题目

急用一篇英文论文 是讨论media and ethnicity in multicultral societies之间的关系
要写一篇英文大概3000字左右的,大家可以给我一个中文思路,主要是讨论出彩,思路清晰.我目前不太会写这种长结构的英文议论文,有经验的朋友能不能大概给我个思路,写几段?每段写什么?怎么争论比较好?
导师大概说introduction不超过300字,但要涵盖之后文章要讨论的内容.不太明白怎么涵盖.如果intro里面已经交待后面要讨论什么,那后面再写不就会感觉很罗嗦么?我所有的分都送你们了

提问时间：2021-02-04

答案

A large number of educators and theorists recognize the ubiquity of media culture in contemporary society, the growing trends toward multicultural education, and the need for media literacy that addresses the issue of multicultural difference. There is growing recognition that media representations help construct our images and understanding of the world and that education must meet the dual challenges of teaching media literacy in a multicultural society and sensitizing students and publics to the inequities and injustices of a society based on gender, race, and class inequalities and discrimination. Recent critical studies see the role of mainstream media in exacerbating these inequalities and the ways that media education and the production of alternative media can promote a healthy multiculturalism of diversity and more robust democracy. They thus confront some of the most serious challenges and problems that face us as educators and citizens as we move toward the twenty-first century.
In this paper, I first discuss how critical pedagogy can promote multicultural education and sensitivity to cultural difference, and then focus on the importance of a wide range of types of critical literacy to deal with the challenges of the cultural and technological revolution that we are currently involved in. Such concerns are part of a critical pedagogy which challenges educators, students, and citizens to rethink established curricula and teaching strategies to meet the challenge of confronting and dissecting cultural representation in our increasing multicultural and technological society. The project involves teaching the skills that will empower citizens and students to become sensitive to the politics of representations of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and other cultural differences in order to empower individuals and promote democratization. My argument is that education today needs to foster a variety of new types of literacy to empower students and to make education relevant to the challenges of the present and future. My assumption is that new technologies are altering every aspect of our society and we need to understand and make use of them both to understand and transform our world.
Multiculturalism and Media Pedagogy
A recent reader Shared Differences demonstrates how media of cultural representation such as film, video, photography, and multimedia can be used to promote multicultural education (Carson and Friedman 1995). The text opens with a statement by co-editor Diane Carson that a sense of urgency concerning America's increasingly multicultural society drove her and Lester Friedman to investigate how multicultural education can help us invigorate education for the contemporary era: "A teacher's inclusion of multicultural pedagogy and an active engagement with diverse ethnic, racial, and national issues is critical to America's social well-being... We must put our beliefs into practice, aware that the defining characteristics and enabling understanding of ethnic, racial, and national groups can and ought to be taught. Teachers must acknowledge uniqueness and difference as they also applaud similarity, for the strength of small communities and also society at large derives from celebrating our diversity" (ix).
Carson expands her pitch for multicultural education as a response to deal creatively with growing diversity, which facilitates "strategies for sharing, understanding, and enjoying" our proliferating cultural multiplicities and differences (x). She urges developing strategies for action, that will promote multicultural understanding, that will empower students, and that will strengthen education. Carson's and Friedman's dual project is to argue that the issues of multiculturalism are central to academic disciplines from literature to anthropology, and that media pedagogy can serve to promote the goals of multicultural education and critical media literacy. They accordingly assemble a broad array of studies by teachers who use media technology to promote multiculturalism in a number of disciplines in two and four year colleges. Each of their 14 contributors outlines course goals, discusses how they use media and media education to promote these goals, and analyzes their course experiences. Each also presents the syllabus used in the course to provide practical models of how to organize courses in multicultural education and media pedagogy.
The result is a very useful collection of models of practical criticism that will enable teachers in various fields to use media education to promote goals internal to their discipline. On the whole, the collection advances the social goals of making teachers and students sensitive to the politics of representation, to how media audiences' images of race, gender, sexuality, and cultural differences are in part generated by cultural representations, how negative stereotyping presents harmful cultural images, and the need for a diversity of representations to capture the cultural wealth of contemporary America. Teachers can gain insight into how media can serve their pedagogical goals and how they can both use media to promote multicultural education and to use this material to teach media literacy as well.
Following Carson's Preface and overview of the project, the collection opens with an essay by co-editor Lester Friedman, "Struggling for America's Soul: A Search for Some Common Ground in the Multicultural Debate." Friedman notes the current conflicts over multiculturalism in American society and the debates over multicultural education in the academic world. In this contentious and conflicted terrain, he suggests, we must seek common ground, to articulate what unites as well as divides us, and come to appreciate our commonalties as well as our differences. Indeed, the rancor in some of the education wars over curricula, pedagogy, and education in general are part and parcel of broader cultural wars between competing groups and ideologies fighting over the future of U.S. society and culture. Since educational debates are often intimately connected with political struggles, it is necessary to articulate clearly the different positions within the debates and if possible and appropriate to seek a common ground for consensus.
Indeed, I have long believed that there is no necessary conflict between traditional and multicultural education, that the education process is strengthened with the incorporation of voices, viewpoints, and perspectives excluded from traditional canons, and that multicultural curricula, deployed wisely, can improve many academic courses. Friedman attempts to articulate some principles that would enable multicultural education to enrich rather than replace the traditional curriculum and that would provide a common ground for both traditionalists and multiculturalists to rethink education. Reaching a common and higher ground in the debates over education require, in Friedman's view: acknowledging that while knowledge is constructed and transmitted from specific locations that "knowledgeable, well-trained teachers can generate discussions about cultures other than their own," (3). For Friedman this entails accepting that multicultural curricula need not "be taught only, or even primarily, to members of ethnic minorities," nor that "one monocultural approach (e.g., Eurocentrism) [be replaced] with another monocultural methodology (e.g., Afrocentrism)" (3).
If multicultural education is to promote genuine diversity and expand the curriculum, it is important both for groups excluded from mainstream education to learn about their own heritage and for dominant groups to explore the experiences and voices of minority and excluded groups. Moreover, as Friedman stresses, while it is important and useful to study cultures and voices excluded from traditional canons, dead white European male authors may have as much of importance to teach all students as excluded representatives of minority groups whom multiculturalists want, often with good reason, to include in the curriculum. Thus, Friedman convincingly argues that: "Western culture, despite its myriad faults, remains a crucial influence on American political, intellectual and social thought and, as such, should play an important role in classrooms" (3).
Indeed, few advocates of multicultural education call for jettisoning the traditional canon and altogether replacing the classics with new multicultural fare. Genuine multicultural education requires expanding, not contracting, the curricula, broadening and enriching it, not impoverishing it. It also involves, as Friedman stresses, including white ethnic groups in the multicultural spectrum and searching out those common values and ideals that cut across racial and cultural boundaries. Thus, multicultural education can both help us understand our history and culture, and can move toward producing a more diverse and inclusive democratic society.
Shared Differences suggests how multicultural education can be used to enrich the subject matter of many traditional disciplines, ranging from literature to anthropology. In addition, traditional disciplines and texts can themselves be taken as the topic of critical scrutiny and inquiry, and can thus be used to promote the pedagogical goals of developing sensitivity to cultural difference. The emphasis in the reader is on using a medley of media material to present aspects and effects of the politics of representation from a variety of perspectives. Thus, an anthropologist discusses how media culture can be used to teach ethnography and cultural critique which is sensitive to cultural representation and difference (Michael M.J. Fischer); writing teachers present a course dedicated to writing about literature and various forms of popular media which helps make students aware of the forms of cultural rhetoric and difference (Margaret Himley and Delia C. Temes); an English professor (Linda Dittmar) discusses how the English curriculum can be transformed by the addition of film and media culture; a public health professor (Clarence Spigner) discusses how negative media representations can contribute to problems of health and social well-being; and historian Carlos E. Cortes discusses how media education can contribute to better historical understanding and socio-political sensitivity.
These studies provide a variety of arguments for the importance of including media texts in the curricula and how using and studying the media can advance the aims of a variety of pedagogic practices. The teaching of writing, for example, as Himley and Temes stress, is enhanced by engaging students in analyzing cultural rhetoric and difference in various domains of social discourses. Print journalism, film, television, photographic images, advertising, and political rhetoric are all forms of writing, all cultural texts that influence how we see the world, and the practice of critically dissecting these writings helps us to see how all of these cultural forms represent different modes of writing with their own biases and perspectives. Attending to the representation of difference within the broader field of society and culture can enable students to avoid manipulation by cultural rhetorics and to empower students to find their own voices within the cacophony of competing and conflicting discourses of the present age. Critically dissecting cultural materials also empowers students to reflect upon their own commonalties and differences, and to respect their differences from others, while becoming critical of those who would suppress differences or present some differences (racial, gender, class, etc.) negatively, stereotypically, and pejoratively.
The authors in Shared Differences thus present arguments legitimating the use of media materials in a number of disciplines to promote both traditional pedagogic goals (the transmission of knowledge, the cultivation of reading and writing skills, the mastering of fields and disciplines), as well as to contribute to the production of a more diverse democratic polity that appreciates and affirms differences between ethnic, racial, and cultural groups. On the other hand, many of the teachers who are using multicultural media as a tool to promote their own disciplines downplay the importance of cultivating media literacy as an important tool in developing students' critical and analytical skills. One needs to be aware that each media technology (film, video, photography, multimedia, and so on) have their own biases, their own formal codes and rules, and that the ways in which the media themselves construct and communicate meaning needs to be an explicit focus of awareness and analysis.
Indeed, media culture constructs models of multicultural difference, privileging some groups, while denigrating others. Grasping the construction of difference and hierarchy in media texts requires learning how they are constructed, how they communicate, and how they influence their audiences. Textual analysis of media artifacts helps to reveal their codes and conventions, their values and ideologies, and thus their meanings and messages. In particular, a critical cultural studies should analyze representations of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, and other identity markers in the texts of media culture, as well as attending to national, regional, and other cultural differences, how they are articulated in cultural representations, and how these differences among audiences create different readings and receptions of cultural texts.
On the whole, the contributions to Shared Differences focus on using media to promote multicultural education and downplay theorizing and developing the skills of media literacy. Most of the contributors focus on the politics of positive/negative representations and do not present more complex methods of gaining media literacy, or articulate more general principles or models. Although many of the practical course curricula and syllabi present materials for developing media literacy, this topic is not overtly theorized and is merely mentioned in passing. In the next section, therefore, I will engage a series of books published over the past decade that contribute to developing a critical pedagogy of media literacy. The argument for developing such skills as part of standard educational training is that the media themselves are a form of cultural pedagogy and thus must be countered by a critical media pedagogy that dissects how media communicate and effect their audiences and how students and citizens can gain skills to critically analyze the media.
Media Literacy and the Challenges of Contemporary Education
While Shared Differences focuses on multicultural media pedagogy as a response to the challenge of developing multicultural education and understanding, a large number of books on media literacy over the past decade start from the premise of the ubiquity of media culture in contemporary society and produce a more general argument for critical media literacy as a response to media bombardment. "Media literacy" involves knowledge of how media work, how they construct meanings, how they serve as a form of cultural pedagogy, and how they function in everyday life. A media literate person is skillful in analyzing media codes and conventions, able to criticize media stereotypes, values, and ideologies, and thus literate in reading media critically. Media literacy thus empowers people to use media intelligently, to discriminate and evaluate media content, to critically dissect media forms, and to investigate media effects and uses.