Film production and cultural studies in the learning process Sónia Pedro Sebastião (ISCSP – UTL - Portugal: P5) Introduction With this text we intend to present a more reflexive style of teaching and learning, evidencing how students can participate in cultural appropriation and media production, both as readers and as writers, and understand the implication of these activities in their lifelong learning process and in their empowerment as democratic citizens. We propose to adapt teaching practices to the changing nature of contemporary culture and everyday life activities that are surrounded by media consumption. In this work we consider media (plural of medium) as something that people use to communicate with each other indirectly, that is, without interacting face-to-face in the same place. So media intervene by proǀidiŶg channels through which representations and images of the world can be communicated indirectly, ďLJ proǀidiŶg selective versions of the world (Buckingham, 2003, p. 3). Media education aims to develop both critical understanding and active participation (Buckingham, 2003, p. 4) enabling people to interpret and represent informed judgments and visions on selected themes and contexts. Participating actively in the learning process means, for example, been involved in the production of educational media, that is, in media outputs – films, in our case - that contain the representations of pupils. In sum, we proposed the adoption of a more inclusive approach according to which cultural objects are produced by trainees, representing everyday life expressions, personal or group representations. 1. Film production: cultural value and pedagogical value Lee (2007) envisages cultural studies as a knowledge movement that has challenged the separation of the social sciences and humanities by evidencing the need of commitment between the epistemologies of truth and values in knowledge production. As a consequence, the categories through which we make sense of the world, the groundings that give authority to explanatory frameworks, the rationales for the organization of investigation, are going into transformation. Realizing that the structures of knowledge are inseparable from the structures of production, distribution and consumption lead us to the inevitability of a crisis in knowledge production tied to chaos. Theoretical divisions between the quantitative disciplines based in the universal, empirical, objective and nomothetic that allow us to predict the future, and the qualitative disciplines founded in the particular, contingency and unpredictable idiographic have loose sense. The need to stress values and interpretation in social analysis has allowed the emergence of Đultural studies iŶ the ϲϬ’s. The aŶtiŶoŵies of reduĐtionism and holism, structure and agency,