October 25–29, 2021, is Annual Media Literacy Week in the United States. The mission of this week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.
This year, the theme for US Media Literacy Week will celebrate one of the five components of media literacy’s definition each day: Access, Analyze, Evaluate, Create, and Act. The host of US Media Literacy Week is the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), the leading national nonprofit membership organization dedicated to advancing media literacy education in the United States.
The following resources from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org support media literacy:
Begin with the NCTE Policy Brief on Critical Media Literacy and Popular Culture in ELA Classrooms. The authors advise educators to integrate a wide range of media and popular culture into instruction, and they center students as content creators (not just consumers).
Hear from Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, Executive Director of NAMLE, a guest at a recent NCTE Member Gathering.
View this 2020 Media Literacy Week Author Talk with Renee Hobbs.
NCTE members can read insights from Lipkin, Hobbs, and other scholars in the Council Chronicle article “Media Literacy—Urgent Work for Our ELA Classrooms and Our Democracy.”
Nicole Mirra says media literacy lessons can pack a double wallop in English classrooms, allowing students to engage issues they find relevant while building reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills that are “foundational to our democracy.” Read an interview with Mirra about the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project.
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 and resources from ReadWriteThink.org on media literacy.
“Today’s teachers and communication majors need to know there is no longer a strict dividing line between mass media and social media.” Learn more in this blog post from members of the NCTE Assembly on Computers in English (ACE.)
Did you know that there’s an NCTE Media Literacy Award?
How will you recognize Media Literacy Week 2021?
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.