Critical Media Literacy

Published by Cognella Academic Publishing (San Diego), ISBN 978-1-7935-2153-8. Previous editions have been adopted at 10 universities and colleges.

"Media Environments: Using Movies and Texts to Critique Media and Society" uses popular film as a gateway to critical readings, encouraging students to think creatively and critically about media, society, technology, and popular culture.

The text anthology explores media in their totality and provides models and theories for interrogating many universal themes that span media, technology, and planetary civilization. Using popular films about media as lead-ins, students are introduced to the works of well-known thinkers and writers such as Marshall McLuhan, Charlton D. McIlwain, Shoshanna Zuboff, Julia Hildebrand, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Devon Powers, Antonio Lopez, and many others. Chapters span interconnected topics:

Memes (original meaning),
Networks (McLuhan),
Spectacle (Debord),
Hyperreality (Baudrillard).

Capitalism and Consumerism,
Freedom and Protest,
Social-Mobile Media,
Ecology and the Anthropocene,
Science and Our Place in the Universe,
Pseudoscience and Conspiracy,
Celebrity and Superheroes,
New Concepts of "Hot" and "Cool" Media,
Land Art, Dark Skies, and Technological Civilization.

The fourth edition features 19 new readings that explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther, Avatar and global media ecosystems, Hollywood and climate change, Blade Runner 2049 and future earth scenarios, Avengers and environmental advocacy, #BlackLivesMatter and Black movements in digital culture, and the International Dark Sky movement as a radical media-tech philosophy. Intellectually rigorous and thematically diverse, Media Environments is ideal for courses and programs in media and/or communication studies.

We argue that the continued growth of the Internet, both as a form of mainstream media and as a tool for organizing democratic social interactions, requires that Internet politics be retheorized from a standpoint that is both critical and reconstructive. While we undertake an approach that is critical of corporate forms and hegemonic uses of the Internet, we advocate for new software developments such as blogs and trace the oppositional deployments of the Internet made by a wide variety of groups in the cause of progressive cultural and political struggle. In this regard, we describe how the Internet has facilitated the worldwide VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PP 75-100

El 2017 empieza a implementarse en el Perú un nuevo currículo para la educación obligatoria. Entre otras novedades, esta norma desarrolla una competencia específica sobre las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC). Para abrir el debate e introducir otros marcos de referencia que enriquezcan el análisis, este artículo presenta y analiza la denominada competencia TIC desde la perspectiva de la educación mediática. Concluimos que, aunque no se enuncie una competencia mediática como tal, algunas de sus propuestas conceptuales están presentes de forma diseminada, lo que presenta una oportunidad para el desarrollo inicial de la educación mediática en el contexto peruano.

This book provides a practical and theoretical look at how media education can make learning and teaching more meaningful and transformative. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes a case study involving an elementary school that received a federal grant to integrate media literacy and the arts into the curriculum. The ideas and experiences of working teachers are analyzed through a critical media literacy framework that provides realistic challenges and hopeful examples and suggestions. The book is a valuable addition to any education course or teacher preparation program that wants to promote twenty-first century literacy skills, social justice, civic participation, media education, or critical technology use. Communications classes will find it useful as it explores and applies key concepts of cultural studies and media education.

Though racism in the form of blatant de facto and de jure policies and domestic terrorism is no longer the law of the land as was the case before, and during the Civil Rights Movement, an intensified dysconscious and color-blind racism has propelled
itself in the post–Civil Rights United States, particularly in this “Age of Obama”; one that manifests in semantically slippery
and rhetorically convoluted discourses. Consequently to illuminate this specter of American racism, critical race theory and spoken word performative poetics join forces here in an interpretive conarrated description of rhetoric that has recently
emerged in the mainstream media—a discourse that attempts (a) to deny Black persons the right to human dignity; (b)
to distort and invalidate Black persons’ ideas, thoughts, and feelings; and (c) to deny one’s right to claim and affirm one’s
personal identity

Antero Garcia and T. Philip Nichols explore how classrooms and schools must reframe their conceptions of technology from a focus on tools that serve specific purposes to a focus on platforms and their ecologies. In doing so, they argue, educational stakeholders should attend to three different dimensions of how technology is integrated in schools: the social uses of digital technologies, the design decisions that were made about these products, and the material resources that help make them operate. This approach requires educators to ask complicated questions about what technology does in schools and how to teach with and about it.

With the sudden interest in fake news, there is an outcry for the need for media literacy in schools.  While this is a good starting point, I argue that this does not go far enough -- as educators and researchers, we must advocate for critical media literacy in the classroom. This paper aims to delineate the differences between media literacy and critical media literacy.

The social maps called classical social theories are to some extent torn, tattered, and fragmented, and in many cases outdated and even obsolete. Fresh theories need to be constructed constantly, using both the resources of past theories and salient sketches of the contemporary era to make sense of our current historical condition.

This essay asserts the importance for English/Language Arts educators to become conversant with the features of Black Language and the cultural and historical foundations of this speech genre as a rule-bound, grammatically consistent pattern of speech. These features go beyond grammar to include such conventions as a reliance on storytelling as a means of communicating ideas. The author proposes a set of issues for educators to consider so that they may produce antiracist scholarship, praxis, and knowledge that work toward transformation and social change in service of addressing racial, cultural, and linguistic inequities in language and literacy education. The essay concludes with ten framing ideas for generating an antiracist Black Language Pedagogy in order to produce a society founded on respect and appreciation for the historical, cultural, political, and racial underpinnings of Black Language., anti-black racism, and anti-racist pedagogies; and is concerned with anti-racist writing pedagogies, critical media literacies, Black feminist-womanist storytelling, and the health & wellness needs of women of color in academia, with an emphasis on early career Black women. The root of her research stems from her experience being ill-prepared to address her Black students' language and literacy needs when she worked as a high school English teacher in Detroit. As a result, her research and teaching agenda creates a pathway to cultural, linguistic, and racial justice for Black students across educational spaces.

In this article, the nature of visual culture art education, the significance of teaching critical media literacy, and frameworks of teaching critical media literacy will be described. Then, how to apply social semiotics in analyzing visual culture will be reviewed. Second, I will share the insights gained from using critical media literacy teaching approaches when teaching an introduction to art education course with preservice generalist educators. The result shows that most preservice generalist teachers have not yet learned the importance of teaching critical media literacy in the teacher education program. Although most preservice generalist teachers have been aware of the significance of teaching critical media literacy in the elementary school after my hands-on workshop, several preservice generalist teachers have not yet fully understood the essential part of teaching critical media literacy is to foster students' critical thinking abilities rather than to teach image-editing skills.

Students in today’s context are engaged with any one or more forms of media predominantly on a daily basis. In many households, parents are not so proficient with the functioning and content of modern media platforms. Many times, students’ media usage does not take place in the purview of parents or teachers and most commonly it happens with peer groups. However, the peer groups too lack knowledge or skills towards assessing the content and its influence on their attitudes and opinion on social relations and issues.  Educational institutions also do not have a mechanism to guide or enable learning towards critically evaluating the media content and its influences, be it the traditional or new media forms. It is a serious concern from many quarters since nowhere do they get education on how to handle the media in a media-saturated and globalized world. Irrespective of gender, age, the discipline of study, the observations on the media usage patterns of students in higher educational institutions urge a need for Critical Media Literacy (CML) in all higher educational institutions of India. This paper measures the need for Critical Media Literacy (CML) as part of the higher framework for all students from all disciplines. An assessment of the media habits of students and their influence on their understanding of the society and socialization process is done towards identifying the need for CML in higher education institutions in India

11 books (free access to full PDF texts):
Media Literacy Education and Film and Media Studies


Media and Information Literacy Education Dictionary:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311675000_Media_and_Information_Literacy_Education_Dictionary

Media Literacy Education:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267623006_FEDOROV_A_MEDIA_LITERACY_EDUCATION_MOSCOW_ICO_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_2015_577_P?ev=prf_pub

On Media Education:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260230477_On_Media_Education

Violence on the Russian & American Media Screen and Youth Audience:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260230555_Violence_on_the_Russian_American_Media_Screen_and_Youth_Audience

Film Criticism:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277009139_FEDOROV_A_FILM_CRITICISM_MOSCOW_ICO_INFORMATION_FOR_ALL_2015_382_P

Film studies in the university students' audience: from entertainment genres to art house:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271155569_FILM_STUDIES_IN_THE_UNIVERSITY_STUDENTS%27_AUDIENCE_FROM_ENTERTAINMENT_GENRES_TO_ART_HOUSE

Western World in the Soviet and Russian Screen: From Epoch of Ideological Confrontation (1946-1991) to Modern Time (1992-2016): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307587864_Western_World_in_the_Soviet_and_Russian_Screen_From_Epoch_of_Ideological_Confrontation_1946-1991_to_Modern_Time_1992-2016?ev=prf_pub

The White Movement Image in the Mirror of the Russian and Western Screen:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305441604_THE_WHITE_MOVEMENT_IMAGE_IN_THE_MIRROR_OF_THE_RUSSIAN_AND_WESTERN_SCREEN?ev=prf_pub

Reflections: West about Russia / Russia about West. Film images of people and countries:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307905692_Reflections_West_about_Russia_Russia_about_West_Film_images_of_people_and_countries?ev=prf_pub

Cinema in the Mirror of the Soviet and Russian Film Criticism:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311953725_Cinema_in_the_Mirror_of_the_Soviet_and_Russian_Film_Criticism

Russia in the mirror of the Western screen:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269992854_RUSSIA_IN_THE_MIRROR_OF_THE_WESTERN_SCREEN

Damon Gameau's documentary offers an inspiring, optimistic look at how current technologies and community action can be used to combat climate change and make the world a better place for future generations. With its imaginative and informative approach, the film also provides plenty of stimuli for classroom discussion and projects, as LUKE RODESILER and RUSSELL MAYO outline.

The white saviour trope, in which a white protagonist demonstrates their virtue by protecting or otherwise assisting a person of colour, is a pervasive narrative in American cinema - but also one that, despite its feel-good trappings, only serves to reinforce racial stereotypes and existing societal power structures. Using examples from John Lee Hancock's film and a range of other screen texts, Luke Rodesiler and Kathy Garland offer a guide on how to critically address this topic in classrooms.

Public education in post-industrial societies has been restructured based on a human capital model that prioritizes the economic value of citizens for the benefit of globally competitive national economies. In a policy-as-numbers climate (Lingard, 2011), school administrators and teachers struggle to 'produce results' and 'close gaps' within accountability systems built on standardized measures of learning. What possibilities exist for critical literacy as viable classroom pedagogy in such an environment? This article offers a contextual-empirical analysis of efforts to implement critical literacy in mainstream secondary classes in Singapore. Drawing on Freire's notion of generative themes, it identifies key political-policy constraints, showing how they impacted the pedagogical enactment of critical literacy tenets and pinpointing a focal direction for critical literacy in Singapore's English education. More generally, the article argues that critical literacy, more than ever, must be a localized practice responding to exigencies emerging at the global-local nexus.

Despite the largely degrading media representations of Blackness, historically, Black girls and women have been strong activists, disrupting narratives the media conveys about Black girl- and
womanhood. Centering Black girls’ lived experience through critical media literacy can give them the opportunity to develop the language to identify, deconstruct, and problematize the complexity of power operating in media and negotiate visibility by counternarrating racist, sexist, and classist media narratives with authentic stories of Black girlhood. This article centralizes Black girls in media literacy by articulating the aims of the individual and collective endeavors of the Black Girls’ Literacies Collective (BGLC). The author unpacks critical media literacy for classroom teachers and shares practical ways to employ media literacy for youth social activism to alter the educational
landscape to effect change.

While reality television is certainly not a new genre of programming, nor is the idea of youth spending time with media an Earth-shattering concept, these two ideas have not been explored in an in-depth way in the same study.  This study sets out to change that.  While research by Jennifer Pozner (2010) illustrates that reality television is full of disparaging imagery and writings by Shirley Steinberg (2011) explicate the ways in which young people are shaped by the world around them, few studies have looked to examine this potential relationship between young people and reality television. 
This critical qualitative case study sets out to change that by examining the question: How is reality television affecting the self-identity of young people and the ways in which they view others?  The purpose of this study was to dig beneath the surface of how young people feel about the reality television shows that they watch daily and the ways in which their viewing habits and shows of choice may be affecting them.  The participants in this study were seven pre-teens and teenagers, aged 12 to 14 who were in 8th grade at the same junior high.  The study took place over the course of one month and was comprised of four focus groups, followed by individual semi-structured interviews with each respondent.  The dialogue produced was examined using Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, and was underscored by the need for critical media literacy for young people. 
The findings of this study indicate that reality television is far more than just entertainment in the lives of young people.  Discussion and analysis showed that some young viewers have an emerging critical consciousness when it comes to recognizing and questioning stereotyped imagery in reality television shows.  The study also found that reality television does play an influencing role in the lives of young people, although the level of influence differs based on the viewer.  Additionally, the concept of what is real life anymore has become skewed, due in part to these shows, with “real reality” being deemed as boring and with Bauman’s notion of disposability alive and well in the lives of these young people.  These four themes emerged throughout the work and came to life when examining the robust discussions that were had around this topic.
The results of this study suggest that there is much more work to be done in the field of reality television and young people.  As educators, critical media literacy needs to be incorporated into both the formal and informal curriculum, as a means to arm young people with the tools necessary to counteract and question common hegemonic devices.  Additionally, educators and parents alike need to be aware of the complex relationship that exists between reality television and young viewers and the characteristics of viewers that may play a role in the degree to which reality television affects their lives.  More than this, educators need to develop a greater understanding of the characteristics of liquid modernity - namely, a lack of private spaces and a pervasive culture of disposability – so that they may better make sense of the ways in which reality television is affecting young people.

This study is an examination of validity in published articles that have provided tests of the effectiveness of media literacy interventions. We identified 88 published tests of media literacy interventions then analyzed their content using five coding variables that indicated the degree to which authors of those studies established basic validity. We first conducted a meaning analysis to identify the definitions that authors of those studies presented for media literacy. Then we used those definitions to determine the extent to which those authors provided a complete (content validity) and accurate (face validity) operationalization in the design of their measures.

This is the opening chapter of Burn, A and Durran, J (2007) Media Literacy in Schools:  practice, production and progression. London: Paul Chapman. It presents an overview of the book, and an original theoretical model of media literacy, based on research and practice in the first specialist media arts school in the UK.

In my classes, I expected students to think critically/reflectively/creatively with the concepts, topics, issues presented, and in class discussions, readings, videos, and written assignments. This educators' critical thinking checklist can be distributed to students or be included in course syllabi as a guide in developing a critical consciousness when consuming media and other information.

Nell’odierna scuola multiculturale la media education può rappresentare un potente strumento di promozione del pensiero critico, dell’espressione creativa e della partecipazione democratica degli studenti. Tuttavia, affinché la media education possa declinarsi concretamente in una pratica significativa di educazione alla cittadinanza sono necessari un maggiore riconoscimento della sua rilevanza sul piano delle politiche educative, un ripensamento dei suoi strumenti in chiave interculturale, una progettazione della didattica mediale particolarmente attenta all’inclusione degli allievi svantaggiati e una formazione sistematica del corpo docente all’insegnamento in classe della media literacy. Attraverso il resoconto analitico dei risultati del progetto Media education for equity and tolerance (Erasmus Plus, 2016-19), questo volume offre strumenti teorici e metodologici per la progettazione della media education in contesti multiculturali e indicazioni utili per generare percorsi di apprendimento socialmente situati.

Since its inception, social media has been an important method of constructing and performing identity, including gender identity. Identity work on social media is perhaps especially relevant to Gen Z (those born after 1996; Parker & Igielnik, 2020), who are the first generation with access to it in early childhood. In this article, we explore how Gen Z constructs and performs gender identity and other facets of intersectional identity on popular video platform TikTok by analyzing selected content from three TikTokers through the lenses of performativity, intersectionality, and automediality.

Critical media literacy approaches to teaching are a pedagogical imperative in twenty-first century education. It is increasingly important educators rethink what constitutes media and extend this conceptualization to Hollywood film as directors and producers also communicate sociopolitical messages.  This article explores the intersection of critical media literacy, Hollywood film, and Black males through the lens of Black cultural projection.  We use prior research to argue Black males are portrayed as endangered in school curriculum, namely social studies, and this portrayal parallels what students encounter when watching Hollywood films.  The significance of this multimodal distortion of Black males is crucial to consider as films are increasingly used in social studies classrooms.  We offer a critical analysis of the Hollywood film The Blind Side as an example of Black cultural projection; then conclude with a call for critical media literacy to be applied towards the use of film in social studies classrooms. 
Keywords: critical media literacy, film, Black males, social studies

A teachers' manual to develop a critical understanding of communication and mass media through 95 lessons, 'Exercises in Media Education' is essential, systematic and fun. It wears its research and erudition lightly and strikes a blow at several ills. It fits well into schoolwork where this kind of stimulus could do lasting good but is usually absent. It provides a simple, hard-to-find framework for an understanding of the media, for study and discussion of the subject beyond the classroom and for that most important of requirements, responsible participation in the use of media. (Gerson da Cunha, Ex-Communication Executive in UNICEF) 
Publisher: Tej-prasarini, Don Bosco Communications, Matunga, Mumbai, India. 
Year: 1994/1999, Pages: 206,  ISBN 81-87060-10-7,
Email: <[email protected]>

This paper addresses what a culturally responsive classroom might look like in the diverse classrooms of the 21st century. Morrell discusses the research base that supports culturally responsive instruction, key competencies in social studies that emerge from this conceptualization of social studies, and practices in elementary, middle and secondary classrooms that illuminate these competencies. Some practices include apprenticing youth as critical historians, employing critical legal studies and critical race theory, teaching economics as social entrepreneurialism, and refashioning American History as a History of the Americas. Ernest also discusses the use of critical media literacy in the social studies classroom and pedagogical practices for a post-pandemic world.

This article maps out two critical race media projects – a documentary and a Chicana/o-centric student newspaper – developed by Chicana/o scholars seeking to fulfilll the promise of praxis hailed by critical race theorists. Fortified and guided by the quintessential tenets of critical race theory and Latino critical race theory, these critical race media projects not only apply, but also extend these principles to seek educational and community transformation. As such, the production process for both documentary and student newspaper merge research and activism in order to cultivate figurative and literal spaces that encourage and allow for the recuperation of memory, archiving forgotten history, and the self-determination of contemporary identities and belonging. By harnessing critical race theory's counter story-telling focus, these projects cultivate the voices of resistance and reclamation in Latina/o communities, transcending the Black/White paradigm that bounds a majority of critical race scholarship. In addition, both the film and quarterly newspaper uniquely sharpen the theoretical framework's analytic critique of language, discourse and representation, exemplifying the inimitable power of words to both heal and wound.