What Does Engagement Look Like in a Media Studies Classroom?

In wider discourses about teaching and learning, “engagement” has become something of a contested term, with teachers and educationalists often arguing about what being engaged in education actually involves. This contestation is compounded in media education, because the teacher has to deal with multiple conceptions of audience and, as a consequence, multiple meanings of the term engagement. In this essay, these conceptions and meanings are explored using some primary data taken from surveys of students and teachers from A-Level Media Studies classes, who were asked about both their engagement with the texts they taught and studied on the course, and their engagement with the wider critical study of media texts. The analysis of the data shows varying types and levels of engagement, some of which are personal, some educational and some academically critical. The authors seek to categorise these “engagement events” in different ways and highlight the idea that engagement in the study of media texts is very different to other types of audience engagement.