Pro Critical Media Literacy

               I am a child of the television-era., as such I have spent decades believing Lao Tze was right, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

In the past few years, I have come to realize that the picture is not replacing the words; it is acquiring equal value with them. In the arena of media, change does not mean elimination of a species. The printed word did not displace oral culture; video did not doom film to oblivion; radio still thrives in spite of television. We live in an age of many different media streams: cell phones, iPods, television, print, movies, computers, internet, advertising, all of which combine to form the confluence that surrounds and threatens to inundate us. If we want to avoid drowning in media input, we need to teach ourselves and our students how to swim in this electronic current. We need to learn to interact with media texts.

Despite years of research acknowledging that students are media-centered, many educators still cling to the notion that the value of literacy is being able to read and write an alphabet-based sign system. But our modern world is no longer a place where reading and writing the “written word” should be the sole baseline for literacy. The traditional written word should be only one part of a person’s literacy. Today, no single medium should have credence over another.  Traditional literacy demands that people be able to read and write, that they be proficient in creating as well as interpreting alphabetic messages. Media literate individuals should not only “read” all the media they use; they should also possess the skills to create their own media messages in each medium and to critique al the media texts they use.

Given this tension between traditional literacy and multi-literacy, how are teachers introducing the concept of media literacy to their students?  Many are doing so by offering activities that require the students to work through more than one mode of meaning in order to complete the assignment. Traditional literacy lessons emphasize the language design, while media literate lessons combine language with other media design elements including, visual, spatial and audio.  Successful lessons in multi-literacy combine these designs into a “multimodal” approach to learning that “integrates meaning-making systems”

Teachers can encourage students to make connections across media by beginning with a medium with which the students are familiar and asking them to look beyond the obvious for those desired connections.  Print media offer a readily available source for multi-literate lessons Analyzing newspaper advertisements can increase student awareness of gender and socio-economic issues. Similarly, comparing stories in diverse papers can illustrate how biased words create tone and how that tone can influence an audience’s reaction. Television is another medium teachers can use as a basis for student-generated critical thought.  Students could become aware of slanted question techniques by deconstructing a television interview. Students can also become cognizant of the power of bias when they create parodies of existing television shows. Students who can critique CLIO winning commercials for provocative language can become aware of the influence television can have over their purchasing patterns. 

Print and television are not the only two media students use; probably they are two of the least used media today’s children interact with on a daily basis, BUT print and television are the two media that least threaten many educators. If we can't convert the teachers, they will continue to dismiss "new media" as non-literacy oriented.