CITIZENSHIP AND MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION

MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION

Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms. This expanded conceptualization of literacy responds to the demands of cultural participation in the twenty-first century. Like literacy in general, media literacy includes both receptive and productive dimensions, encompassing critical analysis and communication skills, particularly in relationship to mass media, popular culture, and digital media. Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content. And like literacy in general, media literacy can be taught and learned.

Media literacy education helps people of all ages to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens.

Media literacy education may occur as a separate program or course but often it is embedded within other subject areas, including literature, history, anthropology, sociology, public health, journalism, communication, and education. It can occur in formal educational settings in both K–12 education and at the university level, as well as in nonprofit community-based programs. Its content may vary as well—from lessons designed to expose the mechanics of how language, images, sound, music, and graphic design operate as symbolic forms for transmitting meanings to exercises designed to reinforce these understandings through hands-on media making.

Media literacy education distinctively features the analytical attitude that teachers and learners, working together, adopt toward the media objects they study. The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that:

• all media messages are constructed

• each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction

• media messages are produced for particular purposes

• all media messages contain embedded values and points of view

• people use their individual skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages

• media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process

Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.

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