Section 4 - Media Production
As well as having a go at their own productions, students will need to consider the pedagogic rationale for such work.
Several rationales have been proposed for media production work, which students might like to consider, perhaps by evaluating them or rank-ordering them. They are summarised as follows:
Analysis - a powerful rationale for students to make their own media texts is to help them to understand the composition and construction of such texts, the better to analyse the texts they encounter later.
Literacy - this rationale can subsume the previous one, but there would be an equal emphasis on the 'reading' and 'writing' of media texts as valuable activities in their own right, though they would be conceptually related.
Creativity - a quite different rationale is that the making of media texts is a creative, expressive enterprise. This rationale is complicated by contesting versions of what 'creativity' might mean (see Loveless for a helpful review of literature on creativity).
Simulation - in this rationale, students lean about media institutions and industries in particular by simulating the processes of media production in such contexts. this might involve taking roles as members of film productioncompanies, advertising agncies, media regulatorsor compter games studios, for instance.
Vocational - this rationale, like the previous one, proposes that students simulate the processes of media industries, but here the emphasis is on preparation for potential employment in these industries, and especially on the gaining of practical skills in, for instance,video editing, web authoring or print journalism. This emphasis is, naturally, most in evidence in specialist vocational exam courses for older students; but Buckingham et al (1996) propose a pre-vocational version of this emphasis which might be invoked lower down the age range.
 
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