In Australia, the key concepts of media literacy education are the subject specific organising framework of the Media Arts strand of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts. Media Arts is considered part of the The Arts, alongside Dance, Drama, Music and Visual Arts. Students from the first year of school up to Year 10 (approximately 5-16 years) should have access to Media Arts, although how this occurs varies greatly between schools. The curriculum documents offer a flexible way to teach Media Arts. Although there are achievement standards that indicate what students should be able to do at each year level band, teachers are able to select the types of media to study based on their students interests and access to technologies. The Media Arts curriculum is underpinned by the key concepts of media education. In Australia, these are technologies, representations, institutions, audiences, languages and the recent addition of relationships.  

Key concepts

The key conceptual approach has a history in Australia that aligns with media literacy education in the UK and Canada (Buckingham, 2003; Jolls, Walkosz, & Morgenthaler, 2013). Instead of a set of processes, skills or competencies for students to achieve, the key concepts offer a lens through which forms of media past, present, and emerging media can be studied. Exploration of the media through the key concepts can occur through both media production and analysis (Partington & Buckingham, 2011). The concepts are non-hierarchical and although it can be helpful to understand them discreetly, the concepts often intertwine and overlap.

Technologies as a concept

Although the key concepts are connected, it can be useful to understand each one and examine how it is applied in situations where media literacy education is occurring. This research explicitly examines the concept of technologies. Technologies can be understood in multiple ways. We can consider how to use technologies, digital and non-digital, for media production. We might examine the types of technologies that are used in media production and learn how to use specific equipment and software. This is an important aspect of the concept of technologies. However, if this is the only aspect of technologies students explore, they miss out on developing nuanced understandings of how technology shapes, and is shaped by, our everyday social lives.

Through the concepts of technologies we can critically examine how technologies shape production practices through the social, political, economic and cultural contexts in which media productions are produced (Buckingham, 2019). The technologies used for media productions are not neutral and have biases (Stoddard, 2014), affordances and constraints built into them that shape users behaviours (Lüders, 2008; Williamson, 2017), whether these are purposeful or incidental.

This research aims to explore the research question ‘How is the Media Education key concept of ‘technologies’ enacted in classroom practice?’ I seek to discern how primary school teachers understand the concept of technologies and the kinds of learning experiences students undertake that advance their understanding of the concept. While this research occurred in the Australian context, the importance of the concept of technologies is relevant for media literacy educators internationally. This research offers insights into how to consider this concept in a deep and nuanced way.

The aim of this research was to investigate how the media literacy key concept of technologies was used by classroom teachers with different kinds of experiences in Media Arts education. A case study methodology was employed (Merriam, 2009; Stake, 1995) to allow the range of data collected at each site and to be examined individually and collectively. Three case study sites were purposefully selected (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). Each site consisted of a primary school teacher and their class of students. At the commencement of the study, all classes were about to undertake some form of Media Arts work, whether this was explicitly recognised or not. Case study 1 consisted of Dave, a specialist Digital Media Arts teacher and two classes of Year 5 and 6 students. Case study 2 featured Josh, a generalist primary school teacher with a strong interest in design, and approximately 50 Year 6 students. The final site, case study 3, consisted of Angela, a generalist primary school teacher and her class of Year 1 students. Data were collected over a unit of work from each case study site. This ranged from five to ten weeks depending on the unit teachers were implementing. Before any observations occurred, I conducted semi-structured interviews with each teacher to gain insight into the experiences of the teacher and their students. Additional semi-structured interviews occurred after most observation sessions and at the completion of the unit of work. Observations occurred four times at each site over the unit of work. Detailed field notes were taken. During this time, semi-structured interviews took place with some students in the class about the work they were doing. I undertook a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013, 2021) of the data. Each case was coded separately in the first instance to search for codes that related to the key concept of media literacy education. After a review of these individual codes, I determined a top-level theme called An uneven implementation of the key concepts, which included the concept of technologies through two sub-themes: Technologies as a tool rather than a key concept and Non-digital tools. I acknowledge that as a researcher my existing understanding of the field played a role in the importance I placed on the determined themes and that other researchers would have generated different themes from the data.

Two sub-themes were determined to help explore how the concept of technologies was enacted in classrooms undertaking Media Arts teaching and learning. The first sub-theme was Technologies as a tool rather than a key concept. The teachers in case studies 1 and 2 focused on how to use digital technologies to create media productions. The students receive different levels of instruction to help them with their production work. In case study 1, Dave expected the students to explore the technology largely on their own or with their peers. At times, this impacted on the productions of those students who were not as familiar with Scratch, the program they were using for their production. The students of case study 2 had more familiarity with the technology they were using, and their teacher provided scaffolding to help them explore new technologies such as drawing apps on their devices. Similar to case study 1 however, the focus remained on producing a production through technologies. This is one aspect of the concept of technologies, but the limited focus on the digital tools means students are not provided with opportunities to explore other aspects of the concept. The second sub-theme was Non-digital tools. The students of case study 3 were required to create a soundscape using materials around them. This soundscape represented a drawn landscape image. Students used materials such as pens, water bottles, leaves and their bodies to create foley sounds that were recorded by the teacher. The students did not have the opportunity to use the digital technology, but were still able to learn about the concept of technologies through their use of non-digital technologies. However, similarly to cases 1 and 2, the emphasis was still on the use of technology for media production, not critical notions of the concept of technologies.

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