|
INTRODUCTION
Often when we try
to understand troubled adolescents, we in special education find ourselves at
a loss. As there is often no definable academic learning problem, we get caught
in a muted game of blame. We may imply that the child is bad, or the family
is bad, or the school is bad, or the neighborhood is bad. We avoid words
like "bad" and cloak our beliefs in respectable academic garb, and of course
we never suggest single causation. But research generally avoids larger cultural
components of disability, perhaps because there is a widespread fallacy that
we can not change our culture. Teachers often informally note the negative
effects of our commercial culture; but when researchers consider culture, they
usually examine the idiosyncrasies of minority group cultures that may hinder
academic learning. Such an approach lets the mainstream cultural overlay
off the hook. Many teachers of troubled adolescents realize that their students
are not all that deviant-- they have internalized our commercial culture's
most pervasive values of happiness through acquisition, competition, and individualism.
In my decade of teaching troubled youth in a variety of
settings, I am confident that there is a strong cultural component to such problems
as opposition/defiant disorder, attention deficit disorder, eating disorders,
and substance abuse. I would not argue that our commercial culture plays
a causal role in such difficulties, but it often reinforces and in some
ways shapes disability. Certainly the standard of the good life that American
advertising portrays presents a mental health challenge to all of us. This is
perhaps another reason such an approach to disability is avoided; we must look
at ourselves with the same lens as we see the troubled student. Teachers
and parents who seek to minimize participation in our commercial culture learn
quickly of its pervasiveness. This pervasiveness leads to a certain kind of
invisibility that serves to keep advertising "under the radar screen" of most
research. However, advertising, and particularly television advertising, was
defined as an important topic for education and psychology research in the
1970s. A research agenda was delineated, but there has been little follow-through
in the 1980s and 1990s. We in education, particularly special education,
have an obligation to resuscitate such research approaches and understand how
an advertising-driven culture defines norms and values.
With this
paper I hope to revive the notion that advertising is a legitimate, in fact
necessary, area of education research. For theoretical grounding, I would like
to begin with the ideas of Paulo Freire. As Freire's framework insists on historical
understanding, I will then trace American advertising's evolution in
the twentieth century from a print-based medium to its present pervasive multi-media
control of cultural distribution.
From this historical
understanding, I will examine the knowledge advertisers possess concerning information-processing,
linguistic constructions, and visual communication. The
sheer volume of psychological research done in the name of commerce dwarfs
the research educators do concerning learning. Advertisers have been quite successful
in capturing the attention of our youth. Educators need to consider
what advertisers know about learning so that we may be as successful in holding
the attention of our students. Finally, I will look at the research that
has tried to address the effects of advertising on youth, particularly those
with behavioral and emotional difficulties. With this paper, I hope that new
research directions become clear.
|