The Media Studies Department at Highgate Wood School aims to engage, challenge and encourage all students to develop a passion for understanding how and why the media exists and how it can ultimately influence audience’s around the world today. Our curriculum celebrates the diversity and is inclusive of the school community and helps students to make sense of the world and representations within it. We have opportunities to study media content from global artists to local heroes, engaging in the various ways the media can be consumed.
By studying a range of media products and industries from the three platforms of media; including magazines, film, TV, social media, video games, radio, music videos and newspapers, we are able to analyse how representations are constructed. In addition to this we debate why they are constructed in such a way? How different audiences would interpret texts and how regulation and ownership will inevitably have influence over media production. We endeavor to challenge and debate perceptions and ideologies created by the media, analytically linking context and intentions around the creations of media products, whilst evaluating how different audiences, with differing experiences and backgrounds, will decode messages communicated. We aim to highlight that there is no one way of interpreting a media text and that opinions, producer views and audience interpretations will always be different.
Our hope for all our students is that studying a diverse and inclusive Media Studies curriculum provides them with the cultural literacy needed to succeed in life and actively participate in the world with empathy and integrity. By answering analytical questions and learning how to question media representation and interpretations, students learn to think critically and become independent, evaluative thinkers. By challenging students, stimulating their intellectual curiosity and encouraging their creativity, we give students transferable skills, preparing them to become lifelong learners and active global citizens; inspiring them to be the best that they can be.