Towards 'creative media literacy'

In this chapter, perhaps counterintuitively, we begin by challenging the orthodoxies of two key terms in media education (creativity and literacy) and then suggest that by bringing them together in a new way we can provide a framework for media production work that is critical, reflective and student-centred. We understand that production work takes place in a variety of educational contexts, some of which are explicitly vocational, but we suggest here that, if claims for production work are to be made as part of a wider project of literacy, some of the assumptions about the affordances of such work must be addressed and subjected to scrutiny. We propose, ultimately, the concept of ‘creative literacy’ – a critically oriented set of attributes with which students practise a systematic interrogation of their own productive processes and the meanings attributed to them. Through a philosophically grounded critical framework and examples of pedagogic practice drawn from a three year study of student production work we show how creative literacy can be recognised, developed and how the conditions of possibility for its emergence may be created.