Voices of Media Literacy: International Pioneers Speak : Renee Hobbs Interview Transcript

 

INTERVIEW TEXT

 

Selected Questions:

 

 

 

 

 

 

RH: When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1970s I was an English literature major. At that time we were reading Shakespeare and John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Chaucer, and I remember very vividly thinking that these very powerful literary techniques that I’m learning to use would be productively applied to shows like Gilligan’s Island and I Love Lucy. At that time, there didn’t exist the serious study of popular culture but I remember thinking it would be so cool to do. And I didn’t know exactly how to go about doing that. I thought, well I can go into journalism, and so I worked as a college reporter and editor for the Michigan Daily for three years. I realized I was fascinated with how news works, how news is constructed. I learned how powerful, in a strange way, the student newspaper actually was at that time. But nobody at the student newspaper was interested in reflecting on that. They were just on to the next story. I really wanted to think about and talk about how the news is made and how making the news shapes the world. At the same time, I also loved film, thanks to my two best film professors: Hugh Cohen, who really taught me how to write, and Herb Eagle, who had just written a book on Russian formalist film theory and whose ideas about film structure influenced my thinking about semiotics, helping me see the deep mystery at the heart of montage, interpretation and meaning in a social and political context.

 

And then my senior year of undergrad I took a class with Barbra Morris, who was a remarkable rhetoric/composition professor at Michigan. She was teaching media literacy even without using the term, as I recall. She had us analyze a wide range of film and television genres and create short videos to write reflectively on our strategic choices as authors. I also took a media and children class with John Murray who was visiting the University of Michigan from Kansas State University, where he was directing a media violence initiative. He was in charge of the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development and had a big media violence initiative. And as a humanist, I got incredibly fascinated with the idea of social science and the process of measuring media’s impact on behavior, and so I got a masters degree at Michigan in communication to learn more about media effects research.

 

That introduced me to this really interesting Israeli psychologist named Gabriel Salomon, a joyful man full of life and heart and imagination. And he was visiting that year in Michigan, too. He was an educational psychologist at Hebrew University; he had just written a book called Interaction of Media Cognition and Learning, and that was in 1979. That book rocked my world! That book basically said that Israeli kids seem to learn more from television than American kids, because Israeli kids had just gotten television, and there was only one channel. Kids put in more mental effort when watching, and therefore they learned more from it. He realized that the more effort you put in, the more value you get out, which seemed completely right about everything in life, really. He introduced me to the work of Howard Gardner, who in the ’70s had written a book called Artful Scribbles and was doing all this stuff studying human creativity at Harvard Graduate School of Education. I started looking at his work and he and his grad students were looking at understanding how kids understood different TV genres, how they came to understand advertising, at the difference between cartoons and live action, and I thought hmm, that is cool. 

 

So that’s what took me to Harvard. Now once I got there I had the great opportunity to work with David Perkins and Howard Gardner and to be at Project Zero and to work on some projects because in the early ’80s, first generation of microcomputers was coming out, and big set of questions were going on in the field as technology education shifted from the television to the microcomputer. I had come to Harvard in part because of Gerald Lesser’s pioneering work in children and television (he was one of the co-founders of Sesame Street) and I loved his high-level boundary-crossing at the intersection of research and practice. And at some point, I discovered media literacy somewhere stumbling around in the library. I saw that Fr. John Culkin (friend of Marshall McLuhan) had written this interesting dissertation on film study in the high school, while he was at Harvard Ed School back in 1964, basically saying that we need to teach kids about film and media. He’s famous for the quote: “Kids with still and motion picture cameras, kids with audio and video recorders, are more fun than other kids.” And when I went to my advisor Gerald Lesser to say I wanted to write my dissertation on media literacy, he said “No way! No way! No way! Teaching kids about camera angles is ridiculous, find another topic.” Basically his argument was there was not enough literature to build upon, and so therefore I wouldn’t be able to write a good dissertation and contribute new knowledge to the field. But that was pretty depressing. So instead I went back to my interest in news and journalism and I conducted an experiment to explore how various forms of television editing could, depending on the type of editing, help people to better comprehend and remember the content of TV news. 

 

After I got the degree, I was hired as an assistant professor of communication at Babson College in 1985. Within the first year or two I found myself at the Boston Film Video Foundation for an event which brought together media artists, K-12 teachers and college professors to talk about media in society. I remember being bored with the superficial blather throughout the whole event, at some point I got up on my high horse and said, “I’m teaching my college juniors and seniors about the First Amendment and the difference between broadcast and cable television and about the economics of the media and how advertising supports what we see on broadcast television and how radio waves work…I’m teaching this stuff to kids who are 20 and 21, 22 years old, they’re finance and accounting majors, and you know what? I could just as easily teach the same stuff to 7^th graders.”

 

 Somebody came up to me after and tapped me on my shoulder and said, “You really think you can teach this stuff to 7^th graders?” I said, “ABSOLUTELY!” That was Anne Marie Stein, and she was the executive director for the Boston Film Video Foundation. We talked, we drank coffee, and we wrote a grant, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation. At that time, Branda Miller, an experimental video artist teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic, was exploring youth media, too, and so we collaborated on a curriculum.  With Tim Wright, a terrific video artist, we went into the Taft Middle School in Boston, a really grimy, deeply troubled school. I worked for three years, in 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade classrooms. Working with these kids was where I made a lot of mistakes and, in the process, I really learned how to teach. I experimented. I discovered right quick that it wasn’t about stuffing knowledge into their heads. It was a form of consciousness-raising and that required creating a meaningful learning environment to activate intellectual curiosity and a sense of personal agency. Kids did critical analysis activities where we deconstructed different kinds of TV shows, news and advertising. We did production activities where kids made all kinds of narrative stories and public service announcements, little documentaries. Those three years were incredibly important for me trying to figure out how to engage 6^th 7^th and 8^th graders and how to connect with their experience with media and popular culture. I also learned a little about how to manage the impossibilities of an urban public school that feels like a prison for these kids who were only 11, 12, 13 years old. I knew then that there were enough messy complexities in this work to last a lifetime – I got bitten by the media literacy bug.

 

 

RH: Yikes, we could be talking all day though! During this time, I think I went deep into babyland… Roger was born in ’88, Rachel was born in ’89 (Hobbs’ son and daughter). When I was raising my children, I was exploring another kind of media literacy watching them use media and technology – they were my informal research subjects, of course. But I was still trying to get tenure, so I wasn’t publishing on media literacy in that period, in part because I was having trouble getting the Taft Middle School work that I was doing into publication. It didn’t really fit into communication and it really didn’t fit in education. So I kind of regrouped and said, to get tenure I need publications, and to get publications, something big and splashy would be good. So basically I went back to the issues I was exploring during my PhD thesis, which was looking at television editing, montage, image-sound relationships, and how this affects people’s interpretation processes.