Media Education History

Abstract

This chapter delineates the history of the early years (the 1970s and 1980s) of the international movement in media education from the author's perspective as an Indian media educator and researcher. It focuses on the roots of the field and the critical issues that the pioneers wrestled with: defining the area of study and the approaches to doing media education/literacy and conducting research and theorizing about it. The roots of media education lie deep in the anxieties of the industrialized West to come to terms with the rapid growth of mass media. But it was the unprecedented international growth of the cinema in the early twentieth century that brought these anxieties to a head. The early history of media education in India can be traced to the halting steps taken by Christian educators in the early 1980s in response to the clampdown on human rights and media freedom during the “Emergency” period.