Media is the message

“Stepping into the 21st century with critical media literacy”

Scenario One: Twenty students are seated in desks that are lined in five rows and pointed at a white board. A teacher stands behind a podium and lectures about a text from the Western canon while students, using pens, fill in blanks on Xeroxed worksheets. They are studying for a multiple-choice test with an essay component.

Scenario Two: Twenty students are divided into five groups of four around a bank of computers. Each group has access to the Internet and software for audio, video, graphic, and still photography editing. Together, they are creating a ten-minute documentary, drawing from themes across a variety of texts and genres comprising high and low culture. Their products will be posted on a classroom blog for celebration.

Linking technology to instruction is just one way that teachers can incorporate new literacies in the classroom. Public schools rarely integrate semiotic knowledge into pedagogies around literacy and student engagement. Yet, literacy is tied inextricably to personal, relational experiences formed through multi-modal text experiences. Interconnections among language, literacy, and culture are becoming stronger. Literacy by achievement test is a narrow window to assess students’ learning. In an era of emerging technology and media and varied cultural practices, is reading and knowledge of Western print texts the sole, accurate, and appropriate gauge of students’ literacies? Can defining literacy in new ways enhance equity in education? Would students be more engaged and critical learners in a classroom where media and popular culture texts are constant components of instruction and dialogue?

Media education as reform

Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy. It is a process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and forms. Additionally, drawing from Freire’s (1992) model of critical pedagogy, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, critical media literacy is inquiry-based instruction that encourages students to ask questions and dialogue with a teacher about what they watch, see, and read. Freire (1992) refers to “critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action” (p. 52) as essential to engaged learning, because students respond in authentic ways when involved in inquiry. Freire argues that “dialogue is indispensable to the act of cognition that unveils reality” (p. 71) and is companion to problem posing.

Critical media literacy education provides tools to help students analyze messages in media texts and to understand how structural features -- such as media ownership and political powers --- influence messages. Conversations with students demythologize the media world while encouraging students to solve as well as to pose problems. Critical media literacy also aims to enable students to be skillful creators and producers of media messages, both to facilitate understanding as to the strengths and limitations of each medium, as well as to create independent media.

“There’s always something decentred about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures,” argues Hall (2003, p. 105), in Decoding and Encoding. By transforming media consumption into an active process, students gain critical distance from the pervasive texts of their lives in order to acknowledge their reasons for enjoyment, the potential for persuasion through symbolic representations, and media’s ability to re-create the world in fictional and non-fictional ways.

How do you incorporate critical media literacy into the classroom? Do you see media literacy education as separate from the remainder of the curriculum? Are you comfortable leaving behind the teacher-as-authority role and becoming a co-learner in what Freire (1992) calls praxis?

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