Abstract
This chapter considers the education for industry discourse from a different perspective – that of media educators – and assesses the value and purpose of media education and its relationship to industry from the point of view of providers of education programmes. Drawing from interviews with 23 media educators, we examine attitudes towards graduate employability and note the concerns that educators have about education-industry alignment, the instability of media industries and the potential precarity of media workers. The chapter notes how educators saw media education as fulfilling a broader role which included personal development of graduates, the acquisition of critical thinking skills and the opening of minds, as well as subject-specific knowledge and skills development.
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Notes
- 1.
By academically oriented , we mean programmes that are more concerned with the ‘study of’ media than the practice of and which are primarily centred on theorising, analysing and critiquing media.
- 2.
By vocationally oriented, we refer to programmes that are more concerned with the ‘making of’ media and which contain a higher ratio of practical and technical teaching than theoretical.
- 3.
Twenty-one interviews took the form of phone or video calls. Two were electronic responses.
- 4.
The sample included three representatives from the south-west of Ireland, two from the south-east, four from the west, one from the mid-west, one from the midlands, one from the north-east and the remainder, eleven, based in county Dublin. The concentration of interviewees based in Dublin is representative of the large number of education and training providers in the county and city.
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O’Brien, A., Arnold, S., Kerrigan, P. (2021). Media Education and Their Perspective on Aspirant Media Workers. In: Media Graduates at Work. Creative Working Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66033-8_3
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