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MEDIA LITERACY DEFINED
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.
Joe McCannon, New Mexico Media
Literacy Project
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."
National Film Board of Canada, briefing notes for the
Government Film Commissioner, 1993-1994.
"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).
ARTICLES ON MEDIA LITERACY
Multimedia Pedagogy and Multicultural Education for the New
Millennium, by Douglas Kellner, UCLA Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies
New Media and New Literacies: Reconstructing Education for the New
Millennium, by Douglas Kellner, UCLA Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies
The Media and Democracy, by Douglas Kellner, UCLA Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies
Media Spectacle, by Douglas Kellner, UCLA Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies
Educational Technology: Media for Inquiry, Communication,
Construction and Expression
Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Media Education: an Introduction,
by Robert Muffoletto, University of Wisconsin at Madison and
Appalachian State University, North Carolina.
Celebrating
National Media Literacy Month, by Frank Baker
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