In an increasingly media-centric world, studying creative media production at Paddington Academy allows students to become fluent media analysts, critical thinkers and skilled technical practitioners. As society becomes ever more inundated with messages, information, imagery and text, we firmly believe that all students should be able to engage with and interpret these messages and reflect critically on their meaning and, ultimately, their impact.
Our media curriculum builds our students' cultural capital through the texts that are studied and discussed across the different units; therefore, we have carefully selected a range of case studies designed to tackle stereotypes and provide an open, welcoming space that encourages students to discuss issues from trans rights and racism, through to the representations of disability.
Our vision for media studies is to seam key media concepts, such as Hall’s representation theory, Mulvey’s male gaze, and semiotics, alongside the more practical elements of media production. The aim of this approach is to stimulate intellectual curiosity through experiential, hands-on, applied learning. Studying creative media production allows students to gain experience of planning, developing and producing their own media projects across a range of text types, from printed to moving image, to gain understanding of a wide range of media products. As such, the students gain real-world, career-relevant skills, learning to produce media using industry standard software, Adobe Creative Suite – InDesign, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.