Representations of students on screen

Any reader of Open Screens is likely to need little convincing of the importance screen cultures play in society. Rudine Sims Bishop (1990), when writing as an educator about the power of literature, emphasised how cultural representations function as windows into others’ lives and other worlds but also as mirrors – as a means of affirmation and identity formation, reflecting back experiences and offering a means to explore one’s own individual sense of belonging. Bishop’s (1990) work has informed many of the debates about representation explored in this issue. The term ‘students’ may conjure ideas and images informed by personal experience, but also by media representations of all kinds. When considering what these representations ‘do’, many questions arise: what can screen representations tell us about what it means to be a student? What experiences might students encounter and in what contexts? What does a student look like? What can representations of students tell us about a specific society and its central tenets and concerns? What students are represented, and who lacks representation? Many of the articles in this issue provide insight into several of these questions at once, helping to critically examine the construction of the student on screen. This introduction will provide a brief overview of some of the concepts and ideas about students on screen already in existence within academic publishing, before providing an overview of the Students on Screen project from which it stems. Finally, it will provide a summary of the issue to help you navigate it.