Outreach

I am very interested in looking at the history of media literacy, and I'm really glad that we are already reading things like AMLA's history in our class. Although I think it's still pretty basic (I assume AMLA intended it for a large audience), it is really cool to look at all the different steps that have been taken over the last half of a century to promote media literacy (and the education of).

What I am still trying to better understand is how all of these different events fit together. I understand that these various organizations (AMLA, Center for Media Literacy, UNESCO, or, unmentioned in AMLA's history, the National Communication Association (NCA)) have created various definitions of media literacy as well as ideas for ways it can be taught in the classroom. But how does this all add up? Where does it lead?

If I were a curriculum professional at the state level, where most curriculum is set on a general basis, I wouldn't know what to do with all these different ideas for media literacy education. And, I also wonder whether I would know about them. I mean, how do these groups promote their proposed media literacy curricula?

I wrote a paper that touched on this last semester, and in the midst of research I found out about NCA's proposed learning standards for media literacy. The first version came out in 1998, but NCA just united with the College Board to update their standards again (the latter one has not yet been fully approved). (Sidenote: NCA is one of the largest communication associations and holds the country's two largest national academic conferences for any issue relating to media or communications.)

Anyway, I asked NCA how they promoted their first standards, and at first the people I spoke to had no idea. Then someone finally told me that they mailed out the standards to all state boards of education once, post-publication, and that was it. Meanwhile, curriculum gets updated and re-worked pretty often in each state, and especially in each school district (once a year or once every few years). So how is media literacy supposed to stay constantly in the forefront of the minds of curriculum professionals if they never hear about it in the first place?

So yeah, my main question is, does anyone know if media literacy organizations actually communicate with educational administrators adequately? If so, who does, and how? If not, anyone have any idea why not? (Lack of money?)