Category: Media Literacy

Stock photo matters: Swings

In praise of improving stock photo libraries

Kyle 3 Comments

When I recently commended a particular online discussion tool in response to a query on the Forma Facebook Group, a friend noted “I wish it was a little prettier. But that’s the curmudgeon in me.”

I contend that you don’t have to be a curmudgeon to want learning tools to be beautiful. No less an educational authority than Maria Montessori put it this way:

“Another character of the objects is that they are attractive. Colour, brightness and harmony of form are sought after in everything which surrounds the child. Not only the sensorial material, but also the environment is so prepared that it will attract [them], as in Nature brilliant petals attract insects to drink the nectar which they conceal.

“‘Use me carefully,’ say the clean, polished tables; ‘Do not leave me idle,’ say the little brooms with their handles painted with tiny flowers; ‘Dip your little hands in here,’ say the wash basins, so clean and ready with their soap and bubbles.”

The Discovery of the Child

If you can read that bit about the broom handles without going a little watery … well, you might just need some more beauty in your life.

My work on Creative Commons Prayer has been largely motivated by the growing importance of art and music to my own spirituality. I suspect working at St. Michael’s Church has had something to do with that, but so has studying with so many gifted designers and media makers.

And the truth is, many of our educational resources, especially free ones, are drab at best, and downright alienating at worst.

Stock photo collections have been a mixed blessing in this regard. Sure, it’s easy to get photos, including free ones, that are individually gorgeous. But as many commentators have noted, together they have too often had an ugly side effect: reinforcing white supremacy by excluding the experience of people of color.

We can do better in this respect by searching for Creative Commons photos on a site like Flickr, but some projects do not lend themselves to required media attribution.

Pastor leading prayer
Photo by Haley Rivera on Unsplash

I thought about representation a lot as I was working on my Holy Eucharist Illuminated teaching cards. I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, but I think I did way better than I would have been able to even just a couple of years ago.

That’s partly because I continue to get a better handle on the limitations of my particular experience as a white, ordained man, and partly because the libraries are getting better.

Free stock photo sites like Unsplash and Pixabay are slowly getting more diverse in their racial and cultural representation. I assume that’s partly because of small-but-growing collections like Nappy (and others), which are tackling the problem more head on and whose photos I’m starting to see show up on the bigger sites.

I also think questions of representation and equity are slowly starting to loom a little larger on (white) creators’ minds. (Emphasis on slowly—see, for example, Season 7 of Gimlet’s StartUp Podcast, which chronicles both the successes and the grueling struggles of Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton.)

I say all this with two explicit intentions in mind:

(1) To challenge us all to attend to the aesthetic dimensions of the work we do. I’m coming away from my most recent resource development experience more convinced than ever of this need. Beautiful learning tools and experiences help us learn better.

(2) To remind those of us likely to need reminding that with the great power of stock photo libraries and the like comes the great responsibility to be thoughtful and critical about how we select and deploy them. Our efforts to make media worthy of the best of our traditions will fall short if we don’t continually challenge ourselves to capture the full range of beauty represented in our whole human family.

Cover photo by Erik-Jan Leusink on Unsplash

Photo: “Amy Gallatin / Montclair Film” - media literacy

Why religious educators must be media literacy educators

Kyle

Note: This piece first appeared in the Winter 2018 Special Issue of Episcopal Teacher and is published here by permission. Amazon links include my affiliate code.

A few weeks before writing this article I saw a tweet from British comedian, actress, and writer Bethany Black. It’s the kind of sentiment bound to get a graduate student in a learning media department nodding sagely.

Still, as a relative newcomer to the interdisciplinary field of media literacy education—little more than a bystander, to be honest—I should probably stick to just retweeting such thoughts and avoid the sweet temptations of the personal “I told you so.”

If there’s one religious media scholar who does have a right to such boasting in times like these—and, I suspect, would absolutely never exercise it—it’s Luther Seminary Professor of Educational Leadership Mary Hess.

For years, Hess has been a rare if not quite singular voice in theological education. She’s been inviting us to recognize that media cultures matter, including to people of faith and especially to those of us who teach in religious communities. Hess wrote the following in the introduction to her 2005 (yes, 2005) book Engaging Technology in Theological Education:

To me, theological reflection lives and breathes amidst movies and music, in the interwoven webs of the Internet, and in the daily and quite ordinary ways in which digital technology is built into just about every form of media we now engage. If we are to teach and learn in contemporary culture, we have to engage these media.

As a theological educator and a media literacy educator, Hess has been a living example of the kind of leadership consciousness we all need to develop in these days of Tweeting popes, religious blogger authority wars, and the digitization of Bible reading.

We all know that faith formation ministers are strapped for time and resources. Why should they—why should you, dear reader—add media literacy education to your ministry toolbelt?

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I made a list:

(1) The people we serve—including adults—are spending more and more time on their screens. We should be there in digital and hybrid spaces to meet them.

For educators who can walk the tightrope that spans playfulness and planfulness, the new media ecology offer perhaps unprecedented opportunities to reach faith learners from all walks of life. It’s not a panacea and it certainly isn’t easy, but the Internet is a place where people consider ideas and connect with their loved ones. That can make for a wonderful learning environment.

Incidentally, I’m not discounting that when we meet our people online, we might occasionally encourage them to spend a little less time on their screens. Helping guide generations of smartphone users into spiritually wise digital habits is a rich, meaningful, and urgent calling. But in this particular teaching role, I think Jesus is a better mentor than John the Baptist (see Matthew 11:18-19; Luke 7:33-34).

(2) Creating media is a much better learning activity than consuming media.

One of the core commitments of today’s media literacy educators is to encourage students to learn by doing. Yes, we should we become detectives sleuthing out hidden messages in advertising and media releases.

But we should put those same skills to work in crafting our own statements on behalf of the causes we care about and the traditions we hold dear. As we embrace our calling as media literacy educators, we can help guide our communities toward becoming more effective advocates and evangelists.

The same goes for more traditional faith formation outcomes. I had the pleasure this summer to co-facilitate a media-making workshop with BimBam (formly G-dcast) founder Sarah Lefton. As she reflected with our students on what they had learned creating storyboards to animate famous proverbs, I was reminded that there’s no better way to teach a story than to help learners tell it themselves. She said,

I’d like to think that six months or a year from now, you will remember your proverb in a different way. You’ve gone pretty deep, you’ve made something you could share, and I hope you’ve observed a process you could use with your students.

(3) Media-literate Christians can contribute to a culture of truth-telling, transparency, and responsible discourse in the public square.

We’re not going to singlehandedly change the cultural and social practices of the world’s spinmasters and power brokers. But since the first days of the early church, it has been a central part of Christian vocation and witness to resist patterns of domination and manipulation.

Whatever our political loyalties, the only Christian response to public discourse that would have made Orwell and Huxley blush is to model something different, teach our children and our peers something different. That will require our own continued formation and learning.

(4) Media cultures are fun, and we should have that sometimes.

The first draft of this list had a lot more items cut for space, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut this one. As many are pointing out, to play, to laugh, and to hope are acts of resistance to what we (and most other generations, incidentally) have euphemistically labeled  Times Like These.

Change is hard for religious people—perhaps cultural change particularly so. To be active, critical participants in the process can help us have our say in it. Such participation also gives us the chance to enjoy the journey as often as we can.

There are richer and poorer definitions of fun to be had among our media cultures. Most of them have their place, and many of them can positively benefit us on our learning journeys.

With their help, we can change our media literacy narratives from “too much, too big, too chaotic, too intractable” to something that evokes the guidance of the Holy One and our regular liturgical charge to live in the world “rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.”

Image by Amy Gallatin / Montclair Film via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)