Each year I ask my first-year university students to write a paper of their choice on anything to do with mass media. This assignment is an excellent gauge of what young adults are most concerned with and worried about. Social media, particularly the role it plays in their relationships, has been the top choice for the past couple of years. The promise of social media to connect the world has fallen short and many of us are lamenting the role it plays in our
identity formation, social connections, and relationships. But all is not lost! With the help of a supportive community, moments of reflection on media use, and a will to reconnect we can find a healthy balance. Whistler Waldorf School is presenting a screening of Screenagers on March 28th and I am happy to be a part of the panel discussing how to further awaken ourselves to these taken-for-granted habits of media use and learn to use media in our lives more conciously and purposefully.
If you want to read more about this purposeful reconnection and how education focusing on imaginative inquiry can help, please see my chapter entitled Bring us Back to Our Senses, in Engaging Imagination and Dev
eloping Creativity in Education (2nd Edition) Edited by Kieran Egan, Gillian Judson and Krystina Madej.
For additional information on the theory I use in my Media Education work, Imaginative Education, please see Dr. Gillan Judson’s imaginEd blog