Calling for Media Literacy!

Media pervades every aspect of our students' lives. Awareness of this fact is the first goal of media literacy. Spend 24 hours keeping track of the ways that you come into contact with the media and you will be amazed at what you find. The scary thing is, even though students encounter the media consistently throughout their day they are ill-prepared to evaluate it. This is the second aspect to media literacy: we must teach our students to recognize what values the media conveys and how these values and ideaologies are constructed.

Our relationship with the media is recursive. The media shapes us and we shape the media - which came first is anybody's guess. Media representations have the capacity to influence the viewer's attitudes and beliefs about the real world. Our students need to be prepared to analyze the message it is carrying in order to make an accurate evaluation.

Engaging with media can be both motivating and engaging for our students who have grown up around technology their whole lives. Most students will feel compelled to interact with the lesson because it is dealing with something that they understand and spend a good portion of their lives around. Students who do not do well with reading and writing have an opporunity to find success with the media...and the options available with the media are endless. Giving students a chance to find their voice through media outlets, while utilizing the critical elements that they have learned, can be exciting and inspiring. For a media literacy hub of information about literacy, I reccommend checking out Gateway Media Literacy Partners.