Making Movies Matter or Whatever Happened to the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum?

This paper argues that media education has developed its own orthodoxies that are preventing it both from addressing the realities of the media as they exist today, and from being taken seriously by policy-makers. The example of Making Movies Matter, the 1999 report of the Film Education Working Group, shows how a policy-making ‘window’ can be exploited, not only to make new arguments for media education, but also to construct new frameworks for teaching and learning. The report had also provided the British Film Institute with a new agenda for UK-wide activities designed to develop education about the moving image media. A version of this paper was originally presented at the Summit 2000 conference in Toronto, Canada, in May 2000.