Mapping the Media Education Terrain
by Dan Krutka, Marie Heath, and Cathryn van Kessel
We hear a lot about the importance of media literacy in education, but schools don’t always put their money where their mouth is. Because most schools don’t have dedicated classes on the subject, every teacher is tasked with the responsibility. If every teacher is a media literacy teacher, is anyone really a media literacy teacher? With packed curricula and high-stakes tests, it’s no wonder media education is often on the backburner.
To add to the challenge, there are a lot of approaches to media education (we explain why we primarily use this term instead of "media literacy on our site). This point hit home for me when I read “Unpacking Fake News: An Educator's Guide to Navigating the Media with Students” when it was released in 2019. The authors in the book make convincing cases for how just teaching students to decipher credibility doesn’t always translate to their real life experiences with media. Younger (and older) people view the content that “bubbles up” on their feeds through “motivated reasoning” and other psychosocial factors. This means that just teaching students to rationally work through the credibility of a source in the classroom is likely not enough. Moreover, Ashley Woodson, LaGarrett King, and Esther Kim wrote a chapter that recognized how white supremacy and the proliferation of racist narratives have long served as a form of misinformation that can often go unrecognized as misinformation in media literacy curriculum.
A few months ago, Marie Heath, Cathryn van Kessel, and I started brainstorming how to provide a more holistic media education. Our initial idea was to categorize different media education approaches on a quadrant chart with spectrums from individual to society and emotional to rational. We sought out, and received, fantastic feedback from Stephanie Flores-Koulish, Jim Garrett, Renee Hobbs, Wayne Journell, Lance Mason, Phil Nichols, and Jeremy Stoddard. At least for now, we tabled the quadrant chart and just tried to identify different approaches to media. After a few months of work, we identified five approaches and we want to share our approach to “Mapping the Media Education Terrain.”
This past week, M.Ed. student in my course explored these different media education approaches, read a chapter from the “Unpacking Fake News” book and other articles, and completed the “Choose Your Own Media Education Adventure” at the bottom of the page. My students are mostly K-12 teachers and they were creative in identifying ways to bring together complementary approaches that aligned with their curriculum and were responsive to their students. As I thought might be the case, the “observe the media” approach, which came from media ecology and figure/ground analysis, was the most confusing. This approach is so different from what typically counts as media literacy. Still, several students did effectively design lessons in this method and others. Michelle Ciccone did a fantastic job authoring our figure/ground page and we’ll have an upcoming blog post with more on that approach.
The teachers in my class developed lessons that paried “respond to posts“ approach with curriculum from NAMLE or Civic Online Reasoning with a “respond to feelings” approach that used psychosocial methods developed by Cathryn van Kessel. The teachers in my class were hopeful that, for example, their students would both use critical thinking and be in touch with their own motivated reasoning. Many others referenced how the “identify power” method could empower their students to confront the invisibility or misrepresentation of historically and contemporarily minoritized groups in media. I am encouraged by this initial feedback I received from teachers in my class. If we “Map the Media Education Terrain” then we may better find the media education lessons our students need. Now if we can just get a dedicated media education course in most schools.
We send this out with a desire for feedback. What did we get wrong? What should we add? What do you think? Please leave your feedback in the comments or contact us to talk more.
While I recommend clicking on the link and viewing this information on our Media Education page, I will include our introduction below and infographic above for easier reading in your email, but there is much more on our site:
Most educators recognize a need to teach students to think critically about the information they encounter through different types of media. By media, we are referring to any technology that mediates, or represents, information about the world. Books, newspapers, websites, and infographics mediate through the print, images, and their design; Radio and podcasts mediate information through the audio, sound effects and their pace; Television and social media mediate information through complex combinations of audio, visual, and textual information. These media are created by people with different levels of power, influence, and purposes from multinational media corporations to independent bloggers.
The most common name for this curriculum in schools is “media literacy.” Media literacy often focuses on helping students decipher the credibility of media content and sources for informed decision-making. As the “literacy” metaphor suggests, media literacy has its roots in focusing on the “reading” and “writing” of content. However, there are other forms of media analysis that require different types of approaches. In some cases, we consciously make meaning about media and, in other instances, we unconsciously experience media. Media can normalize some people’s identities or experiences and make invisible, misrepresent, or malign the identities and experiences of others. Media is important to study because it can change who we are, how we feel, and even create new realities that affect the world in profound ways.
Therefore, we will use the term “media education” here to recognize these different approaches and their purposes, solutions, and limitations. We believe that quality media education experiences are most likely to occur when teachers make thoughtful choices about which approaches best align with their pedagogical aims for the students and communities with whom they work. In the following table, we share initial efforts to support teacher decision-making by mapping out different approaches to media education. Where will your media education journey begin?