Ian Esquivel can’t help but think about what really keeps us connected: AML co-founder and Jedi master, Barry Duncan.

Perhaps it was destiny calling. But sometimes you can’t see the Force for the trees.

My first teaching position was in 1988 at Brockton High School where I had signed on, I thought, to work in a ‘Re-Entry’ program. I wasn’t particularly interested in teaching, but I had become interested in literacy ever since I had begun to volunteer with Beat The Street, an initiative developed by Frontier College. I also was assigned a Grade 10 History class — a topic about which I knew little — and a Grade 12 Media course. The latter made sense to me because I had a fair bit of experience in different types of media. In fact, I was working full time in print production at the time that I applied for the teaching job, and I was running a live music venue part time. As well, I had two years of Radio and Television at Ryerson behind me.

I thought, how hard could it be to teach a subject that I was swimming in? I just had to splash around.

Teaching media turned out to be the biggest challenge I faced that year — it was against the current and exhausting. Group work was impossible because of absenteeism and attitude. The students didn’t know much about contemporary culture except for their own very limited consumption, and they weren’t particularly interested in being exposed to more. They certainly couldn’t understand why we had to analyze the materials — why couldn’t we just watch the films and television shows, and look at the comics, and not try to read into them the kinds of messages that the students were sure I was inventing? Lighten up, sir, they would say. My colleagues in the English department seemed to echo that perspective in a way — for them, Media was not to be taken too seriously. It wasn’t, after all, like teaching Literature, the holy script of language instruction. Heaven was in Hamlet, not in Hip Hop.

Thus fate stepped in.

I was surplussed from Brockton at the end of the year but was hired at an alternative school, City, in part because of my media background and teaching experience. I replaced a teacher, Bob Morgan, who was temporarily at OISE pursuing a graduate degree. He never returned to City and I taught media in his shadow for the next three years, gradually making my way to the light at the end of the tunnel. My guide was Barry Duncan.

As soon as I arrived at City, I figured out pretty quickly that knowing about and working in the media did not qualify me to teach it. I had a sword I didn’t know how to wield. I needed help, and I got it in the form of a teacher who was at another alternative school not far from mine. He even had written a textbook about media literacy, whatever that was. And he and a few of his colleagues had created a resource guide for the Ministry of Education. Whew, this guy was good; I was in luck. I called him up and visited his classroom.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Barry Duncan is the protagonist of that history, the master builder, and simultaneously a window on it and a door through it. You can read elsewhere at length about how he and some of his teaching peers in the 70s began to infiltrate the English curriculum, incorporating texts such as film and music. And as rapidly emerging media like video and cable television pushed the boundaries of mass communication, these educators came to realize that they needed a conceptual framework (or two!) for the increasingly complex experiments they were conducting with their students. They were no longer tilting at windmills but instead had begun to claim intellectual territory in the minds of their students and colleagues. The media landscape had shifted and expanded, and suddenly it was no longer enough to just teach through media: one also had to teach about it. Suddenly what we were swimming in had colour, texture and taste — its molecules bound through a syntax of symbolic chemistry, a code.

You can also read elsewhere about how Barry and several pioneering colleagues — Linda Schuyler, Arlene Moscovitch, and Jerry McNab — constructed the Association for Media Literacy. In 1978, the history of media education in Ontario converged with that of the AML and its Jedi Knights, as Barry would call them. From that point onwards, the push for media literacy in Canada began to gain momentum, international recognition, and support from politicians, parents, students, educators and many in the industry. Today, the force is stronger than ever, in part because of dedicated teachers like warrior priest Father John Pungente and crusading activist Carolyn Wilson, who are in the vanguard of a global movement. Yet Barry is still the Nexus, Minerva’s Owl, Obi-Wan.

My history began to overlap Barry’s at a time when his page was mostly written and mine was mostly blank. During my second year at City, I began to pursue my Media Specialist through the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto (FEUT). Neil Andersen taught Part 1 — Han Solo to Duncan’s Kenobi. I learned so much so quickly that I decided I would take a leap of faith into Part 2. Barry Duncan taught Part 2. He was a known quantity. How hard could it be?

I should have realized by then that nothing about media education is ever easy.

Barry’s class was a deep well of McLuhan, Masterman, Barthes, Kilbourne, Hall, Parenti, Nelson, Fiske, Berger, Schiller, Buckingham, Grierson, and Postman, among others; a Dagobah system of seemingly boundless mystical media planets orbiting one another. We submerged ourselves in semiotics, audience theory, cultural studies, and political economy; we dove into the NFB, production techniques, Ministry guidelines and expectations, assessment and evaluation; we floated in popular culture, from song lyrics to slogans, Muppets to Madonna, soap operas to Star Wars. We faced ourselves and our deepest fears — that the course would never end (and it hasn’t). But at least the technology with which we were dealing was still relatively simple — CDs, DVDs, cell phones, digital cameras, the Internet and World Wide Web were just peaking over the edge of our awareness, vague in the distance.

I’d like to say that learning from Barry was relatively simple too. However, that wasn’t always the case. You have to learn how to read and interpret him. Where Obi-Wan was cloaked, Barry could be closeted. Granted, he constantly has been generous with his knowledge and considerate with his scholarship. And few people are as encouraging or supportive as Barry. But he’s a product of his times: to a great degree, more like his professors Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye than he might realize or care to admit. His moment in history was forged at the juncture of theory and practice, langue and parole, signifier and signified. Barry sketches and his students fill in the details, which is clearly rewarding but can be challenging when his thoughts are shaped like clouds, or whizzing by like waves on a windy day. He drops the dots and you have to connect them; erects tangents by means of which you have to make your way back to the matter at hand. The curve of enlightenment is more lemniscate than loop. I can only imagine the information that is stored in Barry’s brain: vast, circular, eclectic, dialectic, liquid. McLuhan fired probes out into the space-time continuum; Barry sends canoes in search of Tom Thomson.

The best of our Canadian icons are nurtured through mythology and are cultivated as metaphors.

Barry is a stream of ideas, concepts, memories, and people, branching between the past, present and future, amid the sacred and the profane; a bulletin flow from the local to the global wilderness. Last year, he travelled to China, California and Australia to spread the WORD of media literacy at the invitation of various learning institutions. He is respected, revered and relentless; a media missionary. New insights pulse to him like ripples to the shore. And people like me beach their vessels onto the island that he has cleared, mindful of the tides but willing to risk it. The History of Media Education in Canada runs its course but reads like a river that Duncan has navigated, negotiated, charted and named. His is the first chapter, the beacon.

Sometimes you can see the Force for the trees. But you have to know what you’re looking for.