Media Literacy

At the 1992 National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy, a rough consensus emerged from U.S. scholars—from such diverse fields as media studies, media production, literature and language arts, library information science, and educational theory and practice—regarding the importance of media literacy, its definition, and significant concepts for teaching it. Media literacy was defined as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms.” A media-literate person “can decode, evaluate, analyze, and produce both print and electronic media.” Scholars could not agree on a list of goals or instructional practices for teaching media literacy; however, by using models developed by educators in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain, they did agree on the following conceptualizations:

Thus a comprehensive definition of media literacy involves the ability to locate multimedia resources (research skills); to analyze them critically (possibly using various models of analysis); to evaluate them in the social, economic, political and historical contexts in which they are created and interpreted; and to interpret them in light of the grammatical logics (textual and visual) that shape them. For some scholars, media literacy also involves the ability to create media messages in print, audio, video, and multimedia formats, such as are found on the Web. For others, it involves not only acquiring cognitive skills but also aesthetic, emotional, and moral development.

Although media literacy is primarily taught in K–12 curriculums, it is also taught in institutions of higher education around the globe. In North America, the term often used is media literacy, whereas in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries it is often called media education. Teachers of media literacy use diverse pedagogical techniques, including close textual analysis, contextual analysis of specific media texts such as films or television shows, genre analysis, cross-media comparisons, and macro-analysis of media industries, such as advertising. They often employ techniques as diverse as role playing and media production.

The interdisciplinary field of media literacy studies has been informed by various conceptual models, such as media effects/inoculation theory, uses and gratifications, cultivation theory, cultural/critical studies, and semiotics. The conceptual foundations drawn upon result in very different kinds of media literacy education programs. American media studies tend to reflect the effects/inoculation and uses and gratifications paradigms, whereas Latin American and European countries draw primarily from cultural/critical studies and semiotics.