ABSTRACT

Edward Said recalled Raymond Williams’ contributions to culture, history, literature and society in a 1988 obituary from The Nation. One section of Said’s column familiarized readers in the United States with the admirable authority of Williams’ work on communication and education (see Said 1988). This brief mention reflects an even briefer presence of Williams’ thoughts within pedagogical studies of print, film and related culture industries. Although his teaching methods sparked interest decades ago in cultural studies, communication and education, scholars have yet to evaluate Williams’ writings on the culture industries, its messengers and their messages. Many of his adult education teaching plans confirmed a commitment to the reading and writing of mediated messages between 1946 and 1961 (see McIlroy 1990). I suggest that Williams met educational communicators as fellow-

travellers at an interdisciplinary conjunction. I define educational communicators as cultural workers, such as book publishers, television advertisers, magazine journalists or music critics who have continued to make their means of expression available for classroom criticism.1 The means of expression include computers or other machines used by educational communicators such as writers and photographers to create commodities. The conjunction implies an interdisciplinary space in which communication and education converge and converse. The term suggests not fancy airs, but rather common affairs. Classroom criticism refers to an unhurried reading and writing of mediated texts as an exercise in what others have labelled media literacy (see Buckingham 2003). This claim holds larger implications for the unwritten history of engagement between communication and education as interdisciplinary fields of inquiry,2 and contributes a founding chapter to that narrative by nominating Williams as a founder. The conjunction’s existence depends on three contexts that continue to

surround educational communicators and their means of expression today: critical pedagogy, practical criticism and political principles. Critical

pedagogy promotes dialogue between teachers and students in the study of educational communicators and their means of expression; practical criticism suggests ways to slowly and closely read educational communicators and their means of expression as everyday texts; and political principles point to the power of educational communicators and their means of expression. With these definitions in mind, I canvassed Williams’ thought on com-

munication and education through textual analyses of relevant books and articles written between the 1940s and the 1980s. Symptomatic reading inspired not so much a search for hidden meaning, but rather an opportunity to generate new knowledge. The analytical approach follows Louis Althusser’s emphasis on ideological systems of representation that concern unasked yet implied questions (see Althusser [1969] 1971). Select scholars identified a disregard for Williams’ writings on teaching

and learning decades after post-positivism eclipsed more humanistic contributions to the creation and development of communication and education as interdisciplinary formations in the United States (see Shapiro 1982).3 Yet if we reserve his thoughts for specific cultural projects in twentieth-century British society, we will only threaten the advancement of transnational talk on educational communicators and their means of expression. Williams’ observations remain timely today, particularly as we monitor their translation to nations in which educational communicators wield influence. This chapter’s first section enters a short conversation between commu-

nication and education from the former’s disciplinary vantage point in order to historicize their conjunction. The argument unfolds with Williams’ early insight into critical pedagogy, practical criticism and political principles across the remaining sections. Other writers in this volume present thoughtful perspectives from Austria, Germany, Portugal, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. As a humanist from the United States trained in communication and cultural studies, most of my scholarship has been influenced to some degree by Williams’ meticulous analyses of mediated culture. I often revisit his writings, as I know others do, for direction on how to weather ideological hail storms in uncertain times.