Creativity and Media Production in Schools

Media production is an important component of media literacy together with critical understanding. It can be defined as the ability to create messages in different media formats (including press, video, radio, comics, hypertext, webpages, podcasts, and social media) to express personal views and participate in community life. Media production entails creative acts of meaning‐making. It has thus to do with creativity and learning, where creativity is meant as a relational and social practice of generating meaning. Implementing creative media production in school may raise several issues relating to time management, risks of losing class control, tensions between standardization needs and openness to the unknown, and so on. Nevertheless, media production work remains a crucial pedagogical strategy to engage learners with critical understanding through practice and, as such, allows learners to learn by creating or to create for learning. Today, digital tools largely support media production in school, reducing the cost and facilitating access. Teachers and students may even benefit from the widespread use of personal mobile devices to engage with multimedia projects in and out of school.