Media Literacy

Media Literacy Defined

What, then, is media literacy? In 1992, the Aspen Institute hosted a national gathering of media literacy experts to try to reach a definition of media literacy. They defined the goal of media literacy as teaching students how to decode, evaluate, analyze, and produce print and electronic media. The European Community adopted a call for media literacy in 1993, which urged a program of media education that would be more oppositional to media content, would question structural controls of media, and would educate students to be more citizens than consumers. The National Communication Association adopted definitional guidelines in 1996 that were more in line with the Aspen definition, but it listed more forms of media and more skills.

What media literacy means in practical terms depends greatly on the circumstances in which it is being taught and the teacher's range of knowledge, interests, skills, and resources for teaching it. It normally involves three key elements: (1) critical examination of popular media with which students are already familiar but have not viewed analytically before—getting them to think about media in new ways; (2) interpretation of imagery and content, decoding and analyzing the messages contained in the media; (3) discussion of social effects of media representation, including such notions as stereotyping, violence, commercialism, drug use (especially alcohol and tobacco), and race and gender representation.

Where resources, time, and teacher skill permit, media literacy often also involves hands-on production work by students. The students learn how to construct their own media, whether through pictures and storyboards, photo essays, videos, or at the higher end, digital multimedia productions.

Some programs and instructors also incorporate a critical examination of media institutions, including the commercial nature of corporate media and recent trends toward concentration of media ownership: Who constructs the messages told by the media and for what purpose?

Scholars and practitioners debate the details of media literacy—what it should teach and how it should teach it. But those are debates within the more generally accepted proposition that media education is necessary and that it should start in some form at the youngest levels and continue through college. Indeed, as Len Masterman argues, it is really a lifelong process.

In the United States, a survey of state curriculum standards conducted in 1999 by Robert Kubey and Frank Baker found that all 50 states now have a provision for media literacy or media education of some type in their state K-12 standards and curriculum frameworks. Several states are farther along in developing programs than others. For instance, the New Mexico Media Literacy Project, started with both private funding and state support, has become a national model of success in training teachers and instituting media literacy in the schools. North Carolina, as well, [Page 928]has creatively drawn on university and college resources to train teachers and work with local school systems to institute media literacy. Appalachian State University, for instance, has a successful program working with the area schools in Boone and Buncombe counties, North Carolina, and developed a master's program in media literacy as well as an undergraduate certificate program. Project Look Smart, based at Ithaca College, trains media literacy educators in New York and the region.

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