ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the current debate and its implications for the professional education and development of teachers. It focuses on the author’s research in English classrooms during the early 1990s, and offers new evidence about the forms of media education currently taught by English teachers. Media education is also seen as closely related to information technology. Study of the media has been growing in popularity in English schools at least since the 1960s. Although media education has developed rapidly, there has not been a corresponding expansion of training opportunities for teachers. Most had wide and varied teaching experience, usually involving subjects other than English, and several had business or industrial backgrounds prior to teaching. A advertising campaign in the United Kingdom for the French aniseed-based aperitif Pernod contains ambiguities which take us to the center of the debate about spiritual and moral development.
