November 5 – November 9, 2018 is Annual Media Literacy Week in the United States, this year celebrating it’s fourth year. Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, communicate, and create using all forms of communication. The mission of Media Literacy Week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education today. The following resources from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org support media literacy:
In today’s media-rich society, where students are exposed to an ever-increasing variety of traditional and nonprint texts, media literacy skills have become critical to the academic development of our students. Read more in Lesson Plans for Creating Media-Rich Classrooms. Visit this additional collection of lesson plans from ReadWriteThink.org on media literacy.
“Social Critique and Pleasure: Critical Media Literacy with Popular Culture Texts” shows how popular music, for example, can offer powerful opportunities for dialogically teachable moments and engagement in literacy learning that is critical but does not come at the expense of children’s pleasure in such texts.
“Media at the Core: How Media Literacy Strategies Strengthen Teaching” includes an expansion of teachers’ conception of texts to include understanding and creation in a variety of media forms; integrating media and technology across school subjects; modeling strong research practices in an increasingly information-rich environment; analyzing and creating various genres of nonfiction texts; and engaging students in civic participation.
A popular one-semester elective class relies on student knowledge of and interest in sports to teach critical media literacy and rhetorical analysis as described in “Sports Stories and Critical Media Literacy“.
This digital package includes three one-hour, on demand Web seminars on teaching media literacy. Learn ways to incorporate pop culture, youth media, and film in the classroom from leading experts, Frank W. Baker and John Golden. Read more from Frank on “When Should We Teach Critical Thinking to Kids?”
Did you know that there’s an NCTE Media Literacy Award?
If you are interested in learning more, visit the National Association for Media Literacy Education.