Screen Literacy Learning: Educational Applications and Cultural Resistance

For the past decade the Department of Education of New South Wales, Australia has funded a series of Screen Literacy projects aimed at impacting positively upon the traditional literacy skills and engagement levels of students from low socio-economic backgrounds. Although the projects successfully achieved the desired literacy and engagement outcomes, often well beyond the educators' expectations and aspirations, a screen literacy approach to literacy learning has not become an integral part the State Curriculum. This chapter asks why. After outlining the aims, objectives and outcomes of the project, it explores the resistances to screen literacy learning that were encountered and launches an enquiry into how these resistances might be overcome. This study is positioned at the interstices of traditional and new literacies, old and new media, and theory and praxis. It acknowledges the importance of an eduscape in which young people require visual literacy learning if they are to participate as global citizens in a society which is simultaneously localised and globalised by their multiliteracy skills, understandings and dispositions.