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ID:
145736
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores how students experience fictional television as part of their broader learning experience. In particular, the article investigates the potential role of fictional television in the development of visual literacy and critical evaluative skills. The article reports the findings of an experiment into critical evaluative viewing, which measures the foreign policy beliefs of students after exposure to two contrasting episodes of NBC's The West Wing. The results indicate that students are influenced by fictional television, but in perhaps unexpected ways. Although nuanced, the findings suggest that students demonstrate and develop critical evaluative skills—and visual literacy—in two different ways. First, students oppose the fictional/political message to which they are exposed. And, second, students reject the options that are presented to them in their totality. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for teaching critical evaluative skills and visual literacy.
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| 2 |
ID:
110476
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| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Only three weeks after the events of 11 September 2001 (hereafter 9/11), Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing delivered a special one-off episode, outside of usual storylines. The episode, titled 'Isaac and Ishmael', is interesting because it adopts an explicitly pedagogical theme to teach viewers how to think about the events of 9/11. The episode can thus be read as an instance in the wider construction of the meaning of those events. In this respect, this article argues that the production of the episode contributed to notions of rupture and exceptionalism. In addition, despite the potentially 'liberal' and 'academic' lessons given by the show's stars, the extensive contextualisation of the previously incomprehensible events for a dominantly American audience actually relayed, amplified and reinforced the emerging dominant discourses of the Bush Administration. Accepting and repeating official tropes, The West Wing ultimately served to further limit space for debate in the wake of 9/11.
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