Renee Hobbs

A Review of School-Based Initiatives in Media Literacy Education:

When teachers use videos, films, Web sites, popular music, newspapers, and magazines in the K-12 classroom or when they involve students in creating media productions using video cameras or computers, they may aim to motivate students’interest in the subject, build communication and critical-thinking skills, encourage political activism, or promote personal and social development. This article reviews teachers’motivations for implementing media literacy in K-12 education, focusing on current efforts in elementary education, secondary English language arts, and media production. An overview of statewide media literacy initiatives in Texas, Maryland, and New Mexico is provided, and the author examines some public anxieties concerning the uses of popular media in K-12 classrooms and makes recommendations for future research.

The State of Media Literacy: A Response to Potter

Potters essay on the state of media literacy purports to represent the current state of the field, but omits much of the innovative work that has emerged in the last 10 years from scholars across the fields of communication, education, and public health. The review does not include mention of the development of numerous media literacy education initiatives by educational practitioners working in both formal and in informal education. By conceptualizing media literacy as a response to counteract the negative effects of mass media and popular culture, Potter fails to capture the depth and complexity of the field.

Association of various components of media literacy and adolescent smoking.

OBJECTIVE To determine which specific aspects of media literacy were most strongly associated with smoking outcomes. METHODS Students at a public high school responded to cross-sectional survey items measuring smoking outcomes, components of media literacy, and other variables. RESULTS Of the 1211 participants, 19% were current smokers (N = 216) and 40% of the nonsmokers (N = 342) were susceptible to smoking. In the adjusted models, current smoking was most strongly related to representation-reality domain items, but susceptibility to smoking was associated with each of the media literacy domains. CONCLUSION Varied relationships exist between individual facets of media literacy and smoking outcomes.

Teaching with and about film and television: Integrating media literacy concepts into management education

Reviews some characteristics of video‐based educational materials by describing the intellectual heritage of the movement to include media analysis and media productions as basic skills for the information age. Identifies the opportunities and challenges that management educators face in their use of video‐based tools in both business settings and higher education.

Learning to engage: how positive attitudes about the news, media literacy, and video production contribute to adolescent civic engagement

Many students enroll in video production courses in high school as part of a vocational, career, or technical program. While there has been an explosion of scholarly work in digital literacy in informal settings, less is known about how digital and media literacy competencies are developed through school-based video production courses. This study explores the relationship between civic engagement and the various multimedia instructional practices used in a high school video production course with a single-school convenience sample and an ethnically diverse population of students. Findings reveal that the best predictors of the intent to participate in civic engagement are having positive attitudes about news, current events, reporting, and journalism. Media literacy attitudes and a range of in-classroom learning experiences with video production are also associated with civic engagement.

Instructional Practices in Media Literacy Education and Their Impact on Students' Learning.

This study reports the findings of qualitative and quantitative research designed to assess the impact of different types of instructional practices involving media literacy education across the curriculum. Teachers in a small school district participated in a staff development program in media literacy and developed unique approaches for integrating media literacy concepts into language arts, history, math and science at the ninth grade level. The work of four different teams of ninth grade teachers is described by examining the instructional practices, motivations and philosophy behind teachers’ application of media literacy concepts into the curriculum. In addition, students exposed to these different forms of media literacy education were tested on specific media analysis skills, including the ability to identify main ideas, the messages purpose, point of view, and various structural features of a news broadcast. Students who received a balance of media analysis and media production experiences, who ...

Improvization and strategic risk-taking in informal learning with digital media literacy

The city provides a rich array of learning opportunities for young children. However, in many urban schools, often it can be logistically difficult to get young children out of the building. But when elementary children are encouraged to view the city as a classroom and use digital media to explore and represent their neighborhoods, they can be inspired by the unpredictable events of daily life to ask naïve, critical and sometimes troubling questions. This paper presents a case study of a teacher in an informal media literacy learning environment who worked with a group of 9-year olds in Philadelphia. It documents the experience of a novice teacher who, flummoxed by an accidental encounter between her students and a homeless person, transformed an uncomfortable experience into a teachable moment. Childrens questions about homelessness became the organizing frame for learning experience, as the instructor helped children make sense of the information on the Internet, analyze popular culture films and news media, and conduct interviews with community leaders and advocates for the homeless. The inquiry process resulted in a collaboratively produced multimedia project, created by children. The case study has implications for pre- and in-service teacher education for digital and media literacy. This paper suggests that improvization and strategic risk-taking must be conceptualized as a set of socio-emotional and experiential competencies that teachers need when using digital media in an urban community as a tool for learning.

Field-Based Teacher Education in Elementary Media Literacy as a Means to Promote Global Understanding

Preservice teachers develop valuable knowledge and skills when they get opportunities to collaborate with classroom teachers in a field experience program designed to implement and assess a variety of instructional practices in media literacy education. This article describes a university–school partnership that supports the professional development of preservice teachers and elementary teachers. To promote global understanding while developing critical thinking skills about mass media and popular culture, this program used a range of specific instructional practices to help combat negative media stereotypes and increase knowledge, tolerance, and acceptance of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. Grade 3 and 4 children learned to identify inaccurate visual stereotypes of the Middle East and strengthened message analysis skills through asking critical questions about the representation of Arab people in popular culture, including advertising and animation. They gained knowledge about the many nations and cultures of the Middle East through the use of library resources and online databases. After creating simple videos to represent their own cultural heritage to others, they participated in an online collaborative forum sharing their work and responding to questions through a collaborative wiki with students from Kuwait, who shared their culture and family traditions. Students and teachers decreased their reliance on cultural stereotypes and increased their knowledge and appreciation of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East.

Strengthening Media Education in the Twenty-first Century: Opportunities for the State of Pennsylvania

he concept of media education has not fully arrived for children and youth now being educated in public school classrooms in Pennsylvania. Some students get opportunities to use the tools of current and emerging communication technologies to create works for self-expression, but these are generally vocationally designed digital communication programs available to a tiny proportion of students who are sometimes placed in these programs because of their low academic ability. Most K–12 students in the state do not have regular, school-based opportunities to appreciate, analyze, and create works through photography, cinema, sound, digital arts, or interactive media. Although there are some programs that provide meaningful afterschool opportunities for youth media education, these are much less well developed and stable compared to states of similar size nationwide. Moreover, in sharp contrast to elementary and secondary students in states such as Minnesota, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas, few students in Pennsylvania’s public schools have structured educational opportunities to analyze critically media and popular culture, examining the ways in which visual and electronic messages are constructed and designed, how aesthetic and design techniques are used to express and communicate meanings, how they present and represent various cultural values, and how these messages shape attitudes and influence behaviors. Although children and young people in Pennsylvania spend an average of eight hours per day consuming media, they do not have opportunities to develop critical thinking skills useful in responding to these messages. Most do not have opportunities to create video or multimedia works to express themselves or convey their own ideas. The few students who do have opportunities to work with video production usually learn technical skills, working with technologies that enable them to create messages largely designed to serve community or adult needs, including videotaping school football games or school committee meetings, creating morning announcements, or designing school promotional messages. Although it is beyond my scope here to examine the historical circumstances that have created this particular curricular pattern so common in Pennsylvania schools, this article defines media education and places it in the context of contemporary research on the arts, culture, and economic and social development. Second, this article reviews current instructional settings where media analysis and media production activities are now occurring in K–12 education in Pennsylvania. This article then describes how other states have implemented and assessed media education within an arts education framework. Finally, this article makes specific recommendations on policies that could improve media education so that students can build skills of creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration that are so central to life in an increasingly technology-rich and media-saturated society. In constructing this article, I reviewed documents from the Pennsylvania State Department of Education; national, state, and local arts and arts education associations; and data from the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Labor. I examined syllabi and curriculum materials from a number of high schools and colleges across Pennsylvania and nationwide. I conducted interviews with scholars, K–12 educators, media professionals, and artists involved in school-based residency or other outreach programs. Finally, I reviewed the scholarly and academic literature on media education and consulted with professional colleagues who are familiar with media education implementation and assessment in the states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (See references for a com-

The State of Media Literacy: A Rejoinder

Thanks to JoBEM editor, Susan Brinson, who offered me the opportunity to write a rejoinder to W. James Potter’s essay on the State of Media Literacy. Potter begins his response to my essay by alleging that my identity and track record limit the value of my perspective on the field. After justifying his own editorial choices in terms of breadth, balance over time, balance across scholars, and description over prescription, Potter then suggests that my critical perspective regarding his work is an indication of my own lack of media literacy. I begin my rejoinder by wishing that Potter addressed my principal argument, where I claim that his review examines media literacy from a too-traditional mass communication perspective, rooted in the media effects tradition, and as a result, it neglects much important recent work from this increasingly global and interdisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners. When media literacy is conceptualized primarily as a response to presumed negative media effects, pedagogy shifts from its roots in constructivism to become essentially persuasive. Some educators aim to deliver a message about privacy or reputational issues on the Internet, desensitization and media violence, the limiting world view offered by gender stereotypes, the dangers of media ownership, or the emotional manipulation embedded in fast food advertising. They can do so in ways that promote analysis and metacognition as well as divergent, critical thinking, or they can deliver a voluminous collection of facts, carefully assembling a compelling persuasive message using rhetorical strategies that position students as spectators who, more or less inevitably, will be expected to adopt the ‘‘right’’ perspectives on key issues (or at least be able to reproduce them on an exam). The robust and meaningful tension at the heart of the empowerment-protection debate derives its potency from these concerns. It may be that the distinction about how pedagogical methods reflect