In his recent book, Knowledge and Knowing in Media and Film Studies, Associate Professor Steve Connolly examines the nature of knowledge in curricular Media and Film Studies, tracing the nascent subjects’ genealogies. Knowledge, much like the subjects it appraises, effectively bridges the theoretical and the practical. Connolly offers a complex analysis of epistemology within Media and Film Studies, all the while enriching his examination with contemporary examples from English curricula and politics. Engaging and thoughtful, Knowledge complicates conventional understandings of knowledge in Film and Media Studies and encourages its readers to consider more deeply how we know what we know?
In fact, as I spoke with Connolly in June of 2025, in an interview suffused with humor and hope, these how questions permeated our conversation. As Knowledge seeks to answer these questions, the text and our conversation alike pose one more– how might you respond to them?
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Hannah Conner (HC): In the first chapter of Knowledge and Knowing in Media and Film Studies, you take up education scholar John Furlong’s questions of “where are we now” and “why are we here?” I’m really interested in the genesis of this text. What inspired you to write Knowledge and what circumstances influenced your writing?
Steve Connolly (SC): That’s a great question. The first time I thought about this was actually a very long time ago. I had started my PhD, and I was still working as a teacher. I started around 2004, so 21 years ago now, and when I was doing my PhD, I was supervised by two guys who are quite famous in media literacy in this country, Andrew Burn and David Buckingham. They had both taught me as a masters’ student. They were very interested in media learning as a language. How it was a linguistic process, a social process. And I remember thinking at the time, how does this fit in with the kind of people who think that school is about acquiring knowledge?
To be clear, I don’t think about media literacy or media education as an acquisition of knowledge, and the book explains that. But it sort of troubled me that some people would ask things like “the kids you teach, what do they actually know?” I didn’t have an answer to that. I can tell you what they do, and I can tell you the sort of things they say. But I wasn’t 100% what they know other than what they turn in with their assignments or when they write an essay. You can tell that they know some things from their assignments and some of them knew a lot right but, how would I explain that in terms of another school subject?
When I was doing my PhD, I didn’t address that question because the guys I was working with, Burn, Buckingham, and John Potter, various other guys who are quite famous media literacy scholars, that question didn’t come on their radar. They were very interested in the idea of literacy. The idea that it was about communication. And that involves things around creative expression. It involves things about learning a language and communicating, and those are social and collaborative. So I didn’t bother with it again, and I became interested in a lot of other things like creativity and the connection between creativity and media literacy. Then some things happened in this country which made me go back to it as a question.
In 2010 there was a change in government in England, and the Conservative-Liberal coalition came to power. They wanted to rewrite education policy completely, and they wanted to return to what they called a “Knowledge Rich Curriculum.” When you talk to Americans they’re sometimes not aware of this, but the idea for a “Knowledge Rich Curriculum” actually comes from an American. It comes from E.D. Hirsch. He was an American educator. Basically, he wrote this book in the ‘90s called Cultural Literacy: What Americans Need to Know. It was a book about what he thought education should return to- learning facts- because he thought facts were important for people’s education. The book has lots and lots of lists of stuff that people should know. It’s like a kind of primer for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It’s an amazing book, but not for good reasons. It’s an incredible, very narrow view of education and learning.
What was happening in 2010 is that some politicians in this country had got hold of that book, and they tried to use it as a template for the curriculum. They also anchored that to some ideas about culture. The places in the curriculum where you taught about culture, it had to be a particular type of culture. It was effectively stale, male and pale.
Two things happened from a media point of view that were very interesting. One, in the English curriculum, in the prescribed curriculum for English from 1990 through to 2010, there had been a place where kids had to study media texts. It was prescribed in the curriculum, and every English teacher had to do some work with media texts. In the period from 2010 to 2014, this was taken out of the curriculum. Removed. There’s no statutory obligation to teach about media texts at all. A lot of people saw that as a very regressive step.
The other thing was that we had a lot of students in the country doing Media and Film as what you would call electives. They would do it as particularly at 14 and at 16 in high school as elective subjects, optional subjects. All the subjects were basically made to represent new curricula which fit in with the Knowledge Rich Curriculum. For Media and Film, these then became lists of texts that kids should watch and write about. Before, most of the qualifications had a sort of fifty-fifty balance between making and watching, and then making disappeared almost completely. There was a very little bit of it in Media. You had a very little bit of in Film, but it became much more about watching and writing about set texts. There were sometimes newspapers, film, TV, but they were from a prescribed list. This was the Knowledge Rich Curriculum in action.
I was sitting there, and at the time, I was training a lot of teachers. As a teacher educator, people were coming to me and saying, how do you teach this? How do you teach this thing? There were all these things on the list that were like TV programs from the ‘70s. They were considered very, very valuable in their time, but they were being canonized in a way that they were never intended to be. And the teachers were asking how do we teach this thing kids have never seen? They don’t understand it. And I thought, okay, something is really happening here which is very problematic. How does Media Education fit in or try and fit around or push back against or try and take on this Knowledge Rich Curriculum? How would I say knowledge worked in media? What are the knowledge structures that we can use to organize it? How do we write curricula in it? What would an ideal curriculum look like and what would be in it? What would the teacher need to know? What would you want the student to know? And I was sitting there because, almost on a weekly basis, teachers were asking me, Steve, how am I doing? How am I going to do this? Like, how am I going to teach it? I rewound my thinking- what do we actually want? What do we need here? We need a sense of what knowledge means in the subject.
It’s important to make a distinction here- to completely respect the work of media literacy educators. The book is broadly about how media education fits in with school curricula and knowledge in the sense of curricular knowledge. I make that distinction in chapter six which is about media literacy. A lot of really great media literacy work happens outside schools. I want to be clear that a lot of the media literacy work that people do is really valuable. It’s really good work. And I respect the people in America who write the best about media literacy education. Their work is great; I really love their work. But often times because of the way American education works, they’re dealing with state curricula or they’re dealing with stuff that’s extracurricular. Media literacy in America is often in informal settings. I’m thinking about the way that this might work in timetabled school, scheduled school subjects. Because these teachers were asking about it all the time, I said, what do we know? What does curricula look like? What has happened? And that led me then to think that no one’s really thought about this for quite some time.
At first, I thought no one had thought about it ever. And then, I had a conversation with David Buckingham where he said two people have thought about it in the past. There’s these two articles that you need to look at. One was from 1983, and one was from 1991. 35 years ago, right? Some people had done a little bit of work on it. And so I thought, well, teachers, academics, and anyone involved in teaching media need to think about this question because there’s a particular strand of academic and educational thinking which will tell you that knowledge is the end-all-be-all and that knowing stuff right is the most important thing that young people could do. They are a minority around the world, but they’ve got some real traction.
In England, they have some real traction. Australia is another place where they’re trying to do it and the Netherlands where they’re saying facts precede everything. Facts are the basis for a good education. That sort of thing which I don’t agree with, obviously. And so that context is really the genesis of the book. It’s a response to those debates, and it’s an attempt to help media educators think about those questions.
If I was being optimistic about it, it would be designed to help you make arguments about why Media Studies is important to teach. Because one of the things that gets leveled at media education lots of time is that it is dumbing down education. There’s nothing to it. It’s too easy. That’s the purpose of the book; The purpose is to make some complex philosophical arguments about why you need media education, what knowledge looks like in it, and how you theorize media education for the purposes of thinking about it in an academic sense. But it’s not just an academic book. There’s some stuff in there for teachers to think about and some stuff there about exams, assessment, and making media .
HC: I quite enjoyed the book for that reason. You are addressing this theoretical approach of analyzing Media Studies and Film studies which I found to be quite rooted in educational and curricular studies, but then you give it this concrete realization by taking a look at the English context as well as the very text of the exams that your students have been taking. I thought that was really wonderful and also quite a new context for me as an American.
SC: I sort of say this in the book, some of it is a peculiarly English problem. We don’t want people to think that this is something media educators around the world have to put up with. It’s peculiarly English in some respects, and things like the examinations and assessment are peculiarly English, but it does speak to just a broader point about assessment which is a question for all educators. Media educators everywhere ask, how do we assess? How can we tell that someone’s learned what we need them to learn?
HC: And not only is it an issue of assessment. But I think, as you mentioned earlier, it’s really an effort to legitimize or institutionalize ways of knowing. It comes with its own limits and its own constraints. And I think that’s particularly true for any institutional educational context regardless of country. I was wondering if you could kind of speak to the constraints surfaced or ones that you encountered when talking about how Media Studies and Film Studies are represented in educational institutions.
SC: My views come out of my experience as a media teacher for almost 20 years. I taught in high schools in London for just under 20 years, and almost all that time, I taught Media Studies. Under the Labour Government in Britain, from 1997 to 2010, there was a specialist schools program. I was a director of a specialist media arts school. It was a great thing to be involved in because the school had a curricular focus on media. And so my view of the constraints are a little bit different because I had a very wide range of experiences as a media educator, some of which were incredibly positive. I was really lucky. My view of the constraints come from that experience.
The first school I ever worked in was run by a very old-fashioned school principal who was suspicious of Media Studies. He thought it was good for keeping certain kinds of students occupied. That was his view of it- Let them do that stuff. It’ll keep those kids quiet. They won’t be a problem, you know. He was a very old-fashioned school principal, and I actually learned a lot about the way that you can use media education to improve opportunities for students.
In that school, no one was expecting anything of the media kids. They thought they’re just there. If they’re still in school and not out causing trouble, then they’ll be fine. And actually, these kids were clever, and they were often very creative, but they weren’t, in the traditional sense, academic. You could get them to do academic things, and some of them wrote great essays, presented brilliant ideas, and made really cool stuff. Media Studies didn’t fit in with the rest of the school in the sense of being academic. That really taught me a valuable lesson about the constraint of low expectations. You can be constrained because people think that this thing is not that important. They think it’s trivial. It’s about popular culture. How can it be serious? But actually, it’s an opportunity for you to do a whole lot of stuff while no one’s looking. You can do some really great educational stuff.
The second school I worked in, I really learned that. I was with a head who was a bit less suspicious, but he was a scientist. He was interested in what are they learning here? He was quite a serious man. He was quite keen on resourcing Media Studies quite well because he saw that it was popular with kids and that it kept certain kids in education. He put quite a lot of money into supporting equipment and resources. And what I learned under him was that with a bit of technical know-how and some resources, you can do some amazing things. I learned that the constraint for a lot of teachers is money. It’s about resourcing. But I only knew that by having a bit more money, having a few more cameras, and having a couple of computers that we could use to do editing and desktop.
This was the late 90s, early 2000s, and I could get these kids to do some amazing things. I became really conscious of getting girls into filmmaking. I’d noticed, when I started in this place, that I had all these girls, 16, 17, 18. When you would ask them to make stuff, they would choose to do magazines. They would just do print media because they felt comfortable with that media. Whereas all the boys wanted to run around making movies and making animations. It was time to choose project briefs one year, and this girl said to me, I want to make a film. I want to make a short film. And I was like, that’s great. I said, do you know what you want to do? And she said, no. She said, I don’t know, but I just know that I can do it better than the boys, and I want to beat them.
I thought that was really interesting. I had been a bit troubled by all these girls who weren’t happy. In the end, that became my Master’s project. My Master’s project was about finding out how to get more girls to do production and filmmaking. What that taught me about constraints is that actually some of the constraints on Media Studies are cultural. They’re about things like gender or class.
That second school was in quite a middle-class area with very socially mobile middle-class parents. Some parents would say, I’m not having my kids study media here. It’s not, it’s not academic enough. And I’d say to them, why do you think that? And they would say, they’re just messing around with cameras. So I would say, let’s have a look at some of this project work over here.
I had this great film made by a student about kids in the area. The school was in an area where there was a mix of Muslim and Jewish kids. And this kid had made a documentary about Jewish kids and Muslim kids and their views of the Middle East. It was a lovely little film, quite moving in lots of ways. There were some great scenes of Muslim and Jewish kids together talking about all these sorts of things. It was really cool. When I showed this film to parents, they were transfixed.
That really taught me that some of this stuff is cultural. The constraint is about gender, about class, about ethnicity, people from cultural backgrounds saying, I want my son to be a doctor, not a filmmaker. Those constraints were not imposed from outside. They were internal.
It was when we got into the 2010s and the government started to interfere, then the constraints became political. The constraints became about how the curriculum has been prescribed or not prescribed, and in some cases, the way that it was enforced through inspection and through accountability measures. That was when the constraints became enforced on the outside, and you could see then the media education didn’t fit in with these ideas about Knowledge Rich Curriculum. And that was very new to me.
I was aware of all these other constraints around people’s assumptions, cultural things, and class, but this was the first time that we felt that we were being targeted as media educators. Media Studies was being taken out of the national curriculum. You were having to submit to these structured curricula which had no choice for the teacher or the student in it. And that’s when the constraints became political. The book is partly an examination of those constraints. It’s an examination of the way that those constraints get enacted, and how you challenge them in a small way. I’m not purporting to be a revolutionary, but I am holding some of these things up to scrutiny and saying that these constraints don’t really hold up. They’re ideological.
HC: I found your discussion of prescribed curriculum versus the curriculum that you promote where both the teacher and the student are co-constructing to be really insightful. What I hear in the anecdotes you’ve just shared is that part of what really engages students with Media Studies- both the theory as well as the practice- is that it really validates and legitimizes their perspectives and their experiences in ways that often times within school settings students are not afforded. Why does that occur with Media Studies and how? How is that in some ways unique to ways of knowing within Media Studies?
SC: I’d say there are two sides to it. One side is about knowledge. It’s a view of knowledge. And the other side is the relationship between media and popular culture. Let’s take a look at both of those things and unpack them a bit.
In really good media education, knowledge is an encounter between the teacher and the student. My great friend and colleague, Julian McDougall, talks about knowledge as an assemblage, an assemblage of knowledge. The teacher brings some knowledge. The student brings some knowledge, and they kind of work it out together.
That is totally how I would say I treated teaching for the vast majority of my career. I knew some things, but these kids knew loads of things that I didn’t know. And we had to work this thing out together. That involves a surrender. It involves, for you as the teacher, a surrender to the idea that your student might know something you don’t. Right now, in most school systems in the world, and in the English school system particularly, there is an unwillingness to engage in that surrender.
In England, they use this phrase, teachers should be a “sage on the stage”. They should be up front, doling out wisdom. It’s complete nonsense. They use this phrase because they’re trying to elevate the status of the teaching profession which I totally understand. But what they’re saying is that the teacher is the only source of knowledge. And for me, that can never be true. That can never be the case because of the lived experiences of students. Now, I know that there will be conservative educators who hate the idea of lived experience, but in Media Studies, it’s essential. You have to have had an experience of popular culture to interrogate it. In media education, we’re asking, what’s your experience of this thing. Let’s put that under the microscope a bit. Why are you experiencing that thing, and is that experience the same for you as it is for other people? Why is it the same? Who’s trying to give you that experience? Why are they trying to give you it? All those kinds of questions. You can’t really do the subject properly unless you involve the people who are learning and their experiences in the process.
Now, on one level, people will say, that’s because media education isn’t that serious. You can draw on people’s knowledge because it’s easy to know. There’s nothing hard about it. In the book, I give some examples of why that isn’t the case. This connects to the second reason which is about popular culture. In media literacy and Media Education, you have to engage with the popular in order to study it. You have a sense of popular culture, transgressive texts, things that wouldn’t be in school curriculum or considered in the classroom. But that’s precisely why they’re important- because it’s a way of finding out about the world.
Now the example I use now with students and other teachers is Tiktok. Tiktok is a great example of the popular becoming very serious. You ask your kid, what Tiktoks are you looking at today? And they’ll tell you what Tiktoks the kids are making. Some of this stuff is terrifically creative.
I was just watching one yesterday with my son. It’s exam season here for sixteen-year-olds. They’re having their exams, and there’s a whole series of TikToks by sixteen-year-old boys analyzing their exams in the style of a post-game commentary like. So how did that exam go? John, well, we found it hard in the first half… They’ve got the advertising boards behind them. They’re in kits- uniforms- and stuff. It’s great. It’s fantastically funny. It’s really hilarious. They’re kind of genre-hopping. I said to my son, this is great. It’s really funny. Why are you seeing this on TikTok? There’s a question here about why. How do we get TikTok? How does it work? Where does it come from? Why does it work for this sort of user-generated content? There’s a whole set of questions about it that make it complex.
I said to him, you know, some governments are worried about TikTok because it’s run by the Chinese, and they see it as a sort of an infiltrating medium. And he said, yeah, I know that, but, this is just people fooling around. How is this dangerous? It’s an interesting discussion, a complex discussion, about the geopolitical status of TikTok. It becomes complex.
People think because it’s popular culture, it’s not complex. And that’s a problem. I say this in the book, that actually the text itself, or the or the medium itself, is not the thing. It’s not the thing that you ought to be looking at. You ought to be looking at the way the subject looks at things conceptually. It’s conceptually complex. But because you think that the text is insignificant, you think that the whole study of it is insignificant. And that’s the problem.
The thing about knowledge and what the student knows, when you start to get into that, what you realize is that the thing about media is that a lot of people, particularly adults, they see media on one level without ever really thinking about it. Kids are much better at thinking about things in depth because they’re at that stage where they haven’t had their opinions formed. They haven’t spent their whole life in echo chambers. Kids actually are much more open to the idea that media can be questioned than adults are a lot of the time. That’s the difference in knowledge. It’s a difference about the way that the knowledge is conceived of within the subject. Don’t mistake the text for knowledge. That’s the point of the book.
HC: I find that to be such an interesting example as well. I love soccer, as we call it here, so I think that’s quite clever. But also with the post-match commentary, you see the influence of industry. Football is a ginormous industry. Here, you see the idea of representation. Who’s involved? Are girls engaging in this trend? And then you also see that they’re picking up on this aesthetic formula of the post-match interview as well. I think that’s a really rich example.
SC: Interestingly, in these videos there’s two girls who are set up as a studio or podcast. They’re commenting on the quality of the TikTok. Do you think that was a really great performance? No, terribly poor production. And it’s just really clever. It’s a reflection of that thing in English football where you see more women in the studio, commenting and doing punditry. It reflects that they’ve “gone back to the girls.” It’s just very, very clever, but it’s also a good example of kids having knowledge that, firstly, their teacher probably doesn’t have, and secondly, that students assume they don’t have as well.
They have observed certain things about media forms like spoken language and the way interviews get conducted. That’s what I mean by surrendering to the idea that kids will know all sorts of things and that the media classroom is a space where they can demonstrate them. You just have to be okay with the fact that they might know more than you in some circumstances. That can be difficult.
I think this idea of students having knowledge that perhaps a teacher won’t have links well to this idea that the text is less important than the approach and the methodology to analyzing the text and broader trends. A lot of that, I think, we can attribute to the fact that media are constantly evolving, and oftentimes youth are the first to really take up the mantle of whatever form or format is popular.
Read the second part of our interview here.
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