Media Education Goes to School: Young People Make Meaning of Media and Urban Education

Media Education Goes to School examines the struggles involved in integrating media education across the curriculum at a small urban school. Based on quasi-ethnographic research – specifically semi-formal individual and group interviews with twenty-one participants and participant-observation – the text focuses on how students understand and make meaning of media education in their schools, and what they know about urban education and urban school reform. The book argues against the neoliberal ethos that continuously harms urban youth and the rhetoric of new school reform that replicates, not heals, subjected social positions. Media education is a necessity in secondary schooling, but it cannot be thoroughly integrated into schools until significant structural changes are made in education: this book positions the site of change through the struggles students express with their own experience of education.