Building a Global Community for Media Education Research

Abstract

Julian participated in a plenary panel on international research collaboration. For this issue, both journals invited submissions developed from presentations at the Prague Summit. The two pairs of co-editors shared and co-reviewed the submissions and we present the two journals as a 'double issue' of largely post-Summit material. We are also co-publishing this opening piece, co-authored by the four editors. At the panel discussion in Prague, we wanted to move away from fault-lines, silos and paradigm wars, to build a strategy for working together. To do this, we have to manifest the intention in tangible work and outputs. We are trying to make sure we can build capacity in what is still a small community of practice through robust but supportive critical work with new researchers. We acknowledge that media education research, and its associated field of media literacy, are difficult spaces to work in. We continue our attempts, with some success but also some failures, to embed media education in curriculum and secure a mandate for media literacy as a civic entitlement. It's important to protect media literacy as a critical, creative, reflectively curatorial -or " mediadaptive " project from both the neo-protectionist 'tune out' agendas and the neo-liberal discourses of employability, coding (without decoding), enterprise and the corruption for profit of potentially democratic third-space networks. Facing the Challenges In the UK context, media education has been struggling recently after a long period of growth. Most certainly there is trouble ahead as a reactionary political administration strives to essentialize the educational curriculum and research landscape around STEM. Media education sits precariously on the hostile border territories between Arts and Humanities. We can plead for STEAM (with Arts added, as Prague keynote speaker and guest editor of the last MERJ, Andrew Burn, argues) but who is listening? In the US, the " No Child Left Behind " and " Race to the Top " madness continues along with momentum for educational technology in K-12 school. Technology companies and venture capitalists see educational technology as the next frontier, with $20 billion spent in elementary and secondary schools in 2014. We see relentless momentum in many communities, as iPads, apps and 1:1 classrooms are all the rage even though television continues to be the primary technology used in the home, with children ages 2 -11 spending 22 hours