While young people probably learn about election posters in particular through a combination of real-world exposure and explicit teaching, it seems that no one has to motivate them  initially to embrace posters as a medium. That seems to come naturally, like face-painting or making mini-comics. After all, all you need is a sheet of paper--even the back of a sheet of previously used paper--a marker, and some tape. And if a marker isn't available, a pen or pencil will often do just as well. Crayons can also be a key tool.

For generations teachers have used poster-making in the classroom as a kind of lightweight, intuitive approach to visual literacy: "Put your pictures in the center, where the eye is drawn... and here, put the captions under them." The natural tendency, I think, is to view posters and postering (the displaying of posters) as an activity that provides grounding in certain skills that are then best addressed by other media products at higher levels of schooling. In other words, the poster as easy arts-and-craft project or low-tech means of content delivery (e.g., in science fair displays)--but that's about it. Students outgrow posters in favor of, say, multimedia displays, don't they? Shouldn't they?

Sure, if I stop and think about it, studying posters can be an effective entry point into critical literacies involving advertising, propaganda and so on... but the truth is, I've probably dismissed posters as an important form of mass communication for reasons like those cited above.

What changed my thinking recently is the book Posters of the Cold War by David Crowley, originally published by the Victoria & Albert Museum. Even its cover, which reproduces a poster of two Superman-doppelgangers, one labeled "CCCP" and the other "USA," suggests a connection to other media, in this case comics. But then the connections continue, not only to "fine art" (Robert Rauschenberg is one of several well-known artists featured) but, most notably, to the movies. Sometimes this occurs in straightforward terms, as in East and Western posters for science-fiction films, but often as a form of appropriation and visual "sampling."  The approach can be satirical, as in a transfigured Gone with the Wind that positions Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as the main characters, or inspirational, as in a Polish solidarity poster that uses Gary Cooper in High Noon as its central image.

While Crowley's book features reproductions of the Soviet and Chinese posters one would expect, his eye as a researcher and compiler is so sharp that even familiar visual tropes come across as fresh and startling. Add to this a historically-informed yet succinct commentary text, and Posters of the Cold War goes a long way toward revitalizing interest in an art form that's too often overlooked. Now distributed in the U.S., this is a book that I strongly encourage media educators to seek out, either through direct purchase or by urging your library to order it.

Part of my stridency here is motivated by the simple desire to see what talented educators can come up with in this area. In fact, I think it would be fascinating if art history, visual arts, and media literacy educators teamed up to create a cross-disciplinary unit on posters. Such a class could, at the very least, explore the ethical issues involved in wheatpasting as well as questions such as whether commercial, mass-produced (aka "corporate") posters can ever be considered a form of "street art" (a topic touched upon in my previous post).

Working from such a context, we could then make the transition from studying cultural and historical products to having students reflect on their own media-production practices. With this kind of strategy we might enrich the learning that takes place even around the conventional collaboration that occurs around posters that are made in school. In this way, a commonplace practice--"Kids, work together to make a poster for a book that we've read"--can be used to reveal things about how students participate in media creation more generally.

For example, in any given team of poster-makers, who takes charge of the project management? Who is concerned with text, and who with visuals? Who focuses on how the message will land or the grade it will earn--and who just wants it to pretty (i.e., aesthetically pleasing)? Perhaps most importantly, how are all these potentially conflicting impulses negotiated, or do the participants even see the need for a system of negotiation? Then, once an individual project is completed, the focus can shift to issues of "publishing" and "message dissemination." Namely, what constitutes fair play when it comes to postering? Where should posters be displayed--only where they are appropriate, on-topic, and stand in non-competition to other posters and media?

Obviously some of these questions might be better suited to lower grade levels. However, it's worth noting that the underlying issues might in some cases have direct application to what we more commonly think of as the "new literacies." After all, is it simply an accident that in a few minutes I will "post" this blog entry in a public (yet virtual) space? And, to continue in this vein, don't people often "post" their responses to online texts on "boards"?

So in the end the rationale for making and "reading" posters doesn't really involve their intuitive or low-cost aspects or, most deviously, the way they provide practice for studying "real media." Like other forms of enduring media, posters stand as an indispensable part of a complex ecological system which shapes our understanding of the world even if we're not aware of it.