In our media-saturated culture, Media Literacy is a necessary skill to
navigate the 21st century. Students can gain these media literacy skills
through the Global Johnny Appleseed Project in a number of ways.
Students must learn how to analyze, evaluate, critique and produce multiple
media messages. They must learn that they can have a voice and make a
difference by using the tools available to them today. These include not
only web sites, blogs, virtual classroom project, television production, radio
production, filmmaking, but print.
An interesting web page that may inspire many teens is
Hollywood's Top
15 Green Celebrities. These are celebrities that the students know and
admire. This page provides information on a myriad of examples of projects
for protecting the planet. They should inspire some ideas for you and
students in gaining media literacy, using the media to create and sustain
change, and to join or begin a service learning project.
Please visit our Service Learning page on this web site, and at
www.21stCenturySchools.com
Media
literacy empowers people to be both critical thinkers and creative producers
of an increasingly wide range of messages using image, language, and sound.
It is the skillful application of literacy skills to media and technology
messages. As communication technologies transform society, they impact our
understanding of ourselves, our communities, and our diverse cultures,
making media literacy an essential life skill for the 21st century.
(From
the
AMLA web site - Alliance for a
Media Literate America)
Click links below to additional information on Media Literacies!
Definitions
of Media Literacy
Media Literacy teaches
analysis, access and production of media. Media consist of "mediums" such
as books, newspapers, billboards, magazines, comics, mail, packaging, jokes,
radio, television, movies, software and the Internet.
The ability to Access,
Analyze, Evaluate, and Communicate information in a variety of format
including print and nonprint.
Like
traditional literacy it includes the ability to both read (comprehend) and
write (create, design, produce). Further, it moves from merely recognizing
and comprehending information to the higher order critical thinking skills
implicit in questioning, analyzing and evaluating that information.
David Considine
"Media Literacy is concerned
with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the
nature of mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these
techniques. More specifically, it is education that aims to increase
students' understanding and enjoyment of how the media work, how they
produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality.
Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create
media products."
Barry Duncan, et al., Media
Literacy Resource Guide, Ontario Ministry of Education, Toronto, ON.,
Canada, 1989.
"Media Literacy is an
informed, critical understanding of the mass media. It involves an
examination of the techniques, technologies and institutions that are
involved in media production, the ability to critically analyze media
messages and a recognition of the role that audiences play in making meaning
from those messages."
Rick Shepherd, "Why Teach
Media Literacy," Teach Magazine, Quadrant Educational Media Services,
Toronto, ON, Canada, Oct/Nov 1993
"All media productions embody
"points of view" about the world. Whether these viewpoints are consciously
intended or not, they manifest themselves through a variety of choices by
the people who make them.
·
What story will be told (or
reported)?
·
From whose perspective will it
be presented?
·
How will it be filmed (camera
placement, movement, framing)?
·
How will it be edited?
·
What sort of music will be used,
if any?
·
Whose voice will we hear?
·
What will the intended message
be?
Questions surrounding the media's point of view will lead us to ask:
·
Who has created the images?
·
Who is doing the speaking?
·
Whose viewpoint is not heard?
·
From whose perspective does the
camera frame the events?
·
Who owns the medium?
·
What is our role as spectators
in identifying with, or questioning what we see and hear?
That's what media literacy is all about. It is an education that aims to
increase an individual's understanding and enjoyment of how the media work,
how they produce meaning, how they are organized and how they construct
reality.
Media literacy also aims to
provide students with the ability to create media products; it's hands-on
training to teach critical viewing skills."
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National Film Board of Canada,
briefing notes for the Government Film Commissioner, 1993-1994.
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"Media literacy seeks to
empower citizenship, to transform citizens' passive relationship to media
into an active, critical engagement capable of challenging the traditions
and structures of a privatized, commercial media culture, and thereby find
new avenues of citizen speech and discourse."
Wally Bowen, Citizens for
Media Literacy, Asheville, NC, U.S.A, 1996.
"Media Literacy is an overall
term that incorporates three stages of a continuum leading to the media
empowerment of citizens of all ages:
The first stage is simply
becoming aware of the importance of balancing or managing one's media
"diet," that is, making choices and managing the amount of time spent with
television, videos, electronic games, films and various print media forms.
The second stage is learning
specific skills of critical viewing – learning to analyze and question what
is in the frame, how it is constructed and what may have been left out.
Skills of critical viewing are best learned through inquiry-based classes or
interactive group activities as well as from creating and producing one's
own media messages.
The third stage goes behind
the frame to explore deeper issues of who produces the media we experience –
and for what purpose? In other words: Who profits? Who loses? And who
decides? This stage of social, political and economic analysis looks at how
each of us (and all of us together in society) take and make meaning from
our media experiences and how the mass media drive our global consumer
economy. This inquiry can sometimes set the stage for various media advocacy
efforts to challenge or redress public policies or corporate practices.
Although television and
electronic media may seem to present the most compelling reasons for
promoting media literacy education in contemporary society, the principles
and practices of media literacy education are applicable to all media from
television to T-shirts, from billboards to the Internet."
Elizabeth Thoman, Operational
Definition of Media Literacy, Center for Media Literacy, Los Angeles, CA,
U.S.A, 1995.
Critical
Media Pedagogy
"Critical pedagogy considers
how education can provide individuals with the tools to better themselves
and strengthen democracy, to create a more egalitarian and just society, and
thus to deploy education in a process of progressive social change. Media
literacy involves teaching the skills that will empower citizens and
students to become sensitive to the politics of representations of race,
ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other cultural differences in order
to foster critical thinking and enhance democratization. Critical media
literacy aims to make viewers and readers more critical and discriminating
readers and producers of texts.
"Critical media pedagogy
provides students and citizens with the tools to analyze critically how
texts are constructed and in turn construct and position viewers and
readers. It provides tools so that individuals can dissect the instruments
of cultural domination, transform themselves from objects to subjects, from
passive to active. Thus critical media literacy is empowering, enabling
students to become critical producers of meanings and texts, able to resist
manipulation and domination." (from Douglas Kellner, "Multiple
Literacies and Critical Pedagogies" in Revolutionary Pedagogies - Cultural
Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, Peter Pericles
Trifonas, Editor, Routledge, 2000).
Media
Literacy