READING GENDER AND CULTURE

Chapter in G. Bull & M. Anstey (Eds.) (1996) The literacy lexicon.

New York/Sydney: Prentice-Hall.

Introduction

TV is today's mass social educator with powerful influence on social life, people's worldviews, consumer behaviour and the shaping of public sentiment. The network of commodity and visual symbolic sign systems within which we live is already so dense and pervasive that we fail to take much note of it. In Australia, 99% of all households own a TV set, 60% own two or more sets, and 72% of all TV households own a VCR. Clearly, everyone is exposed to TV's version of social reality. Television takes up more of children's time than any other activity except sleeping, and school aged children watch on average between 18 - 30 hours a week. Many children watch a lot more, and many watch far less. By age 18, the average viewer has watched some 14 000 hours of TV, and yet during that same time has spent only 12 000 hours in classrooms in front of teachers and texts (Luke, 1990). These figures do not include time spent reading comic books and magazines, playing video games, or playing with media spin-off toys. In my estimation, the everyday televisual and popular cultural texts that students encounter are at least as, if not more, significant sources of learning than the print texts educators deem as culturally relevant literacy texts. TV's pervasiveness and the huge amount of time children spend in front of TV screens, suggests that media literacy instruction can no longer be a curricular 'add-on', but must be treated as a medium worthy of serious study: as social text, cultural icon and social practice.

In the broadest sense, media literacy aims to make students critical and selective viewers, able to reflect critically on media messages, and to use those critical skills in the production of their own print and audio-visual texts. Analytic skills are meant to interrupt students' unreflective acceptance of media's 'public pedagogies', and to develop new strategies for thinking about the meanings media transmit, and the meanings viewers construct for themselves. Core analytic questions in any media studies program usually ask: How are society, culture, and persons portrayed? What attitudes and values do images promote? What technical, symbolic and semiotic features are used to generate meanings? How does what see and read influence our opinions of others, our worldviews, our social relations and behaviours? How might others, reading from different socio-cultural positions, view a certain text and what might it mean to them? Developing a critical understanding of how texts position readers/viewers must always extend to helping students understand the social and cultural contexts of viewers and texts: that is, how others might react to, construct and/or resist textual meanings. Media studies is as much about language and literacy as it is about social and cultural studies (Buckingham, 1993).

Social justice based curriculum and pedagogy acknowledge difference in students' identity, location, reading positions, and the cultural resources they bring with them. A cultural studies approach to media literacy grounded in social justice principles recognises that students engage media texts from different social class, gender, and cultural positions. From a social justice position, media analyses can show how inclusions and exclusions are structured in public discourse: the marginalisation, trivialisation, or romanticisation of indigenous Australians and other cultural 'minorities', gay persons and issues, rural groups, girls and women, disabled persons, etc. The media texts students are exposed to daily, year after year, are the very texts which help shape their understandings of social in/equalities; they are therefore eminently suitable texts for teaching towards and about social justice issues in contemporary cultural contexts.

Television, childhood and youth culture

Long before children enter school, most have already been socialised into play, social values, behaviours, attitudes, play and linguistic repertoires shaped by the videogames, TV programs and spin-off toys which constitute childhood experience. Childhood culture is an intertextual universe which connects TV programs to movies, videogames, toys, T-shirts, shoes, games, crayons, colouring books, bed linens and towels, pencil cases, lunch boxes, and even wallpaper (Engelhardt, 1986; Seiter, 1991). Beyond the merchandise transformations of movie or TV program characters, media icons extend to fast food chain or cereal box-top contests and special give-away deals, shopping mall entertainments featuring the 'Batmobile', a Jurassic dino, or Homer Simpson, and contests (e.g., a prize trip to Universal Studies to meet the characters). It is in this intertextual network between media and commodities in which childhood is played out and which, in fact, constructs childhood and youth more generally. It is an intertextual universe of cultural discourses and commodities in which both children and parents actively participate. TV shapes the child's early into narrative and consumption by being located in the centre of family life (however families may be constituted), and by cross referencing to other narrative forms such as movies, stories, comic books, videogames, music videos (often movie soundtracks), of which toys and teens' popular culture are an integral extension. In that regard TV serves as a kind of clearing house for both the texts and artefacts of consumption. For children, the jump from narrative to commodities -- e.g., from Transformer cartoons to Transformer toys; from Muppet cartoons to McDonald's give-aways of Muppet Babies; or from Spielberg movies to spin- off cartoons or fast food chain contests -- is natural and naturalised because it is the background cultural tapestry in which childhood is experienced.

Buying into the system, whether the Nintendo, Sega, Ninja Turtles, Strawberry Shortcake, Cabbage Patch, Barbie, or Jurassic Park 'system', means both buying into particular ideological narratives (of family structure, gender roles, power relations), and into a social construction of reality which is real, material, and constitutes the lived experiences of childhood and adults (Kinder, 1991). Parents do take their children to McDonald's and purchase the latest figurines. Parents do save their supermarket receipts so that their children's school can purchase Mac computers. Girls do respond to the cultural images of femininity and starve themselves to get 'the look' or construct themselves in the image of the Madonna signifier (Schwichtenberg, 1993). Parents do buy the TV advertised cereal or peanut butter children insist on to avoid embarrassing conflicts in the supermarket. These everyday consumer and social practices constitute social and material relations between parents and children. Clearly, children's immersion in electronic media texts and the commodities of popular culture are an important part of their everyday experiences. Not to attend to these cultural forms and texts, and not to teach children the constructedness of our media and mediated understandings and how these texts structure experience, knowledge and social relations, is pedagogically and politically irresponsible. It is irresponsible in an age when current generations are inheriting a technologically and symbolically mediated world of work and leisure which is significantly different from how most of us grew up.

Marketing gender

Despite some changes in the media portrayal of women and men in the last decade, representations of gender remain limited to stereotyped representations. Men continue to outnumber women across all program genres by three to one (Luke, 1990). Men dominate voice-overs regardless of product. Men 'age' on screen whereas women virtually disappear at about age 30 only to be revived in grandmotherly roles. Facial lines, rotund physique and grey hair in a male are considered 'distinguished' and 'mature', whereas the same features in women are deemed unseemly and 'old', not fit for public consumption on TV screens. Men solve most political and social problems whereas women generally wait to be rescued, to be told how to do something right, or to be romantically pursued. In advertising texts, women continue stick their heads in ovens, dirty laundry, toilets or bathtubs looking for hidden dirt and germs, and agonise over product choice. Women gain their identity and the loving admiration of family members through domestic accomplishments which always hinge on her embodiment in the correct product choice. The lessons for girls is that women are generally mindless and powerless, either domestic drudges or saintly supermums, sexual sirens or brain-dead bimbos. The lessons for boys is that men are supposed to be competitive at work and play, keen sportsmen, decision-makers and knowledgeable about almost everything, and able to solve all minor and major problems. And while there are indeed notable exceptions to stereotyped gender portrayal, those exceptions are not the rule.

Reading gender semiotically

Media studies usually involves four aspects: the study of text, audience, media industries, and text production (Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett, 1992; Bazalgette, 1992; Buckingham, 1993; Lusted, 1989). I focus here only on text analysis and, specifically, semiotic analysis. Qualitative and quantitative text analyses are most frequently used in media studies curricula. I will discuss qualitative analysis first which usually begins with semiotic deconstruction of text to isolate particular symbolic features. Semiotics, very simply, is the study of the selection, combination and meanings of signs and symbols (cf. Fiske, 1987; Fiske & Hartley, 1978). We are all practicing semioticians, daily reading and negotiating a world of symbols, and daily constructing ourselves semiotically: from the way we dress to the way we communicate non-verbally (Hodge & Tripp, 1986). Cultural coding among teens is the hallmark of adolescent identity: from color-coded shoe laces or school bags, to 'in-crowd' gestures or the subcultural 'uniform' of the swampie, grunge, or surfie look.

Semiotic analysis studies the 'grammar' of audio-visual texts: genre-specific codes and conventions (laugh-tracks in sitcoms; 'formal' dress for newsreaders; opening credits); metaphor and metonymy (meanings by association or substitution such as a red rose or heart = romance); iconic (Sydney Opera House = Australia) and symbolic (black = evil; white=purity) representations; paradigmatic (historical and linear 'across time' analysis such as character or plot development) and syntagmatic features ('slice of time' analysis such as in freeze frame).

Semiotics is based on two main concepts: i) all meaning is structured in opposition, and ii) the sign always signifies something else. Students already have a good understanding of the notion of opposition: good guys are usually pitted against the bad; stories start with a (social or individual) problem and end with problem resolution; the slow, icy drops of moisture in an ad's thirst-quenching drink are shown next to dry, parched, heat sizzling images; bright and clean laundry and the happy female consumer is always shown in opposition to an anxious women next to a stack of dirty and dull looking clothes. Every sign or image signifies something else and is always culture and genre dependent. The sound or visual imagery of a thunderstorm can signify danger or a romantic interlude. Black can be associated with style and 'class' (in clothing ads), evil (in action-drama) or mourning (in western culture). Red can mean danger, romance, or sexual allure; yet in combination with green and white in a pasta ad, red is reframed to signify Italy, Italianness, and cultural authenticity. Technical features also signify meaning: the use of camera angles can make products appear larger or women smaller and diminutive; special effects can make toys appear more exciting and action-oriented; and the use of colour can depict mood, national identity (green and gold), or gender (see Table 1).

Table 1: Semiotic Representations of Gender

These gendered representational differences are identifiable both in the construction of meaning within textual units as well as in genres. Soap operas, for instance, make extensive use of indoor and close-up shots, slow pacing and soft music, multiple characters and plots, to signify what media theorists call feminine texts. Ads targeted at girls (e.g., Clearasil or doll ads) and women (e.g., skin care or household products) are similarly structured through technical features. Masculine texts (e.g., action dramas or male-targeted ads), on the other hand, tend to use outdoor and wide-shots, fast pacing and hard, metallic music, single character (the hero) and a more focussed linear plot development. This structuring of gendered meaning through technical features is precisely what is meant by the social construction of gender: the intentional construction of representation and meaning into stereotypical gendered distinctions which have very little to do with any 'natural' human characteristics. However, the wall-to-wall pervasiveness across all media of gendered stereotypes at the level of narrative structure and textual meanings, easily makes them appear commonsense, universal, 'natural', and 'true'. Most students, teachers, parents, and the public more generally, tend to hold such 'essentialist' gender ideologies. Therefore, it is important pedagogically that applications of the concept of opposition in analyses of gender representations always proceed from a clear explication that cultural and media texts construct gender difference as opposition -- not that they reflect some mythical, biologically-based differences between girls and boys, women and men.

Quantitative analysis, or simple frequency counts, is a common aspect of primary and secondary media literacy studies. Quantitative text analysis can be applied to almost any aspect of content across genres: from female/male news presentations and voice-overs, to the number of ads per program (in terms of which ads sponsor which program genres), the numerical use in ads of superlative descriptors assigned to female/male products ('new', 'better' 'improved'), gendered uses of linguistic features (passive/active modes), gendered occupational distributions across prime-time, or specific technical features to characterise femininity and masculinity. The latter would reveal the extensive use of close-ups, fades, soft music and slow pacing in ads and programs targeted at women/girls (e.g., girls' toys or women's make-up products; Kellogg's Special K series), and quick jump-cuts, long-shots, hard rock music and quick pacing in male-targeted texts (e.g., car, computer, aftershave ads; Kellogg's 'Iron Man' Nutri-Grain). Frequency counts of where women are textually located in ads would quickly reveal that women are primarily shown as cosmetic, household cleanser, childcare and food product users. Quantitative analysis can begin to show students the sheer numerical distribution of gender across genres which would invariably lead to a recognition of the subordinate and domesticated status of female representations.

Students can be asked to undertake a week's research on portrayals of gender across a pre-determined set of programs. Results can be tabulated, written up, and presented to the class. Most students have VCRs at home and taping a few segments for analysis is usually welcome homework. As long as parents are informed in advance of 'TV homework' as part of a critical media studies unit, parents are usually supportive of any effort to make kids more critical and selective viewers. From simple quantitative study, students can be led toward more in-depth ideological analyses of gender portrayal through the application of semiotics. Semiotic concepts enable micro-textual analyses -- a kind of parsing of audio-visual grammars -- from which students can be led to tackle larger social and political issues of social justice, cultural and gender in/equalities.

Students are not naive or incompetent critical readers when it comes to media texts. Students come into classrooms as 'TV experts' and most have little trouble applying conceptual analysis to the texts with which they have grown up and which occupy a significant amount of their time. The jump from 'technical deconstruction' to an ideological reading of the politics of gender is, for most, not that difficult. Consider the two student examples below which illustrate work on a unit on the media construction of women using semiotic analysis; note in particular the students' attempts to interpret science-nature and old-new oppositions:

Example 1

Some products such as Estee Lauder, show diagrams from scientific research to show that such products are better than nature and will improve your appearance. Other beauty products try to sell through having ingredients from nature (such as avocados). In respect of science, advertisers try to make their scientific ingredients look better than nature. In the Oil of Ulan ad, they show a dried up apple to show what nature does to your skin, compared to a fresh, firm apple after using the product. Such products make women feel competent. A drama of incompetence takes place in such ads. It implies that the consumer has a problem (aged skin), losing one's youthful complexion, and with the use of the product the problem will be eradicated and she will be in control/competent. This competency equates with self-identity/esteem and self-assurance and social competence. Women are usually drawn into these docu-dramas but men are now also being used.

Example 2

In the Complete Care ad we are shown how when applied to a dry and brittle leaf, the leaf becomes a fresh and smooth green leaf. We can see how science (the moisturiser as a regenerating and replenishing ingredient) is applied to nature (the notion of the dry, old leaf becoming green and young). Language techniques achieve this transformation such as the use of "refreshing", "replenishing", "regenerating", and "make your hands look younger and new". The gender construction is accomplished through camera angles which are always close-ups, focusing on the soft hands or her delighted look on her face, showing her happiness in using the product. The pacing of the ad is slow and relaxed -- very feminine. The colours are soft pink and pale green, very relaxing and feminine. The symbolism is the leaf which represents old, dry, broken, and brittle (nature), and green fresh, smooth after use of the product. All these techniques aid in consumer and gender ideology.

Close textual analysis can begin with static print text: e.g., magazine ads or editorials. The recent print ad series for Toyota Paseo are a good example. Several ads targeted at male readers, and published in news magazines use distinctly masculine terminology, colours, and layout to highlight the car's prowess and mechanical features. The comparable ads for women (published in Dolly, Cleo, etc.) use terminology to appeal to women's environmental sensibility, to highlight the car's comfortable ride, safety features, and colour choices. Similar comparisons can be made by showing, for example, the Kellogg's Special K and Nutri-Grain TV ads side by side. The gendered differences between the two ads, both promoting more or less the same cereal, are striking. Students have little difficulty recognising the semiotic construction of gender in both ads.

Most Special K ads are targeted at women and feature women in various forms of deliberation over their body size. Aerobic workouts, or fitting into a new or small outfit feature heavily in these ads. The women are always inside, engaged in conversation, admired by daughters or husbands for 'looking good', framed through soft-focus lenses, and the music, colours and pacing are generally soft and slow. The Nutri-Grain ad, by contrast, features men in iron-man beach activities who move and tumble fast, are outside and don't talk to each other in the frenzy of competition. The cereal's essential minerals are pounded on the screen in red-hot iron cast dies accompanied by loud, heavy metal music pounding along with the pace of the surf and the men.

As introductory material, two such explicitly contrasting gendered texts can be used to introduce semiotic concepts as well as to begin discussion about how gender identity and characteristics are portrayed in the media. Other off-air taped materials can include a newsbroadcast to identify gender distribution and representation: who covers what kinds of stories? Who are spokespersons for what kinds of issues? How many news items in a given broadcast are of interest to women/men and both? Segments from the currently popular Beverly Hills 90210 can be used to analyse gender representation, discuss issues of class privilege and racial exclusion, or how social issues of importance to teens (e.g., drink driving, drugs, dating, divorce, contraception, safe sex, etc.) are dealt with in that program. How realistic are the gender portrayals? Are the girls more interested in boys, fashion and make-up than in career options and intellectual matters? How are schooling, teachers, mothers and fathers portrayed? The commercial treatment of social issues in such shows can be further linked to programs such as ABC's Attitude. Differences in genre (Attitude's documentary newsmagazine format), mode of audience address, and gender representation can be discussed.

As with print narrative, all TV texts use modes of address and appeal strategies. We teach children to write stories with audience in mind and with textual strategies to 'paint a picture' with words. TV does the same thing. Students can be asked to consider gendered imagery and audience address by examining appeal strategies. Which semiotic features are used to sell products to girls/women and boys/men? Clearasil ads, for example, appeal to girls' insecurity about their looks and the social need to be popular with boys; in these ads girls with pimples wear no make-up, look frumpy, don't smile, and usually wear pink bathrobes. Car ads appeal to men's sense of adventure and cowboy imagery of masculinity (outback Pajero ads), and responsibility for the family's safety and security (the recent Mitsubishi and Nissan Bluebird ads). In these ads, women usually are passengers and ask questions whereas men are the drivers and have all the technical answers. Ads for women usually appeal to women's responsibility for her family's health, cleanliness and nutrition (most domestic cleanser and food ads), and to women's insecurity about their body shape and size (food, diet, and cosmetic ads). TV texts are constructed with particular audiences in mind, and use psychological appeals framed in semiotic codes which play into cultural gendered stereotypes.

Lessons to familiarise students with basic analytic terminology can then lead into group projects to facilitate deeper and collective understanding of how media texts shape students' lives and attitudes. Projects on, say, the 90210, Barbie, or Jurassic Park phenomena can investigate the commodification of media texts by researching the licensed merchandise and consumer market. A trip to Toys 'R' Us or any department store toy section can yield documentation of the gendered differentiation and display of merchandise, and interviews with the store manager and/or with kids and parents in the aisles can be used to gather information on the 'selling' and 'buying' of popular culture. This kind of a project also can be focussed more specifically on the gendered culture of childhood which might include students' own recollections and oral histories of the toys, games, and TV programs they grew up with; it can extend further to include an historical study of growing up female or male by interviewing parents and/or grandparents. Related study can focus on the gendered uses and control of media and technology in the home: Which family members select hire videos for family viewing? Who sets the 'family viewing' agenda in the evenings and on weekends? Who mostly operates the VCR? Who makes most use of the home computer and for what purposes? As many researchers have found (e.g., Gray, 1992; Lull, 1990; Morley, 1986), the use and control of home computers, TV, and VCRs are highly gendered.

In small groups students can prepare an edited collection of ads to illustrate constructs of femininity/masculinity, along with a short analytic commentary and, perhaps, OHTs for a class presentation. Several class projects within a larger framework of gender analysis can include constructs of gender in daytime children's ads; constructs of femininity in popular teen shows, daytime soaps and ads; constructs of masculinity in car, finance sector, or computer ads or weekend sports discourse, etc. Alternately, segments of documentaries or science programs can be taped, edited, and presented to the class as analysis of the first-world media construction of (other) cultures, the media representation of women and men in other cultural contexts, or gender and science reporting. Small group projects require task delegation, development of a research strategy, evaluation and progress sessions, and would facilitate student collaborative learning and discussion not under the immediate scrutiny and direction of a teacher. In very broadly sketched terms, projects focussed on the media construction and reading of gender would be structured according to three general aims:

i) Identify constructs of femininity and masculinity: projects can include an essay, a photo-montage, charts or tables on OHTs of semiotic components.

ii) Prepare a short video clip: students tape off-air and edit (for subsequent class showing) a short video clip to illustrate constructs of femininity in girls'/women's ads or masculinity in boys'/men's ads; gender constructs can be identified in children's programs, newsprograms, documentaries or soaps, Neighbours, The Simpson's, or A Current Affair.

iii) Complete a short viewer survey: family or neighbours can be surveyed with a brief questionnaire asking: What and how much do you watch? Why do you like watching program 'X'? What do you think about the way women/men are shown on TV and, specifically, on program 'X'? Depending on local context, students may be able to survey other students in the school, or survey a public sample in the local shopping mall after school hours. Students tabulate and summarise results, and include these in the class presentation.

The strategies outlined so far apply to textual analysis of all forms of media representation, including constructs of race, ethnicity and culture.

Marketing race and culture

Media representations of 'race' and culture can be characterised, at best, by marginalisation and romanticisation and, at worst, by glaring omission. The portrayal of persons of colour on Australian TV is overwhelmingly of African-Americans: from imported comedy programs, daytime talkshows and music videos to a range of American sports broadcasts. In contrast, Australian indigenous and migrant cultures are not part of the everyday televisual landscape in any genre. Instead, they are romanticised and marginalised as 'special interest' stories at the end of a TV newscast or at the back of a newspaper. If they do warrant a front-page headline or first item placement in a newsbroadcast, it is almost always in negative contexts. Particularly in newspapers, 'black' is usually linked with negative connotations: "black violence", "black land grab", "black activists", "black brawls", "black drunkenness". Such discursive representations are ultimately destructive both to indigenous cultures and communities, and to Anglo-Australian readers/viewers who are positioned to read/view cultural difference with fear and anxiety based on misinformation.

The monochromatic nature of Australian TV does little to provide positive role models for indigenous and migrant children, or to present a balanced picture of indigenous and migrant cultures to all Australians. Central to any media literacy curriculum, therefore, must an anti-racist pedagogy which gives students the analytic skills and political vocabulary with which to challenge racism on two levels: i) analysis of how media narrative forms and ideologies contribute to the marginalisation and stereotyping of indigenous and migrant groups, and ii) analysis of how media messages help shape public sentiment and students' own perceptions of and attitudes toward racial, ethnic, and cultural differences.

In North Queensland, cultural tourism is an ascendant money spinner; Aborigines and aboriginal culture appear frequently in local media and print advertising promoting various forms of tourism. The majority of such portrayals, however, tend to feature Aborigines as performance acts and cultural artefacts -- usually in traditionally garb performing tribal dances for enthralled (mostly white) tourists. Linked to representations of Aboriginality as anthropological curiosity are associations to 'tribalism' and 'nativism' which, in turn, are conceptually opposed to all that which is progressive, western, civilised, and contained. Negative, traditionalist, and oppositional media connotations abound in national and local newspaper headlines such as: "Heritage of indigenous people steals the limelight", "The rock of ages past" in reference to Yothu Yindi, and "Black cause, white froth".

Media representations of Aboriginal peoples too often feature them as non-urban, native, tribal, uncivilised and untamed. Moreover, Aboriginal efforts to recover their colonised and decimated culture, to assert autonomy, economic self-determination, or just to write the rules of the game for themselves -- whether through cultural tourism or the 'selling' of cultural artefacts -- potentially reposition or 're-tribalise' them in discourses of cultural identity read by dominant culture as 'primitive' or 'tribal'. Certainly, the print and electronic media stress and foreground this aspect of Aboriginality along with that other most common depiction: Aboriginality as social problem.

Media coverage of Aboriginal issues, groups or persons tends to depict them as agitators, politicos, welfare-funded drunks, or as frequent cause of social unrest in 'stable' white communities. In media discourse, an 'educated' and 'articulate' Aboriginal person is quickly labelled a political stirrer, radical activist, or black sympathiser. News crews are quick to cover community brawls, or scuffles at Aboriginal landright marches or protest gatherings outside courtrooms. Wherever and whenever Aborigines (or other ethnic groups) can be captured on film as unruly, disruptive, and (preferably) violent, the media are present. Yet, the many thousands of Aboriginal persons in ordinary jobs, raising ordinary kids in ordinary homes and suburbs are completely overlooked by the media: they do not feature in prime-time entertainment, news, or current affairs programs. Aboriginal initiatives such as in the arts, business, community welfare, health or education are ignored. Across the nation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health clinics, alternative schools, media and business initiatives have been established. In recent years Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have graduated from tertiary education in record numbers. Yet media coverage of 'ordinary' urban and suburban Aboriginal communities and achievements are systematically excluded from public discourse. A critical media studies curriculum tackles such issues of cultural politics and the politics of (mis)representation, prejudice and exclusion.

As with analysis of gender, a cultural studies approach to deconstructing cultural representations using semiotic analysis, is both timely and politically important. Monoculturalism is a fossilised remnant of the past and yet racism still abounds on the streets, in the schoolyard, and media. What it means to be a citizen in the new millennium cannot be based on ethnocentric paternalism, systematic racial exclusions, and cultural elitism. Counter-pedagogies of anti-racism can begin with deconstruction (comprehension) of representational systems of oppression, and the reconstruction (composition) of positive and constructive imageries and texts. Below are some briefly framed lesson outlines for the study of race and culture portrayals in the media.

Semiotics: Reading race and culture

The following unit was prepared by a senior English teacher for Year 11 students, and was based loosely on the International Year of the World's Indigenous people (Luke & Bishop, in press). The students' task was to compile a reflection log based upon a variety of inputs. In the orienting phase, a brainstorming session used the 'Hot Potato' strategy to activate students' existing knowledge. Questions included: What does indigenous mean? What famous indigenous people do you know? What has been your schooling experience with indigenous people? What aspects of indigenous culture do you know? How are indigenous people and cultures portrayed in the media? Student responses were placed on the walls and discussed.

Next, a summary was provided of planned reading and viewing activities. A large proportion of students in this school came from the Torres Strait Islands; therefore, the next session was spent reading extracts from "Thathilgaw Emerit Lu", a brief history of the culture and artefacts of the Torres Strait. Students showed little resistance to this lesson, partly because the material fitted into their preconceptions of what Islanders were 'really' like. The class then viewed the video Barbikuera, an Aboriginal satirical interpretation of white stereotypes in Australian mythology. It is a role reversal of sorts: a look at white Australiana, and black/white relations, from an Aboriginal point of view. The film opens with a group of Aborigines landing at Sydney Cove, interrupting a white colonial family BBQ, and after inquiring what the place was called, the Aboriginal group takes possession of the land and proclaims it "Barbikuera" (ie., the Bar-B-Q area). Students became quite uncomfortable as the film unfolded, refusing to accept many of the points raised. In another context, Aboriginal first-year university students watching this film with white students, also rejected this film. They claimed that it tried to simplify complex historical issues through humour, and rejected the 'role reversal' on the grounds that it symmetrised profound cultural and historical differences (ie., Aborigines were not colonisers and would not assume white social characteristics). These responses are indicative of the range of culture-specific reading positions found in any classroom.

The students' discomfort became more evident with the viewing of Exile and the kingdom, an ABC historical documentary about a group of West Australian Aborigines in the Kimberleys. Many students refused to believe the callous and inhumane treatment meted out by Europeans to the local population. In the U.S., incidentally, a recent survey found that the majority of teenagers refuse to accept that the WW II holocaust ever happened. This erasure of historical memory is part of what an anti-racist pedagogy tries to counteract. A variety of readings were subsequently presented to the class (e.g., Yothu Yindi lyrics; excerpts from David Suzuki's Wisdom of the Elders), providing students with appropriate vocabulary to enable them to speak and write effectively in the genre of their choice. In addition to the reflection log, the unit culminated in a public speech on the topic "Reconciliation would be good for all Australians". The winning team showed an impressive conceptual grasp, able to weave Aboriginal vocabulary and metaphor into its presentation. This unit enabled students to deconstruct cultural text and their own presuppositions, and to reconstruct a more critically informed and socially just set of meanings around the categories race and culture.

Another strategy for analysing constructs of race and culture is to examine portrayals of so-called developing nations which are primarily framed in discourses of poverty, starvation, and social decay (Jackson, 1992). Aid agency ads found in most magazines are useful texts with which to begin semiotic analysis. In efforts to raise money, ad and aid agencies collude to construct images of national and individual misery and starvation. Textual features include the use of 'down' shots which positions the person(s) in need of aid (usually a mother and child) to look up at the reader with pleading eyes. Down-shots make subjects look small, helpless, passive and insignificant next to (and in opposition) to the larger, western, 'white saviour' -- the celebrity aid spokesperson -- who is usually included in such ads. The use of pronouns ("you can help", "your money can save", "it's up to you", etc.), visual mood and thematisation (black and white photos), construct a negative vision of the 'third world' which is almost always gendered: we see children, mothers and babies -- not men -- with outstretched hands and starvation in their eyes. Semiotic thematisations include the following: appeals are personalised, focussed on "you"; black and white photography is commonly used to highlight 'black/white' discourse and the stark opposition between (western) affluence and (third-world) poverty; sponsorship endorsements usually feature white female media celebrities who often wear 'ethnic' dress (beads, earrings, woven materials, etc.). The use of well-known media figures lends credibility to aid programs and the use of women fits the ideological equation of women as carers. These texts position the (white western) reader as guilty coloniser who, like the white female celebrity and/or foster mother in the photo, has a historical and moral debt to pay. Third-world aid campaign ads, as well as TV ads which use and romanticise third-world peoples and locations (e.g., Nescafe Gold's "docu-dramas" of Brazilian or Kenyan coffee pickers; Baccardi Rum's Carribean or Levi's jeans south American locations), can be used as ways into social studies analyses of the economic realities of developing countries, the politics of colonisation and third-world aid dependency.

As noted earlier, quantitative analysis can include surveys of magazines or off-air taping of any entertainment, news or current affairs programs or ads. A count of Aboriginal portrayal, for instance, would reveal their near total absence across all genres and media forms, and the frequent use of linguistic and visual opposition to white discourse and values. Tourism TV or poster ads also are instructive texts for showing the romanticisation and 'tribalisation' of Aboriginal and Islander cultures. A particularly useful promotional text is the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation's video Unforgettable, around which a media analysis unit for senior English teachers has been built, including student worksheets for semiotic analysis. The video consists of three Queensland tourism ads, each aimed at a different audience. An examination of how Aboriginality is differently constructed for different reading/viewing audiences -- South-East Asian, American and Australian tourists -- shows how culture can be commodified and reframed to suit different viewer and consumer markets. Examples of student worksheets with which to begin semiotic analysis (preferably in small groups) of three different texts are shown in Table 2.

updated