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Teaching the creative class? Media education and the media industries in the age of ‘participatory culture’

ABSTRACT This article explores the provision in the UK of pre-vocational and vocational media courses targeted at academic underachievers. Such courses typically claim to offer routes into employment for socially disadvantaged young people. These assertions have gathered force in recent years with the advent of digital media, and associated claims about their potential for promoting democratic participation and creativity. The article begins with a brief look at the history of provision in this sector since the 1980s, and the critical debates that have surrounded it. It then moves on to look at claims about the ‘empowering’ possibilities of digital media technologies, and at the changing nature of employment in the media and creative industries. The article then focuses on the most recent initiative in this field, the ill-fated Creative and Media Diploma. Drawing on interviews with teachers and some limited classroom observation, it points to some significant gaps between the rhetoric that surrounded the introduction of this new course and the difficult realities encountered by the teachers who adopted it. It points to several reasons for the ultimate demise of the qualification, not least to do with the fundamental incoherence of the Diploma's aims.