Richard Berger

No Longer Just Making the Tea: Media Work Placements and Work-Based Learning in Higher Education

This chapter takes as its focus the experiences of work placement students on undergraduate creative and media programmes at the Media School, Bournemouth University. The School has almost 3,000 students, most of whom undertake some form of work placement as a formal aspect of their studies. It is perhaps an axiom now that such programmes of study in the post-1992 university sector are more industry facing — the word ‘vocational’ is often applied — and have been the subject of a great deal of criticism (see Berger and McDougall, 2012).1 However, we argue here that the work placement can also be an important and useful pedagogic experience if used in the right way, where students can develop further as critical thinkers.

A remaking pedagogy: adaptation and archetypes in the child’s multimodal reading and writing

ABSTRACT This paper proposes combining theories about, and practices of, using archetypes and adaptation in education for the purposes of multimodal literacy learning. Within such contexts, children of primary school age act as readers, performers and researchers, exploring and analysing existing adaptations of archetypal stories and images across time, space and platforms, as well as writers constructing and producing their own adaptations of archetypes in varying forms. Our suggestions are that ‘revisiting’ and ‘remaking’ existing texts and practices in the multimodal primary classroom can be a route to a deeper and more sophisticated learning experience, and one which challenges current definitions of reading, writing and literacy.

Hang a Right at the Abbey

The city of Bath in the English county of Somerset sits at the base of the Avon valley, built around a natural hot spring. English folklore has it that the spring was discovered by Bladud—later King Bladud—the father of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The Roman invasion saw the city—then named Aquae Sulis—become a site for rapid redevelopment. The area became famous for its distinctive stone buildings, which Jane Austen herself described as having a “white glare” (Persuasion 31). Bath was still walled in the author’s time, and the central maze of streets and corridors were home to ordinary working people. The wealthy inhabitants of Bath generally settled in the estates and grand houses arrayed on the fringes of the valleys overlooking the city below. It is necessary to get a sense of the topography of Bath because it is important not only to Austen’s work but also to how she was later represented by the Janeites and the Austen tourism industry.

Remediated Pedagogies? The Secret Life of Six Year Olds

In 2015, a new reality television program debuted on Channel 4 in the UK. The Secret Life of Four Year Olds was based on a pilot from the previous year, and this time around it was augmented by The Secret Life of Five Year Olds and The Secret Life of Six Year Olds, respectively. The program-makers stated that these three distinct age-group-led iterations offered different sites of developmental comparisons, and by doing so appropriated the conventions (age-not-stage) and contexts (the classroom) familiar to UK television audiences—particularly those with children of their own. Our analysis of The Secret Life of Six Year Olds reveals how it constructs a simulacrum of education, presenting a curated version of children’s learning and interactions through a fixed rig format, familiar to us from other reality TV shows. We note the irony of such a show, complete with expert commentary and critical responses, failing to identify (yet including) particular kinds of mediated learning. The children featured in this program exhibit considerable awareness of a transmedia landscape and are able to quote from, apply and combine a range of elements from different media sources—an adroitness that was not the focus of this particular “anthropological project” and one which was barely commented upon. We conclude that the program gives us an unintended insight into children’s productive practices that could and should form part of early-years education—a project we call (after Bolter and Grusin) “remediated pedagogy.”

Cultural Disneyland? The History of an Inferiority Complex

The early 1990s saw the beginning of the modern era of media education in the UK — what John Ellis would later term the ‘era of plenty’ (2000: 162). John Major’s government had created the first Department for National Heritage, which would later become the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). This government department would have specific responsibility for the media and creative industries. The DCMS would often come into conflict with the Department for Education, as the 1990s was a period when successive ministers attempted to define the ‘Creative Industries’ and tried to articulate what exactly this nebulous collection of activities contributed to the UK economy. In addition, the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act enabled polytechnics to become universities and award their own degrees for the first time, and this saw a boom in creative and media related courses being offered by a reconfigured higher education sector.