the project. Almost all were
subject specialists: most had trained as (and remained) English teachers, but were

3
teaching classes explicitly labelled as Media Studies. A further two were teachers of Art
and Citizenship with an interest in the area, and three were senior managers.

My analysis here draws on ‘discursive psychology’ (e.g. Edwards & Potter 1992): I am
interested in how the teachers position themselves discursively, and how they construct
or seek to define their identity through talk. My analysis is organised in terms of three
broad dimensions of teacher identity, which I have labelled personal, institutional and
subject-related (in the sense of subject discipline). Although these aspects are obviously
connected and indeed mutually constitutive, this distinction provides a rough and ready
way of organising the account.

Personal identities: identifications and motivations

What versions of personal and professional identity, and what autobiographical

narratives, did these teachers construct? In general, this research suggests that teachers
rarely come to Media Studies because they are interested in media for their own sake.
There is a striking contrast here with the passion that many English teachers (including
several of those in our sample) express when describing their love of literature. Of
course, many teachers have particular media enthusiasms, and may even be committed
‘fans’ of particular texts or genres, but very few chose to mention this in seeking to
explain their motivation for teaching Media Studies. Still less are Media Studies teachers
likely to be creative media practitioners – and here the interesting contrast would be
with Art or Music, where teachers often maintain their own creative practice outside
the classroom. Peter, one of the most experienced media teachers in our study,
suggested that this was changing, and that younger teachers were more likely to have
grown up with media and even to have studied the subject at university – although we
found few instances of this in our research. It might also be noted that this kind of
generational shift was anticipated (perhaps optimistically) by Murdock and Phelps (1973)
forty years ago.

As we have argued elsewhere (Burn et al. 2010), teachers’ and students’ media
preferences are less polarised than is often assumed; and media education can
potentially provide a ‘third space’ where their media experiences can be brought
together in a constructive dialogue. Yet even for those teachers who did have well-
developed enthusiasms for particular aspects of media, the possibility of sharing these
with students was viewed with ambivalence. One of our teachers, for example, was a
writer of ‘fan fiction’, especially within fantasy genres; while another described himself as
an avid computer gamer. Yet both were aware that these specialised tastes might not be
shared by all of their students; and the latter teacher argued that there was a ‘tight line’
between recognising students’ enthusiasms and the need for a rigorous approach to
teaching – ‘that’s not the student you want to encourage, who’s just going to be a lazy
ass and sit around and play computer games and just think “oh great, that’s all they do”’.

For most of the teachers, media were not identified as a major preoccupation but
simply as a fact of life. While a few non-specialists in our wider study expressed strong
criticisms of media and their effects – and while some tended to talk about media in

4
terms of ‘manipulation’ – the sense of moral or political suspicion that has historically
characterised educators’ discussions of media and popular culture was not much in
evidence here (cf. Lusted 1985).

As we shall see, some teachers had ended up teaching Media Studies without especially
wanting to do so; but of those who had deliberately sought the subject out, there was
some sense of the ‘subversive’ motivations voiced in Richards’ (1998) study. Claire, a
teacher at Orchard school, began her narrative with the line ‘I became a media teacher
because I was very naughty at school’. She described how her rebellion against the
‘traditional’, ‘regimented’ system of her school in Singapore, and a period studying at
Oxford – ‘I hated it... we weren’t doing anything modern and it didn’t feel relevant at all’
- eventually led her to seek out Cultural Studies at its original source, the University of
Birmingham. After an unsatisfactory period working in the media industries, she opted
for a teacher training course with a specialist Media Studies component, and eventually
found her first teaching post in a rural school:

I remember walking down this long corridor and just feeling like I was in prison... And I
actually set up a Media Studies course and it was fascinating how these children, often
from the sorts of environments where they hadn’t questioned where information comes
from or who creates the media or anything like that, to actually open up their eyes to
the idea that it is created, there is a process behind it, there is authorship, it was just
fantastic.

While Claire saw the middle-class children at her current school as much more ‘media
savvy’, she nevertheless argued that they tended to take a ‘naive’ view of the commercial
forces at work in newer media such as social networking sites. Her self-presentation as
in some way subversive was thus expressed not only in relation to traditional academic
subjects and the institution of the school, but also to the culture of the students – who,
she argued, needed to ‘have their eyes opened’, and know more about how they were
being ‘targeted as a market’ by the media industries.

Other more experienced Media Studies teachers told similar stories of resistance, if not
outright subversion. Nick, a senior teacher at Hillfield School, described how he had
deliberately chosen American Studies at university in preference to English – ‘I had the
very great fortune not to do an English degree... I didn’t want to be told which books to
read’. This led to encounters with Cultural Studies and approaches to analysing visual
culture, film and popular music, which were developed further in his postgraduate
teacher training course. Nick’s ‘narrative of self’ stressed the formative role of reading
in his life – ‘everything that I have achieved in any part of my life has been to do with
reading’ – but also his individual resistance to a traditional literary education.

For Nick, as for some others, the route into Media Studies was also informed by a
growing interest in children’s everyday engagements with popular culture. He described
how his experience of media teaching had led to a ‘complete paradigm shift’ in his
approach, away from front-of-class ‘exposition’ towards a more student-centred
pedagogy: ‘now I’m much more like an art teacher, I’m at the back of the class, I look
over the shoulders of the kids and see what they’re doing’. Several other teachers

5
argued that media teaching necessitated such a move away from ‘transmission’
pedagogy, towards an approach that started from ‘the student’s point of view’ –
although they accepted that this was not always an easy or comfortable move to make.

A few of our teachers had had some professional experience in the media industries –
such as publishing, journalism and television – prior to entering the profession, although
this was generally not extensive. Yet interestingly, none of them saw this as especially
relevant to their teaching of Media Studies. Jackie, a teacher at Babington, had worked as
a journalist, and said she would sometimes tell her students ‘anecdotal stories’ about
‘what happens in a newsroom’, but in general she saw these experiences as ‘quite
separate’: ‘I see me as a teacher as quite different from me as a journalist’. Significantly,
she was also comparatively reluctant to teach Media Studies (for reasons to be explored
below), even though she had been recruited to the school partly in order to do so.

While our interviewees’ reasons for teaching Media Studies were therefore fairly
diverse, hardly any of them seemed to have been motivated – at least initially – by any
sense of burning mission or political conviction. Even those who had since developed a
central interest in the subject or achieved a position of responsibility for it tended to
present this as an accidental, even arbitrary matter. They had happened to meet
somebody or choose a particular postgraduate teaching course that had sparked their
interest; or they had simply taken a job and then been asked to take on a Media Studies
course. Few had actively chosen to become media teachers, and most lacked any formal
training: only two of the specialist teachers across our three secondary schools had
received any training beyond occasional in-service sessions, or on-the-job advice and
support.

This lack of training inevitably led to a sense of insecurity: as Brian, an experienced

Media Studies teacher at Hillfield, described, he felt constantly ‘exposed’ as a media
teacher in a way that he did not when teaching English. For some, starting out teaching
Media Studies had been ‘a baptism of fire’ (as John, the Head of Media Studies at
Orchard, put it); while several others described themselves as ‘making it up as you go
along’. Some suggested that this was inevitable, as new media technologies and teaching
topics emerged – and it was suggested that Media Studies was under greater pressure
than some other subjects to keep pace with change. As Brian put it:

I still feel as if I’m learning. You’re still developing. I don’t think as a Media Studies
teacher you can turn around and say ‘that’s it, I’m finished now, I know it’, because it’s
just not possible.

However, this lack of training made it difficult for teachers to take ownership of what
they were doing in the classroom. Several described their own early efforts in teaching
the subject – and those of other, less experienced media teachers – as a matter of ‘going
through the motions’, without fully understanding why they were doing what they were
doing, or knowing how best to respond to the students. Many depended upon schemes
of work and teaching materials devised by more experienced media teachers within
their department (in some cases, several years previously), and many felt unable or
unwilling to develop or extend these materials further.

6
As we shall see, the ambivalent relationship with the ‘parent discipline’ of English was
critical in this respect: in taking on Media Studies, English teachers were having to deal
not only with texts that might be unfamiliar to them, but also with a more conceptually-
oriented approach to dealing with texts, based more on critical theory than on
conventional literary criticism. At Orchard and Babington Schools, this had led to more
or less explicit resistance to Media Studies among some of the English teachers. While
this manifested itself partly as a resistance to technology it was often somewhat
broader. For example, Jackie (the former journalist) was also critical of what she saw as
the reductive perspective of Media Studies, at least as it had been developed at Orchard:
she described the approach to close textual analysis as unduly ‘technical’ and indeed
‘almost mathematical’, in contrast to what she saw as the more open-ended, more
‘progressive’, approach of English.

These issues inevitably have consequences in terms of the quality of teaching, and hence
for the status of the subject. The lack of engagement on the part of some teachers
seemed to have contributed to a decline in the popularity of Media Studies at Orchard
School. As Peter, one of the senior teachers, put it:

I think a lot of the reason why children have stopped valuing media at Key Stage 4 is because
we’ve had teachers teaching it who don’t value it and who communicate that to the children…
We’ve had teachers over the last few years who have seen themselves so much as English rather
than media teachers that they have communicated a kind of devaluing of media...

According to Peter, these tendencies had been accentuated by workplace reforms,

which meant that teachers had less time available for curriculum development meetings.
In a sense, the success of Media Studies within the school had also contained the seeds
of failure: ‘mainstreaming’ the subject as a core curriculum entitlement had inevitably
resulted in it being taught by teachers who were indifferent, or even antagonistic,
towards it, and this had in turn been communicated to students. This had led to a
growing resistance among students, as John, the Head of Media Studies, described: ‘now
it’s [in the core curriculum], you get students going “why am I doing this, I don’t want to
do it” and resisting that quite viciously, from spoiling their exam papers through to
refusing to do the work and all kinds of things’. The fate of Media Studies in this context
might be taken as an object lesson in being careful about what you wish for.

Institutional identities: status and purpose

Subjects, it could be said, also have ‘careers’, in the sense that their role and status can
vary significantly over time within a given institution. The three schools in our research
were (or had recently been) media arts specialist schools; yet the reasons why they had
chosen to apply for this designation, the functions that media education appeared to
serve for them, and how it was understood, were very diverse. Combined with
significant differences in terms of location and the social class backgrounds of the
students, these factors all had implications for the status and practice of media
education.

7
Orchard was one of the earliest specialist media arts schools in England, with a history
of innovation in this area stretching back almost fifteen years. On being granted
specialist status, it had made Media Studies a compulsory part of the curriculum, and
while this was based in the English Department (significantly re-named ‘English, Culture
and Communication’), staff had also developed media work in several other curriculum
areas. During the period of our research, however, there was a growing sense that this
initiative had reached the end of its cycle. The school had not sought to renew its
specialist media arts status, and established a new specialism in languages instead. The
specialist Media Studies examination course for students in Year 10 and 11 had been
made optional, and numbers had significantly fallen; although a new, more vocational
course, the ill-fated Creative and Media Diploma, was also being offered (see
Buckingham 2013). Meanwhile, the school was moving towards the International
Baccalaureate system at 16+, which included a narrower emphasis on Film Studies rather
than Media Studies. To some degree, these developments were symptomatic of the
school’s entrepreneurial approach to innovation. Indeed, the headteacher argued that
the impact of such innovations depended precisely on them being regularly renewed.

The situation at Hillfield was very different. The school had won specialist status
relatively recently, and this formed part of the headteacher’s concerted efforts to
transform the school and especially to ‘lever up’ examination results. Media arts was
chosen as the focus because it would be seen as ‘vibrant’ and ‘modern’ and as potentially
offering different employment prospects for students - and hence, according to the
headteacher, could be a means of encouraging otherwise reluctant students to remain in
school. As at Orchard, media work was based in English, where Media Studies was
taught as a compulsory course throughout the school; however, there was also a strong
emphasis on media within the Art department, which was generally seen as one of the
most successful departments in the school. As such, the media arts specialism was seen
to sit comfortably between English and Art, while also involving a focus on technology
that would be applicable across the curriculum.

The institutional position of Media Studies in these schools was therefore quite
ambivalent. On one level, it enjoyed an unusually high level of official endorsement from
senior management. Yet in both schools, media had been chosen as the focus for
specialism partly because of its potential application across the curriculum. While all the
senior managers whom we interviewed rehearsed familiar arguments about the
importance of media education in the modern world, its relevance to students’ lives and
(at least in Hillfield) its vocational potential, it was clear that their decision to focus on
media was also strategic. Media, one argued, was a ‘dimension’ of the curriculum, rather
than merely a ‘subject’; and as such, a media specialism was less likely to be seen as a
matter of one department ‘taking over’ or colonising others for its own advantage. Yet
in this cross-curricular application, the boundaries between media and technology were
often less than clear.

The status and definition of the subject thus depended to a great extent on the
institutional trajectory of each school. The schools were bound to compete within a
wider marketised environment, in which headteachers and senior managers had to act

8
as entrepreneurs, selling a certain ‘vision’ of the role of the school – and especially of its
future role – not just to prospective parents and to funding bodies (both commercial and
governmental) but also to their own staff and students. However, the schools were
engaging in this process in very different social circumstances and with very different
histories.

At Orchard, and by extension at Babington, media education was predominantly

understood in terms of its cultural or artistic dimensions: cultural competence in the
field of media was seen as a legitimate extension of the cultural capital of what Bennett
et al. (2009) have termed the contemporary middle-class ‘cultural omnivore’. By
contrast, at Hillfield, with a very different social class intake and with intense pressure to
raise examination performance, it was hoped that media education would play a key role
in terms of student motivation: media and technology were seen to possess an appeal
that would help to counter problems of truancy and low aspirations. However, as
compared with the cultural orientation of Orchard, there was also a stronger emphasis
here on the critical dimensions of media education – an emphasis that might reflect an
underlying sense of working-class children as having a greater need to resist media
influence.

Subject identities

As this implies, ‘becoming a media teacher’ can mean different things in different
institutional contexts. In identifying themselves as Media Studies teachers, individuals
may have very different ideas about the status, aims and ‘subject knowledge’ of media
education. Even for the few who have studied media at university, the identity of the
subject at a school level is often very different – although this is also the case with many
other subjects, including English. For the teachers in our research, the
institutionalisation of the subject in public examinations did not necessarily appear to
provide a more clearly defined identity. Indeed, several argued that the examinations
system acted as a conservative force, undermining their attempts to respond to changes
in media technology and in children’s media experiences.

As I have noted, the relationship between Media Studies and English was a particular
source of tension and uncertainty here. We were offered many conflicting accounts of
this relationship. On the one hand, Media Studies was presented as a challenge to
English – both to the traditional canonical approach to literature teaching, and to the
exclusive preoccupation with print literacy. Yet on the other, it was frequently argued
that media education was – or should be - a central part of English, and indeed that the
two subjects should not be seen as separate, much less antagonistic. These apparently
contradictory claims were often made by the same individuals; although those who were
less experienced in teaching Media Studies tended to describe it as quite distinct from
English, while those who were more familiar with it were more inclined to emphasise
areas of overlap or potential transfer between them.

9
Nevertheless, these differences were described in quite diverse ways. Some argued that
Media Studies was more conceptual and analytical than English – although it was also
suggested that it could engage more directly with affective or subjective aspects of
students’ experience. As we have seen, some saw Media Studies as necessitating a move
away from ‘transmission’ pedagogy – and here again, it was contrasted with English,
which was seen as more desk-bound, and more ‘mechanical’. On the other hand,
teachers who were less experienced in Media Studies tended to see it as more teacher-
dominated and less open-ended.

These claims may well reflect the age group that is being referred to, and the elements
of the subject that individual teachers prioritised: for some of our interviewees, the
critical or analytical aspects of the subject were much more important than creative
production, while others claimed quite the opposite. In some cases, they were also
institutionally specific. For example, Jackie suggested that the ‘technical’ emphasis that
she identified in her school’s approach to Media Studies was partly a consequence of the
fact that it was led by male teachers: if it were to address questions about
‘communication’, ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’, she argued, it would have been very different
and ‘much more interesting’ for her.

Ultimately, the fairness or accuracy of these observations is beside the point: what is
more notable is the way that Media Studies constantly needs to be defined through its
relationship to its ‘parent’ – or perhaps its ‘other’. While this is true historically and in
scholarly accounts of the subject (see Buckingham 1992; Masterman 1985), it is also
apparent in teachers’ everyday negotiations of their identities as subject teachers.
Defining who you are (or might become) as a Media Studies teacher necessarily entails
defining who you are (or are not) as an English teacher. Similarly, for those who resist
Media Studies, there is a contrary process of self-construction, in which apparently
essential values of English are asserted and distinguished from those of Media Studies.

Yet despite the sense of ‘comfort’ that most described in their identities as English
teachers, there are clearly several (co-existing but also potentially competing) ‘versions’
of English, and of being an English teacher (Marshall 2000). English at university may have
changed as a result of the impact of literary theory and challenges to the canon,
although the impact of this on English in schools has arguably been quite limited.
However, English in schools has changed in other ways. Especially in the earlier years of
UK secondary schools, it has effectively transmuted into ‘literacy’ – a much more
instrumental notion of English, in which claims about the subject’s cultural mission or
about ‘personal growth’ seem almost prehistoric. The marginalisation of these creative
or affective aspects of English teaching, and the new emphasis on functional skills, were
described with regret by many of our interviewees. Nevertheless, subject English still
appeared to provide a greater sense of security – a more settled identity – than it was
possible to achieve as a teacher of Media Studies.

Cutting across this is another troubled relationship, between Media Studies and
technology (Buckingham 2007). As I have suggested, the technological dimensions of
media education were a particular ‘selling point’ in the context of these schools, both
marketing the schools to parents and in promoting the media specialism to potentially

10
reluctant staff. The overlap or confusion between ‘media’ and ‘technology’ was especially
apparent in the discourse of senior managers, whose accounts tended to focus on
interactive whiteboards and learning platforms rather than the critical concepts of Media
Studies. This identification of ‘media’ with ‘technology’ was also apparent in our
interviews and observations of non-specialist teachers, in some cases offering them a
basis on which to welcome ‘media-and-technology’ into their classrooms, while in
others causing them to resist it. These arguments were also frequently tied up with
invocations of ‘creativity’, a term that was particularly fashionable in educational
discourse at the time (see Banaji, Burn & Buckingham 2006): for some at least, ‘media’
appeared to offer ‘technology plus creativity’, giving it potentially wider appeal.

While the technological dimension may have increased the general palatability of media
education, it also contributed to the discomfort and even resistance of some English
teachers in particular. While this was partly about the ‘stress’ of managing technology in
the classroom, it also reflected a broader view of the differences between English and
Media Studies. Although this discomfort was not confined to female teachers, it also had
a definite gender dimension. Several female teachers presented themselves not so much
as technologically incompetent but as simply not interested; and in two cases, this was
explicitly linked to what they saw as the ‘male bias’ of Media Studies within the school –
which, Claire argued, was dominated by ‘boys with their toys’.

A further concern, voiced most strongly by the more experienced media teachers, was
that the critical aspects of media education would be marginalised by the emphasis on
technology. The key aim, they argued, was not simply that students should learn to
make a web-page or a sequence from a computer game, but that they should be
engaging with more theoretical questions, for example about representation or the
targeting of audiences. The difficulty, as Nick put it, was ‘marrying up’ the use of
technology with the ‘conceptual’ dimensions of media education – ‘looking beyond what
you see and looking at other layers of meaning’ – and finding meaningful ways of
measuring this. As this suggests, the attempt to define a distinct subject identity for
Media Studies is likely to prove a continuing struggle.

Conclusion

This chapter has presented a case study of Media Studies as a means of raising broader
questions about the construction of teachers’ professional identities. For numerous
reasons, Media Studies represents a very particular case; and the circumstances of the
schools in our research are not necessarily representative of the broader position and
status of media education. Yet, in a sense, the specificity of this case is partly the point.
There is a limit to how far we can understand the construction of teacher identities
simply in terms of individual biography. As I have shown, identity construction takes
place within particular institutional contexts and particular subject cultures – contexts
and cultures that are themselves diverse and subject to change. Teachers’ identities are
flexible, sometimes fragmentary and contradictory, and always highly contingent. Identity
is, above all, a continuing process rather than a fixed possession: it is something we do
rather than something we are. To this extent, the notion of identity may itself imply an

11
illusory stability: we might do better to talk about ‘being a teacher’ as a matter of
multiple identifications rather than of a singular identity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The research reported here was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research
Council, as part of the project ‘Developing Media Literacy: Towards a Model of Learning
Progression’. I would like to thank Mandy Powell, Becky Parry and Andrew Burn for
their collaboration, and the teachers who gave their time to be interviewed.

REFERENCES

Alvarado, M. & Ferguson, B. (1983). Media Studies, the curriculum and discursivity.
Screen, 24(3): 20-34

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education
Policy, 18(2): 215-228.

Banaji, S., Burn, A. & Buckingham, D. (2006). Rhetorics of Creativity: A Review of the
Literature. London: Creative Partnerships.

Beauchamp, C. & Thomas, L. (2009). Understanding teacher identity: an overview of the

literature and implications for teacher education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(2):
175-189

Beijaard, D., Meijer, P.C. & Verloop, N. (2004). Reconsidering research on teachers’
professional identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20: 107-128.

Bennett, T., Savage, M., Silva, E., Warde, A., Gayo-Cal, M. & Wright, D. (2009). Culture,
Class, Distinction. London: Routledge.

Bolas, T. (2009). Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies. Bristol:
Intellect.

Buckingham, D. (1992). English and Media Studies: making the difference. In Alvarado, M.
& Boyd-Barrett, O. (Eds.). Media Education: An Introduction. London: BFI/Open University
Press.

Buckingham, D. (2007). Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture.
Cambridge: Polity.

12
Buckingham, D. (2013). Teaching the creative class? Media education and the creative
industries in the age of ‘participatory culture’. Journal of Media Practice, 14(1): 25-41.

Buckingham, D., Burn, A., Parry, B. & Powell, M. (forthcoming). Developing Media Literacy:
Creativity, Culture and Critique. London: Routledge.

Burn, A., Buckingham, D., Parry, B. & Powell, M. (2010). Minding the gaps: teachers’
cultures, students’ cultures. In D. Alvermann (ed.) Adolescents’ Online Literacies. New
York: Peter Lang.

Day, C., Stobart, G., Sammons, P. & Kington, A. (2006). Variations in the work and lives
of teachers: relative and relational effectiveness. Teachers and Teaching, 12(2): 169-192.

Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.

Kenway, J. & Bullen, E. (2001). Consuming Children: Education, Entertainment, Advertising.

Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lusted, D. (1985). A history of suspicion. In Lusted, D. & Drummond, P. (Eds.). TV and

Schooling (pp. 11-18). London: British Film Institute.

Marshall, B. (2000). English Teachers: The Unofficial Guide. London: Routledge.

Masterman, L. (1985). Teaching the Media. London: Comedia.

Murdock, G. & Phelps, G. (1973). Mass Media and the Secondary School. London:
Macmillan/Schools Council.

Paechter, C. and Head, J. (1996). Gender, identity, status and the body: life in a marginal
subject. Gender and Education, 8(1): 21-29.

Richards, C. (1998). Teaching Media Studies: ‘The cool thing to do’? Changing English,
5(2): 175-188.

13