What’s media literacy?

Media literacy is not a new concept in the literature. Its history as a field of study and discipline can be traced back to the early 20th century. During this period, media tools such as newspapers, telephone, radio, and television have reached masses of people. This has led to a common consensus that media can be used as educational material in Europe and America. So, they began to include media literacy in their teaching curriculum.

Some saw this as a way to raise children’s standards of taste and quality while others saw this as a means to protect children from the distracting influences of Hollywood by teaching them to understand how the cinema worked. (Hobbs & Jensen, 2009, p. 2).

Scholars suggest that media literacy takes a critical perspective—one that would focus on engagement with media as texts, and the conditions in which these texts are produced and consumed.

Indeed, the concept of media literacy was defined as “the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information for specific outcomes” (Aufderheide, 1993, p.6).

So, media literacy involves “critical thinking skill” that allows the viewer/audience to resolve the meaning of the information they receive and the ability to make independent decisions about the media content.

This requires understanding the mass communication process and recognizing the influence of the media on individuals and society.

Media literacy skills

Media literacy involves questioning the messages objectively coming from the media. Therefore, the individual has to have certain knowledge to examine media messages from multiple positions.

In this respect, Livingstone and Thumim (2003, p.2) listed media literacy skills as follows :

• Technical skills: These are the knowledge of how to access information that can be in the form of printed, visual, audiovisual, and new media texts. Technical skills are recognized as prerequisites for media literacy.
• Critical input skills: These involve evaluating media texts such as movies, advertisements, and banners with a critical and inquisitive point of view.
• Media production: This is the use of individual media tools to produce and share unique media texts. This includes the ability to produce their own media texts, such as cartoons, documentaries, videos, and web pages, using information and communication tools.

This means that media literacy is the ability to read the media critically and also write and produce activities and projects.

It’s worth noting that, to interpret critically media messages and produce messages it’s important to be aware of political agendas, stereotypes, or misrepresentations and explore them.

Media literacy education

Media literacy was described as “a lens that helps individuals to understand the world and to see what is happening in everyday life” ( Baker,2012, p. 14).

Thus, media literacy education aims to make the individual a conscious consumer who reads messages from the media and interprets them critically.

This is through developing the necessary strategies that help him discuss and analyze media content, understand and evaluate such content, and build media communication to recognize the culture he belongs to.

Since media literacy is about reading and responding critically to media messages, its education should equip students with critical thinking skills that will help them seek out information, critique, and engage in dialogue about media.

It should also help them think about their own civic and political participation via media production (Hobbs,2011).

Therefore, media literacy education should be part of every school curriculum starting from the preschool period to all other levels of education. It must move beyond developing technical skills to cultivating the necessary skills to understand the role of media.

Indeed, there are important skills in an individual’s life that can be honed through media literacy education. These include :

• Be able to learn to analyze news and advertisements,
• Be able to examine the social functions of music,
• Be able to distinguish between propaganda, idea, and knowledge,
• Be able to examine whether different races, genders, and classes are represented in entertainment and news media, or not,
• Be able to understand media economy and ownership concept,
• Be able to interpret media messages that depict violence and sexuality. (Hobbs & Jensen,2009,p. 9)

So, media literacy education can support students to develop critical thinking; a necessary skill to adapt better to a complex and ever-changing environment.

Yet, to help students engage with media, process and interpret texts’ meaning and so develop their critical thinking skills, teachers need to adopt a critical approach to teaching media literacy. How?

Here are some strategies for teachers to develop students’ media literacy :

1) Introduce various media tools

Teachers need to introduce different media tools in the classroom. These can include magazines, songs, cartoons, TV dramas, advertisements, and movies.

Doing so can help students work on various media messages, and examine how different rhetorical, social, and cultural elements reshape such messages.

As stated previously, media literacy involves critical thinking skills. So, it’s necessary to make students interested in learning about media and engaged to prompt their critical thinking.

To this end, providing them with opportunities to choose from a variety of media tools or messages to work on can make them more engaged in analysing them and so voicing out the sources of their stereotypes and prejudices.

2) Promote students’ questioning

A critical approach to media literacy teaching is less concerned with the media as texts, and more focused on why certain media texts exist. (Lewis & Jhally, 1998)

This means that teachers should engage students in investigating the political, economic and social relations in which media texts emerge, and how these processes condition the consumption and regulation of such texts.

This can be achieved by teaching them to ask questions such as:

• Who or what groups will benefit or hurt this communication?
• What are the social, cultural, historical, and political contexts while shaping and trying to understand the message?
• How and why is the message created?
• How do different people understand this knowledge differently?
• Whose viewpoint, values, and ideologies are represented, and who is ignored? (Masterman,2004)

In this concern, media literacy education in the classroom must be informed by cultural studies to help unpack how dominant ideologies are perpetuated in media, and then, how students can produce counter or subversive ideologies.

Teachers, therefore, should be aware of the conditions and dominant ideologies that relate to the media texts they use in the classroom so that they can encourage students to reflect on them: why these exist and how they affect those texts.

This will help students involve in a critical literary analysis of media texts that account for their social and technical production as well as consumption (audience). By doing so, students will understand the role of media in constructing or mediating reality.

Yet, to analyse critically media texts, students need to be given instruction and constant feedback on their close reading of these texts.

3) Encourage media production

Besides critical reading and analysing media texts, students should also create their messages. This can help them become more critically media literate.

So, they can write blog posts, create videos, design logos, and make presentations to respond to the examined media messages or the issue in question. (Clarifying instructions is a MUST here)

Teachers should encourage students to think aloud about the process or stages of their media production. This can tell a lot about their thinking skills and so help track their media literacy progress.

It’s necessary also to allow students to share their production with their peers (in the classroom or via an online platform) and promote discussion and debate.

To conclude, our students must become media literate as they are inward with more media than their past generations. So, we should consider teaching them about media and helping them to take a critical stance towards its use. This will support them to become critical thinkers who can make smart choices in today’s message-saturated world.

References

Aufderheide, P. (Ed.). (1993). Media Literacy: A report of the national leadership conference on Media Literacy. Aspen, CO: Aspen Institute. Retrieved February 12, 2017, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED365294.pdf

Baker, F. W. (2012). Media Literacy in the K-12 school. Washington, DC: Iste Publishing.

Hobbs, R. (2011). The state of media literacy: A response to Potter. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 55(3), 419–430. doi:10.1080/08838151.2011.597594

Hobbs, R., & Jensen, A. (2009). The past, present, and future of media literacy education. The Journal of Media Literacy Education, 1(1), 1–11.

Livingstone, S., & Thumim, N. (2003). Assessing the Media Literacy of UK adults. A review of the academic literature. Broadcasting Standards Commission. Independent Television Commission. NIACE. Retrieved May 2, 2017, from http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/whosWho/AcademicStaff/SoniaLivingstone/pdf/Pubblication2010.pdf

Lewis, J., & Jhally, S. (1998). The struggle over media literacy. Journal of Communication, 48(1), 109–120. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1998.tb02741.x
Masterman, L. (2004). Teaching the media. London: Taylor and Francis Group.