I’ll admit, when I signed up for this class, I really didn’t know what media literacy was. I had a few ideas (understanding when advertisers use media to sell you something, understanding point of view/bias in news and other organizations, etc.), but I really didn’t know that it encompassed as much as it did. It is definitely more than just technology and tools – it is understanding those tools and the role they play in today’s society. It is the ability to “read” and think critically about print, films, photographs, paintings, YouTube videos, and more.
This all leads to my question – why bother with media literacy? Why should I, someone who isn’t planning to be a school library media specialist but rather a children’s librarian, worry about whether or not the kids I see are media literate? I’d like to try to answer that question, especially since we talked a bit about it in class this week. Also, I think it would be a good exercise to help me justify putting together some sort of series of programs designed to teach kids about media literacy. Any thoughts or additions you have would be greatly appreciated.
On page 196, Tyner introduces the concept of “a democratic education that improves the life chances of all children” through critical literacy, experiential education, and critical pedagogy. This really caught my attention – even though I think that all students have a right to have access to the same education, I had never thought of “democratic education” as a specific thing. It’s more than just public school; it’s access to equal opportunities for learning, and it doesn’t have to be in school. It can be in the public library, it can be at home, and it can be in an after school program.
As someone who grew up with well-educated parents in a very poor community (60% free and reduced lunch – my mom is a teacher and considered rich in the town), I have seen the disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” firsthand as far as the preparation and opportunities many children have been given at home. However, I have also seen the results of what I would consider democratic education based on Tyner’s definition in a school system that somehow manages to attract good teachers despite relatively low pay compared to some of the wealthier towns nearby supported by tourist dollars and ski resorts.
I introduce all of this to explain why it is important that public institutions, whether schools, libraries, community centers, or after school programs, provide media literacy instruction. It is not something that kids naturally just “know,” nor is it something that all children experience at home; we must level the playing field as best we can without simply letting those already familiar with the medium continue to dominate in the classroom (see Jenkins p. 13 for a brief discussion of this issue – the students who have access to technology at home seem “naturally” superior to those who don’t, but it’s really just because they have the access and are more comfortable).
I want to talk further about some of the things that Jenkins said. In particular, on pages 3-4, he states: “Educators must work together to ensure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, can articulate their understanding of how media shapes perceptions, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities.” Instead of a discussion about access to technology and tools, he wants to focus attention on opportunities to fully engage with the technology. Beyond having the technology, schools, parents, and after school programs need to teach kids to think critically about it. Like Jenkins, I think it’s important to differentiate media literacy from simply acquiring the tools. While we need tools and it is difficult to teach about some aspects of media literacy without them, if we focus simply on tools, our purpose may be lost.
So anyway, what can media literacy do for our students?
It teaches the understanding of all types of “text,” from video to print, which we all encounter every day. The internet is currently heavily text-based, but videos and images play an important role, and their prominence will continue to rise. There are charts and graphs to read in magazines, newspaper, and journal articles, there are video billboards, there are photographs and paintings, and there is traditional text. To be literate in today’s society means understanding how to read all of these texts, not just books and other traditional print media.
Teaching media literacy rather than how to use this tool or that tool is also the same idea as teaching someone to fish rather than giving him/her a fish. This is the concept behind the liberal arts computer science major, where you learn the concepts behind programming and learn to solve problems rather than focusing solely on programming in one language or format (obviously you do have to use one programming language when doing your actual programming, but professors usually try to teach broader concepts rather than simply how to program in this language). Teaching someone how to make a video and put it on YouTube is not media literacy – teaching someone to create a digital story and think critically about the process from start to finish is teaching media literacy. (For more about the educational possibilities and benefits of digital storytelling, see the project website my group – including Nell from this class – made for LIS 506 last fall.)
I’m sure there are more reasons, and maybe I need to be more specific, particularly with the paragraph about understanding all types of text, but this post is really long now, so I’ll conclude:
So why bother with media literacy education? In short, because everyone needs to be media literate to participate in society. If we, as librarians and teachers do not teach media literacy skills, not all children will have the same opportunities to become media literate. The ALA Code of Ethics states that we have an “obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.” If we provide access to that information, we also have to teach people how to use and understand that information. We all need media literacy skills.
Showing posts with label media literacy proficiency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media literacy proficiency. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Media Literacy Proficiency, Participatory Cultures: Reflection on Week 11
On Proficiency: Please Fill In These Multiple Choice Bubbles to Demonstrate Your Knowledge of How You Critically Evaluate Media
The idea that we have to measure media literacy proficiency makes me wonder if one day we’ll see media literacy sections in standardized tests. Wouldn’t that be funny, to see teachers and students scramble to cover material based solely on yearly scantron tests designed to satisfying media literacy requirements outlined in something similar to No Child Left Behind? The fact that such an idea feels so fundamentally ludicrous makes me feel more strongly that education in the U.S. would have to shift drastically from its current path in order to accommodate some of the more abstract or open-ended goals outlined in the NCTE Guideline.
… Or are these goals really so broad in scope that they veer into the academic aether, never to be touched by ordinary folk with ordinary goals? I’m thinking the answer is no. If anything, the teaching method outlined in class yesterday from Understanding by Design gets away from the Möbius strip of false understanding implicit in the “teach to the test” standardized testing method and brings students to a form of understanding that is more real and therefore more capable of measurement in the first place.
I call it a Möbius strip because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Forgive me for my blathering (and I will do much of it in this post), but in class this week I found myself thinking of possible analogies or metaphors for the critical thinking skills and media awareness that we are trying to bestow upon these hypothetical young persons. On the whiteboard this week, we came up with things like teaching people to “look behind the message” and “recognize media”:
And when we came up with all that (sorry, I couldn’t get all 4 groups’ content into the shot) it made me think that there’s something primal to it akin to philosophical stuff like lifting the veil of illusion in Buddhism or teaching people Plato’s allegory about seeing shadows on the cave wall. When we describe something like “look behind the message” or say we want youths to become “critical readers of the world”, isn’t that what we mean? It’s heady to think about. I’m reminded of why we teach kids anything, and I think of my first time learning deconstructionism or postmodernism in my British Literature class in high school (thanks, Mr. Scotese). To put it plainly, seeing how everything is interconnected (like on the whiteboard, or in mashups, or in social networking) felt like the moment when Neo was finally able to “see the matrix” in its entirety, in its foundational structure. Stuff like this is where you can really get into the heart of the facets of understanding we talked about in class: explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge. It was so eye opening about and it seemed to bear little relevance with learning goals or objectives based on institutional standards.
But like Carol said in class, relevance is subjective. And I’ve come around to the idea that a structured learning format like in Understanding by Design where you think of what you want your students to learn before you go through the process of creating a curriculum or evaluation methods is not only a relevant method of learning but is probably the smartest thing I’ve heard all week. It’s not abstract, it’s goal-oriented in a way that encompasses the whole learning process. It makes room for the idea of “richer, nuanced learning” spoken of in Hobbs by focusing on understanding over performance. That level of engagement requires discipline from students and balanced guidance from educators, and what’s more grounded than that?
On Participatory Cultures: Your Contribution Is Appreciated
Do we all have to create things? The question brings to mind my artist friends who sometimes talk as if I, their non-artist friend, am not in the room. They ask wonderingly: “How can anybody go through life without creating music?” And I would briefly feel like some non-artistic leper, resentful that I lack musical talent and happen to go through life without ever creating much of anything tangible. In short, I used to think the answer is that we don’t all have to create things to get through life … but I’ve changed my mind since then.
Not all teens are engaged in participatory culture. For every teen who has a blog or a twitter, there’s one who doesn’t. How much of this is due to what Jenkins called the “participation gap” and how much of this is due to teens who don’t want to or feel like they can’t? We spoke in class of arts-based vs. civics-based approaches to media literacy education and it makes me think of how not every teen happens to be a whiz-kid that whips out million dollar programs every other week and on the other side of the spectrum not every teen even has a MySpace profile.
But ultimately, I’m feeling optimistic about participatory culture. Maybe because I ultimately don’t believe in dichotomies like “arts-based vs. civics-based”. That like we learned in our high school English classes and in our readings this week, everything is interconnected and part of one big social construction. I feel differently about Web 2.0 stuff than I do about my lack of musical ability because even a dabbler like me can feel useful when it comes to participatory culture. I may not make music or know how to paint, but every Flickr photo I put up and every blog post I write is part of the greater whole, as cheesy as that sounds. The threshold is so low that essentially anyone who wants to communicate with other people is a participant. In turn, we as communicators need to be made self-aware about the contributions we make and how we fit into history or into the universe.
Anyhow, that's the stuff I was thinking of this week. Blogger may have a spell check, but there's no check for long-windedness or dithering. I'll go communicate elsewhere on the internet now.
The idea that we have to measure media literacy proficiency makes me wonder if one day we’ll see media literacy sections in standardized tests. Wouldn’t that be funny, to see teachers and students scramble to cover material based solely on yearly scantron tests designed to satisfying media literacy requirements outlined in something similar to No Child Left Behind? The fact that such an idea feels so fundamentally ludicrous makes me feel more strongly that education in the U.S. would have to shift drastically from its current path in order to accommodate some of the more abstract or open-ended goals outlined in the NCTE Guideline.
… Or are these goals really so broad in scope that they veer into the academic aether, never to be touched by ordinary folk with ordinary goals? I’m thinking the answer is no. If anything, the teaching method outlined in class yesterday from Understanding by Design gets away from the Möbius strip of false understanding implicit in the “teach to the test” standardized testing method and brings students to a form of understanding that is more real and therefore more capable of measurement in the first place.
I call it a Möbius strip because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Forgive me for my blathering (and I will do much of it in this post), but in class this week I found myself thinking of possible analogies or metaphors for the critical thinking skills and media awareness that we are trying to bestow upon these hypothetical young persons. On the whiteboard this week, we came up with things like teaching people to “look behind the message” and “recognize media”:
And when we came up with all that (sorry, I couldn’t get all 4 groups’ content into the shot) it made me think that there’s something primal to it akin to philosophical stuff like lifting the veil of illusion in Buddhism or teaching people Plato’s allegory about seeing shadows on the cave wall. When we describe something like “look behind the message” or say we want youths to become “critical readers of the world”, isn’t that what we mean? It’s heady to think about. I’m reminded of why we teach kids anything, and I think of my first time learning deconstructionism or postmodernism in my British Literature class in high school (thanks, Mr. Scotese). To put it plainly, seeing how everything is interconnected (like on the whiteboard, or in mashups, or in social networking) felt like the moment when Neo was finally able to “see the matrix” in its entirety, in its foundational structure. Stuff like this is where you can really get into the heart of the facets of understanding we talked about in class: explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge. It was so eye opening about and it seemed to bear little relevance with learning goals or objectives based on institutional standards.
But like Carol said in class, relevance is subjective. And I’ve come around to the idea that a structured learning format like in Understanding by Design where you think of what you want your students to learn before you go through the process of creating a curriculum or evaluation methods is not only a relevant method of learning but is probably the smartest thing I’ve heard all week. It’s not abstract, it’s goal-oriented in a way that encompasses the whole learning process. It makes room for the idea of “richer, nuanced learning” spoken of in Hobbs by focusing on understanding over performance. That level of engagement requires discipline from students and balanced guidance from educators, and what’s more grounded than that?
On Participatory Cultures: Your Contribution Is Appreciated
Do we all have to create things? The question brings to mind my artist friends who sometimes talk as if I, their non-artist friend, am not in the room. They ask wonderingly: “How can anybody go through life without creating music?” And I would briefly feel like some non-artistic leper, resentful that I lack musical talent and happen to go through life without ever creating much of anything tangible. In short, I used to think the answer is that we don’t all have to create things to get through life … but I’ve changed my mind since then.
Not all teens are engaged in participatory culture. For every teen who has a blog or a twitter, there’s one who doesn’t. How much of this is due to what Jenkins called the “participation gap” and how much of this is due to teens who don’t want to or feel like they can’t? We spoke in class of arts-based vs. civics-based approaches to media literacy education and it makes me think of how not every teen happens to be a whiz-kid that whips out million dollar programs every other week and on the other side of the spectrum not every teen even has a MySpace profile.
But ultimately, I’m feeling optimistic about participatory culture. Maybe because I ultimately don’t believe in dichotomies like “arts-based vs. civics-based”. That like we learned in our high school English classes and in our readings this week, everything is interconnected and part of one big social construction. I feel differently about Web 2.0 stuff than I do about my lack of musical ability because even a dabbler like me can feel useful when it comes to participatory culture. I may not make music or know how to paint, but every Flickr photo I put up and every blog post I write is part of the greater whole, as cheesy as that sounds. The threshold is so low that essentially anyone who wants to communicate with other people is a participant. In turn, we as communicators need to be made self-aware about the contributions we make and how we fit into history or into the universe.
Anyhow, that's the stuff I was thinking of this week. Blogger may have a spell check, but there's no check for long-windedness or dithering. I'll go communicate elsewhere on the internet now.
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