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FOR THE PAST TWELVE YEARS, the New South Wales Department of Education and Train- ing (NSWDET) has funded a suite of screen literacy learning projects for “at risk” students from low socio-economic and ethnically diverse backgrounds (Mills, “Tools”; “Expanding Horizons”; “Screen Literacy”). Developed with the related aims of engaging students in learning and having a positive impact on their traditional literacy skills and capacities, these projects operated in the space where, as Jane Mills outlines, “old literacies meet new literacies, old media meets new media, screen culture meets other visual cultures, and theory commingles with praxis” (“Screen Literacy” 289). Purposefully acknowledging the students’ existing knowledge and understanding of popular screen culture, they addressed challenges for literacy, identity, and schooling for youth in the age of “new” (i.e., digital) media. The latter has been characterized as a profound change in the semiotic landscape, worldwide, summarized by Ilona Snyder as a general shift from “page to screen,” and described by Bill Green in terms of a similarly paradigmatic shift for literacy from print to digital electronics, and by Gunther Kress as a shift from text to image.

Abstract: This article discusses a trial project to explore the role of popular screen culture in student engagement levels, the capabilities of the smartphone camera for screen literacy learning, and the potential of digital communication technology for cultural participation and global citizenship. It asks if screen literacy learning so framed could point to a new pedagogy of cosmopolitanism.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, mobile phone technology, pedagogy, screen literacy

Popular Screen Culture and Digital Communication Technology in Literacy Learning: Toward a New Pedagogy of Cosmopolitanism

A global community of cosmopolitans will consist of people who want to learn about other ways of life, through anthropology and history, novels, movies, news stories in newspapers, on radio and television. Indeed, let me make my first entirely concrete practical proposal … Do what people all around the globe are already doing with American movies: see at least one movie with subtitles a month.

(Appiah 94)

BY Jane Mills AND Bill Green

Copyright © 2013 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2013.787355

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Adopting a multimodal approach that looks beyond language to all forms of communication, as has been variously discussed by Kress and Van Leeuwen, Jewitt et al., and more recently by Kress, these NSWDET-funded screen literacy learning projects took a “three-screen” approach comprising cinema, televi- sion, and computers. Initially, the proj- ects worked within a mainstream view of literacy pedagogy, as endorsed by NSWDET. In the most recent of these projects, the pedagogical and conceptual framework for the screen-based com- ponent has drawn on Green’s tripartite (3D) model involving the interplay of the operational, cultural, and critical di- mensions of literate practice and peda- gogy (Durrant and Green; Green, “A Literacy Project”). This model provides a bedrock for media literacy learning in- volving media consumption and produc- tion competence (i.e., the operational), understanding the meaning systems in, and being able to construct one’s own meanings from, media texts (i.e., the cul- tural), and, at the same time, responding critically and responsibly to those texts (i.e., the critical) (Durrant 2012). The conceptual design of the screen literacy projects under discussion has also drawn on what, in a somewhat parallel devel- opment to Green’s model, Andrew Burn has called a 3C model involving the cul- tural, the critical, and the creative. In this, not only is movie-making closely linked to critical analysis, but screen and literacy are also conjoined, as are screen literacy, traditional literacy learning, popular film and television studies, and English studies. All these fields can and do stand alone but, arguably, they be- longed together if the students were in- deed to become properly screen-literate.

Popular screen culture—that is, films and television programs that were not part of the respected and hallowed canon—was a crucially important as- pect of these screen literacy projects. Following James Gee’s notion of af- finity spaces, as well as his distinction between formally taught and informally acquired learning, specifically learn- ing attained outside the classroom, the teachers involved in the projects were encouraged to publicly and explicitly value the knowledge and understanding which the students had acquired from their viewing of television and films in the home and local community environ- ment (Finch). Thus the projects sought to bring popular screen culture—some- thing about which the students had learned a great deal outside the class- room—into the classroom. They then built on this informally acquired knowl- edge in the classroom, where critical analytical and production skills were taught.

For the movie-making component of the projects, the students followed an in- dustry model: from concept and devel- opment through pre-production, produc- tion, and post-production, culminating in exhibition in the form of a screening for family and friends in their local cin- ema. As most rural Australian towns have no cinema, other local venues, such as the Returned Services League (RSL) Club, were used. Thus the stu- dents first brought their knowledge and understanding of popular screen culture into the classroom, and then took their enhanced knowledge, understanding, and new production skills back into the home and community, whence their orig- inal knowledge—and their passion— had started.

Impact of Screen Literacy Learning

In each of the projects, researchers and teachers observed an immediate positive impact on student engagement, and a significant enhancement in lit- eracy levels. A positive impact on the sense of self and identity that the stu- dents developed in relation to the rest of the class, to the school at large, and to their families and community was also observed. This was of particular signifi- cance to students who hitherto, due to their low levels of engagement and lit- eracy, had been held in low regard by their peers and, often, by their teachers. However, their sense of identity in rela- tion to that which existed outside their local community, that is, to the nation and the rest of the world, appeared to be unchanged. In short, the students ap- peared to be relatively untouched by a global perspective.

This requires some elucidation, since popular film and television in Australia, as in most parts of the world, is noth- ing if not global. As Graham Nash and Kathy Mackey point out, Hollywood and the Internet are widely considered examples of the globalized culture that our students inhabit as “natives.” But how meaningful is this if they continue to act and to imagine themselves as un- connected to the rest of the world? Cer- tainly, in terms of content, the students’ movies demonstrated knowledge of the global—indeed, the “glocal,” to use Roland Robertson’s apt neologism. For example, the students skillfully adapted Hollywood genres such as horror, the chick flick, and kung fu to their own local specifics. But a blinkered local- ism was manifest in the students’ lack

Popular screen culture—that is, films and television programs that were not part of the respected and hallowed canon—was a crucially important aspect of these screen literacy projects.

A New Pedagogy of Cosmopolitanism 111

of interest in viewing films they were shown that were made by students from other schools and other towns, in show- ing their films outside their immediate community, or in viewing and learning about films in a foreign language or genres specific to Hollywood or main- stream Austalian cinema.

The students appeared to experience what John Tomlinson calls “banal glo- balism.” Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry (122) argue that “‘banal glo- balism,’ the almost unnoticed symbols of globality that crowd our daily lives,” might be “helping to create a sensibil- ity conducive to the cosmopolitan rights and duties of being a ‘global citizen’ by generating a greater sense of both global diversity and global interconnectedness and belonging.” Our observations, how- ever, suggested that the promise of such citizenship remained unfulfilled.

In short, the three screens opened up a world to our students but did not en- able them to access, or participate in, the world. While the local links between school, home, and community were expressly sought and valued, the proj- ects failed to overcome a parochialism that disadvantages rural youth in many educational and societal senses. Not, of course, that there is anything intrinsi- cally “wrong” with the local or the paro- chial. As explained earlier, the projects actively encouraged a local connected- ness between school, home, and com- munity. There was, furthermore, an im- plicit understanding that, as Ulrich Beck argues, globalizing is also a matter of situating and localizing. But the projects did nothing to actively encourage wider horizons. This did not synchronize with cinema, which has been a global phe- nomenon since its inception, it ignored the global cultural flows within the new eduscape (of which the students were clearly a part, although seemingly

unaware that this was so), and it con- tradicted the increasingly transnational direction of contemporary literacy studies.

The projects responded to what Jewitt et al. argue is the “need to make curricu- lum knowledge ‘relevant’ by connect- ing with students’ out-of-school experi- ence” (17). For our students, however, “out-of-school” was located very close to the boundaries marked by their school fence. In the social terrain inhabited by our students, it proved difficult to de- termine the extent to which their screen literacy learning was having an impact on “the social and political boundaries of English [learning]—determined by teachers, schools, Local Education Au- thorities, by policy and by diverse so- cial interests—boundaries [that tend to be] tightly guarded and regulated by a highly prescriptive policy context” (18).

The images the students looked at and filmed, and the sounds they heard and recorded, provided the starting point to extend the horizons of their literacy learning, but they were unable to go further. The overriding need for teach- ers to deliver the outcomes formulated narrowly in the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NA- PLAN) in all Australian schools meant that many of the social and political boundaries of the English curriculum remained in much the same place, thus keeping the students in much the same place, and indeed “in their place,” as Richard Edwards and Robin Usher (115–34) discuss. To make the social terrain for our students more equitable, we needed to dismantle the boundar- ies that preserved localism—not be- cause the home-community focus was not needed but because it came at the expense of the students seeing beyond the boundaries that denied them access to global citizenship. The boundaries,

which prevented the students experienc- ing or establishing a global–local dia- logue, needed to become porous.

Adding Value To address this issue, a trial screen lit-

eracy learning project involving teach- ers and educators in Australia and Japan was designed to add value to previous projects in two ways. First, it included the fourth screen: the mobile-phone camera screen. Second, it added a trans- national framework by linking students in rural–regional NSW with similarly situated and (dis)engaged students in Japan. It was determined that students in both countries would use mobile smartphones to communicate with and learn from each other, both to record their films and to distribute them to their counterparts in the other nation.

We selected Year 10 students in a medium-sized secondary school in rural New South Wales, at which most stu- dents came from low socio-economic backgrounds, for a seven-day trial the week immediately after the School Cer- tificate exams ended. The significance of this is that the Year 10 cohort is an underresearched group within the total school population: literacy education attention tends to fall on the early and senior years of schooling, and more re- cently on the middle years, with little focus in particular on Year 10 as such. A further consideration was that, in NSW, students sit for the School Cer- tificate at the end of Year 10, and this is widely seen as a limbo period in their total schooling context, within the larger black hole of the junior secondary school (Sawyer, Brock, and Baxter), particu- larly for students and schools classed as “educationally disadvantaged.” It is worth noting here that although we had applied for federal funding to support a

The students appeared to experience what John Tomlinson calls “banal globalism.”

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larger, more comprehensive project, we were unsuccessful. We remained con- vinced, however, of the value of such an undertaking, and this article will in- dicate something of why we feel that is the case.

The Fourth Screen In his discussion of the mobile phone,

Gerard Goggin (115) points out that this particular technocultural development offers possibilities for the coordination of activities and greater independent communication with peers. It was this, coupled with a desire to better under- stand, and contribute to, the theoriza- tion of this emerging aspect of com- munications culture, that led us to the fourth screen. As Goggin argues, the coming together of the moving image and telephony in the form of the smart- phone is evidence of the convergence of “formerly distinct communications platforms, technologies, audiences and cultures in which cell phone and mo- bile technologies are being fervidly embraced” (162). The fourth screen, therefore, offers not only moviemaking technology but moving-image commu- nication and sharing capacity as well.

We also wanted to address, and per- haps pre-empt, a moral panic similar to the one that has developed around text-messaging and “sexting” (Lumby and Funnell). Could, or would, the new practice of smartphone moviemaking be accused of posing a threat to literacy and also to cultural film values and can- ons, thus leading to a new generation of screen illiterates? The general intoler- ance of teachers toward digital phones was another factor. Although mobile phones are not banned from all schools, their use in the classroom commonly is. As Goggin explains:

because of their prevalence and avail- ability, their portability, their intricate incorporation into the patterns of ev- eryday life, and increasingly, their function as media, mobiles [pose] con- siderable challenges for the conduct and regulation of private and public spheres, and the boundaries and rela- tionships that pertain to and traverse these (115).

The argument for using the smart- phone in our trial project was clinched by the principal of our participating school, which up to that point had al- lowed mobile phone use in the play areas only. Recognizing the existing conflict between teen culture and new forms of pedagogy, he observed: “Mo- bile phones are in our classrooms now and they are causing us problems. Let us see if we can turn them into learn- ing and teaching tools.” In other words, rather than a threat, could they be seen as an opportunity?

Some Outcomes Accepting that in so short a time and

in such circumstances we could not adequately gauge literacy levels, and knowing, too, that Japanese students could not participate until the following year, our aims in this trial project were confined to the interrelated exploration of the role of popular screen culture in student engagement levels, the capabili- ties of the smartphone camera for screen literacy learning, and the potential of the “fourth screen” for cultural participation and global citizenship.

Engagement As explained above, we targeted Year

10 students in the week immediately af- ter their School Certificate exams. Un- til the announcement a year earlier of the raising of the school leaving age in

NSW, the majority of this cohort had ex- pected to join the ranks of school leav- ers once their exams were over. We thus anticipated very low levels of engage- ment. What we got, however, was a high level of engagement. For example, stu- dents volunteered assistance throughout all stages, supplemented the work of teachers, used their initiative to offer so- lutions and, often unasked, assisted one another. Some voluntarily took work home in order to complete their work on schedule—a rare occurrence in this cohort’s culture, as we were told. The students took time-keeping seriously, with almost all arriving on time for each class throughout the project, and several returning from another class although they had been told it was not necessary. At the screening, furthermore, several students demonstrated hitherto unsus- pected hospitality and social skills, vol- untarily welcoming parents and guests and offering them refreshments.

There were some failures. After the first day, six students left because “it sounds like it’s going to be too much hard work.” Some disappeared for one or two periods, or a whole day, for a va- riety of reasons, such as romantic entan- glements or because they were bored. More generally, the uneven nature of the filmmaking meant that not all were fully involved all the time. In the period immediately after lunch, engagement levels dropped very noticeably, making the planned learning and teaching dur- ing this period virtually impossible.

Mobile Phone Capability The small cameras proved easy to

use, and several students quickly be- came skilled in their use—demonstrat- ing, for example, an understanding that on such a small screen, the close-up was

Could, or would, the new practice of smartphone moviemaking be accused of posing a threat to literacy and also to cultural film values and canons, thus leading to a new generation of screen illiterates?

A New Pedagogy of Cosmopolitanism 113

a more appropriate shot to use than the wide shot. Student enjoyment and en- gagement flowed partly from having access to expensive, latest-model smart- phones, and also from a sense of trans- gression, as demonstrated by their de- cision to film themselves tearing down the posters around the school banning mobile-phone use.

The downside was that the quality of the image was not as good as had been hoped, and indeed proved inappropri- ate for screening in the large assembly hall at end of term, although this was of greater concern to the teachers than the students. A more significant prob- lem was that the students’ government- provided Digital Education Revolution (DER) laptops provided, at times, proj- ect-threatening incompatibility between the camera and the editing software.

Cultural Participation and Global Citizenship

As already mentioned, due to the time constraint in this instance, we were unable to fully implement the global aspect by directly involving Japanese colleagues and students in a fully col- laborative, transnational moviemaking project. However, the students were in- formed of this aspect of the project from the start and were asked to make films for Japanese students their own age, which would later be shown to academ- ics and students in Japan. (This subse- quently took place at a conference of the Australian Studies Assocation in Japan in Tokyo on July 3, 2011.)

After some initial protestations of ig- norance, the students discovered they possessed considerable knowledge of Japanese popular screen culture, which

they shared with their fellow students. Many had been avid viewers of the As- troboy television series when younger, for example, and most knew about, al- though had not necessarily seen, the popular horror Hollywood movies The Ring and The Ring Two, the remake and sequel of the globally successful Japanese film Ringu. Some students had even seen the Japanese original, or ex- tracts from it, on YouTube. These films offered a wealth of material to prompt further viewing and discussion of is- sues of importance to screen literacy learning, such as genre, the remake, na- tional cinema, and other Film Studies concepts. Their existing knowledge of popular film and television was further extended by accessing Japanese moving and still images from cinema, television, and news sources on their computers and on the smartboard. Preconceptions of “uncool” Japanese school students were quickly swept aside by the down- loaded images of cosplay teenagers at Harajuku. Although this shared knowl- edge of Japanese culture did not have a direct impact on the students’ filmmak- ing technique or practical production skills, it did mean they lost interest in reproducing stereotypical images and ideas of either themselves as Austra- lians or their Japanese audience. Rather than stress perceptions of national and cultural difference in terms of Austra- lian superiority, their film ideas came to demonstrate interest in communicat- ing similarities and differences between themselves and Japanese students of the same age. There is, of course, much else that might be explored in such work, such as, for instance, how to deal with narrative patterning, or what is involved

transculturally in the visual image; how- ever, our opportunity was limited in this regard.

Reflection and Feedback

At the end of the project, the students were invited to participate in a group discussion designed to encourage re- flection and elicit feedback. The key teachers and educators were invited to engage in a semistructured interview and to comment on a draft report. This was then redrafted to reflect all views and experiences.

From the student feedback, we learned that what had proved difficult for us had also been difficult for them. However, they went further than simply commenting on the problems they had experienced and made helpful sugges- tions for how the project might be im- proved for future students. In particular, they acknowledged the problem of stu- dent dropout by offering ideas for im- plementation the next year. Prior hands- on experience of cameras and editing, they told us, would “show them [i.e., fu- ture students] before [they start] who is good and who isn’t and they can choose them what are best with the camera or [those who] can do good sound or edit- ing. That would save a lot of mucking about.” They recommended that future projects should include hands-on cam- era experience on the first day because “that way they’ll know there are good bits coming and they’ll cope with the boring bits.” They thought that future students should be shown more smart- phone “mini-movies,” “to learn what works and what doesn’t from what

Rather than stress perceptions of national and cultural difference in terms of Australian superiority, their film ideas came to demonstrate interest in communicating similarities and differences between themselves and Japanese students of the same age.

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others have done.” As for the problem- atic period immediately after lunch, they suggested it would be a good time for viewing smartphone mini-movies: “Then they can be sort of quiet and not be all stressed out, and learn at the same time.”

Their comments about future proj- ects, in which they themselves would not be participating, demonstrated what their teachers suggested was an un- usual degree of altruism among a cohort which, until now, had been regarded as disempowered and largely disengaged. The Head of English later commented:

when I speak to the kids who were involved in the [trial] Screen Literacy project, I am beginning to realise just how much benefit they received from the experience. Some of them were very negative “customers” [i.e., ex- tremely uncooperative] and their whole attitude to me and to school now seems to be much more positive.

Cooperation was indeed one of the most significant outcomes of the project. Movie-making is usually an intensely collaborative process and several stu- dents commented that they were unaccus- tomed to the degree of cooperation that was required of them. The teachers and researchers also noted this outcome, with one commenting that the students “took collaboration to a whole new level.”

Transnational Collaboration

Upon hearing that their films would be screened in Japan, many of the students initially responded with caustic, xeno- phobic remarks employing racist stereo- types relating to physical appearance, contemporary fashion, military coward- ice, and Asian inferiority underpinned by a belief in Australian superiority. Their “us against them” remarks can be characterized as a mixture of ignorance (“Do they talk the same as in China?”; “Do they wear those long dressing

gown things?”), low self-esteem (“They won’t want to see our films”), and sar- casm directed toward our “good” inten- tions for their self-improvement (“We’ll make a crap film to show how crap our school is”).

Quickly, however, it became “cool” to be involved in the transnational as- pect. The first manifestation of this was the poster that three students designed collaboratively. Using Photoshop skills, inside the screen of an enlarged image of a smartphone downloaded from the Internet, they wrote:

Do you use your mobile phone in class? We did! We made movies using this small screen. Literacy means not just reading and writing but also view- ing, listening, and representing. We are showing our movies to family and friends this Friday… and to students in Japan next year. Are you jealous?!

In the group discussion, the students suggested how the Japanese connection in future projects could be improved. Their use of “we” and “them” in their comments below refers to future stu- dents, both Australian and Japanese. This time, however, by placing them- selves in the position of future students they expressed an empathy for others that they had previously lacked.

• “It would be good to be in touch with the Japanese students before we make our films so they know us and we know them.”

• “We could talk on Skype, or email, and have a special Facebook page then they could see us and us could see them.”

• “We could all text them 3 questions and they can text us their 3 ques- tions, then we’d have to do, you know, research so as we and them answer properly.”

• “We can look at Japanese films and we can send them some Australian films to see.”

• “That way we could all see [i.e., in each other’s films] what things we do different and what things we do the same.”

We heard no racism or xenophobia in their later comments. Rather, they demonstrated a valuing of dialogue, of civil conversation, and of sharing ideas and images outside their immediate community. Indeed, they suggested the making of another, wider, community of practice in which ideas are shared with complete strangers. They expressed the view that this community would be one in which Australian students would be equal partners with as yet unknown Japanese students. What these students were expressing, we realized, was a cos- mopolitan form of cooperation.

Cosmopolitanism There are numerous defnitions of

cosmopolitanism—many far from fa- vorable—but in the context of this par- ticular cohort, Ulrich Beck’s comment in The Cosmopolitan Vision is apposite:

What is enlightenment? To have the courage to make use of one’s cosmo- politan vision and to acknowledge one’s multiple identities—to combine forms of life founded on language, skin colours, nationality or religion with the awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different (ii).

Until relatively recently, discussion of cosmopolitanism was trapped in a binarism beween an idealized, border- less globalization and fixed, bounded notions of nationalism and parochial- ism. Stephanie Donald, Eleanore Kof- man, and Catherine Kevin suggest that the present revival of interest in cosmo- politanism derives from “debates about mobility, belonging, and strangeness … [from] a rethinking of the nature of a global political community, and on the ethical bonds of hospitality in a mo- bile world which applies equally to the parochial or local and the global” (5). Closely aligned to globalization, cos- mopolitanism involves the erosion of distinct boundaries, and the emergence

What these students were expressing, we realized, was a cosmopolitan form of cooperation.

A New Pedagogy of Cosmopolitanism 115

of internal globalization or dissolution of the nation-state in the “us” and the “them” of social identities is constructed less negatively. Thus cosmopolitan tol- erance, as Mica Nava argues, involves opening up to the “world of the other” and the “allure of difference” (19).

Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider sug- gest that it is only when cosmopolitan ways of thinking and perceiving become incorporated into people’s identities, rituals, and dispositions that the former can become an effective force in the world (7–8). Szerszynski and Urry find that this blending of universalistic dis- positions and particularistic local cul- tures does seem to be occurring among certain social groups. But they also find that the relationship between visuality, mobility, and the cosmopolitan suggests that this blending can radically trans- form the very character of the particular and the local in a way that is not neces- sarily an unalloyed civilizational gain: that humans are increasingly seeing and experiencing the world from afar, “at home” only within the multiple mobili- ties of late modernity. In other words, there is a possibility of going no further than the limits of banal cosmopolitan- ism. They do not suggest, however, that there is an inevitable irreconcilability between cosmopolitan openness on the one hand and the local or parochial on the other. Bruno Latour’s solution, they point out (127), was to call for a form of cosmopolitanism that does not require us to leave our attachments at the door, one in which people are not asked to detach themselves from the particular— from their particular local place—in order to attain cosmopolitan emancipa- tion. As Rizvi (2009: 257–58) argues:

A global imagination now plays a cru- cial role in how people engage with their everyday activities, consider their

options and make decisions within the new configurations of social relations that are no longer confined to local communities but potentially span, ei- ther directly or indirectly, across na- tional boundaries.

How this is to be achieved is precisely the challenge, particularly in the context of education, and perhaps especially with regard to rural–regional schooling, as in the case discussed here.

Conclusion The students’ comments support Ber-

tram C. Bruce’s observation (29) that participation in the kinds of collabora- tions that new communication technolo- gies enable, demonstrate how consider- ations of globalization lead us toward understanding the perspective of others. The project further points to the poten- tial of popular film and television for literacy learning that uses the fourth screen to promote national cultural well- being. As Martha Nussbaum argues, this must draw on longstanding discus- sion concerning cultural literacy learn- ing as a necessary aspect of educating for democratic and cosmopolitan world citizenship.

By combining mobility, communica- tion technology, visuality, and a desire to get to know and relate to “other- ness,” screen literacy learning organized around the mobile phone camera offers a concept and experience of cosmopoli- tanism that, as Kwame Appiah argues (155–74), calls for “a habit of co-exis- tence” and “dialogue” with strangers. This approach to literacy learning en- abled our students to learn the value of Appiah’s notion of “ethics in a world of strangers” while they actually practiced it. The students’ films and their reflec- tions demonstrated Appiah’s notion of the cosmopolitan that celebrates the

fact that there are different local human ways of being. And, as Beck acknowl- edges, “one of the most important pre- suppositions and implications of the cosmopolitanization thesis is the redis- covery and redefinition of the local” (88). Hence, the project outlined here might appropriately be understood as working toward what Rizvi (2009) calls cosmopolitan learning, as “a new way of learning about other cultures and in- tercultural exchange” (266).

This raises for us the following ques- tions: By ensuring that literacy learning involves practicing such ethics locally and globally, might we not begin to ad- dress the uneven terrain that exists for educationally disadvantaged students? And might not this enable them to participate in the wider community of which, in fact, they are already a part, even though not necessarily, or know- ingly, participating in it? The students’ own practice and their reflections in this trial project suggest that screen literacy learning as cultural production using the mobile phone camera could indeed em- power currently disempowered students to become proactive cultural partici- pants and to take their place in society as ethically aware global citizens.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank our colleagues at Charles Sturt

University, in particular the School of Com- munication and Creative Industries, teachers and students at Canobolas Technology High School, colleagues at the NSW Department of Education (Western Region), the NSW English Teachers Association, the Japan Academy of Moving Images, and the Austra- lian Studies Association in Japan. For their support and collaboration, we thank Heather Grant, Chris Condliffe, Bec Wotzko, Phil Glen, Kristina Gottschall, Eva Gold, Shigeki Chiba,Yoshikazu Shiobara, and Jo-Anne Reid. We also thank the anonymous peer re- viewers for their helpful comments.

This approach to literacy learning enabled our students to learn the value of Appiah’s notion of “ethics in a world of strangers” while they actually practiced it.

116 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television

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Jane Mills, formerly Associate Professor in Communication in the School of Commu- nication and Creative Industries at Charles Sturt University, is a Senior Research Fel- low at the Journalism & Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales. She has written and broadcast widely on cinema, censorship, feminism, sociolinguistics, and human rights. Her current research concerns geocritical approaches to the moving image. Her most recent book is Jedda (Currency Press & NFSA, 2012).

Bill Green is Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University. His research and publication ranges across curriculum in- quiry, literacy studies, English teaching, doctoral research education, and education for rural–regional sustainability. His most recent books are Literacy in 3D: An Inte- grated Perspective in Theory and Practice (Australian Council for Educational Re- search, 2012), co-edited with Catherine Bea- vis, and Rethinking Rural Literacies: Trans- national Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013/forthcoming), co-edited with Michael Corbett.

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