Media literacy education in primary years: carrying on regardless

This think- piece shares emerging ideas about media education, which the authors permit themselves to explore despite the current ‘strangulation’ of media studies in England. By ‘carrying on regardless’ we refer to an aspiration we have to continue to develop our pedagogical and theoretical approaches to media education, rather than having to expend energy always defending the subject and reformulating it to suit the discourses of populist politics. As such we reflect back on the Developing Media Literacy research project and consider our interpretations of the data in the light of recent thinking about cognition, constructivism and curriculum (more Cs!) in learning and pedagogy. We suggest that there is still important work to be done in terms of developing pedagogy which enables complex concepts to be understood, operationalized and questioned by children. We do so with the assumption implicit (as it is in most other subjects) that this work is important for the individual, the community and society (and that we do not need to spend our word count reinventing that particular wheel).