An incomplete recontextualisation? Media literacy, policy and the school curriculum

The idea of media literacy - a set of skills and competencies which people should possess in order to navigate and understand the media- has been recently characterised in UK law by the Online Safety Act which makes token attempts to legislate for media literacy needs. It does this through means of an Online Media Literacy strategy, making recommendations about where it should appear in the school curriculum. This paper argues, however, that media literacy is an example of an incomplete recontextualisation. For Basil Bernstein, recontextualisation was the process by which an academic region, discipline or field of study became transformed into something which appeared in the school curriculum. In this paper it is argued that media literacy can only ever be an incomplete recontextualisation, because attempting to ‘shoe-horn’ it into other curricular areas, particularly PSHE or Computing does not allow for its fundamental conceptual bases - most notably, understandings of audience, representation, institutional power and media language - to be properly explored in the classroom. Ultimately the paper concludes that media literacy is best explored through the curricular subject of Media Studies, or through the curricular subject of English where criticality, textual analysis and creative production have been ways of exploring media tex