National Council of Teachers of English

NCTE Position Statement on Media Education

Introduction 

English language arts (ELA) education is an inherently interdisciplinary field, informed by multiple intellectual traditions, and anchored by core learning outcomes centered on the power of language, meaning-making, and creative expression. As ELA teachers, we help students develop an effective repertoire of self-expression, critical thinking, and communication skills. We want to empower learners to meet personal and academic goals while also participating in public discourse.

Many elements of media education are implemented by our colleagues in civics and social studies, health, computer science, library media, communication arts, journalism, and other related fields. But ELA classrooms are also uniquely suited to support students in the development of critical reading, writing, and ethical reasoning skills needed to navigate the complexity of media texts, contexts, and platforms today. 

When students learn to consider the nuances of a word choice, the implications of a metaphor, or the rhetorical needs of an audience, they are developing a deeper understanding of the power of language. When they reflect on the emotional impact of imagery and how it conveys tone and mood, students appreciate how stories, characters, and conflicts shape people’s feelings and ideas about people, relationships, and the world around them. When they inquire about the reliability of a narrator or make inferences about a character’s motivations, they deepen critical thinking skills. 

When ELA teachers deliberately and explicitly integrate media literacy into our curriculum, we model how reading, thinking, analysis, and communication competencies apply to Shakespeare as well as the latest viral video; we create bridges for making meaning in the ever-changing and complex contemporary world our students are learning to navigate.  

Context: Why Now?  

The 2022 position statement Media Education in English Language Arts [1] encouraged ELA educators at all levels to help learners develop the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed for life in an increasingly digital and mediated world. Media education is defined as the study of the media with the aim of cultivating people’s media literacy competencies. It is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of new literacies, including visual literacy, news literacy, information literacy, digital literacy, critical media literacy, AI literacy, and youth media production. The NCTE 2022 position statement emphasized three core themes that make media education fundamental to teaching and learning: 

These core themes continue to be foundational for media education in ELA. But since 2022, concerns about media and adolescent well-being, the rise of generative AI, and the ongoing legacy of disinformation and propaganda have created new areas of focus for media education in English language arts. The National Association for Media Literacy Education observes that AI’s influence on public opinion, decision-making, and civic life is “profound and still unfolding” (2026, p.1).  All teachers can help students maintain a balanced, healthy relationship with technology and use media in ways that are respectful, responsible, and fair. As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, students without the skills to engage with it thoughtfully and ethically are less prepared to critically evaluate information and use AI tools responsibly. For all these reasons, we determined that an update to the 2022 Media Education in English Language Arts position statement was needed.  

How We Created This Position Statement 

NCTE Executive Committee voted to update NCTE’s stance on media education. Writing committee members were recruited and selected to include a mix of researchers, teacher educators, and K–12 practitioners. In a series of five online meetings, the group read and discussed the 2022 Media Education in English Language Arts to identify shared community values and the most urgent updates and concerns. K–12 educators were interviewed to identify strategies that could best support ELA leaders, practitioners, and students. We reviewed current literature on topics including multimodality; critical media literacy; AI in education; disinformation and propaganda; and children, adolescents, and media. Through dialogue and discussion, we prioritized the need to support K–12 educators by creating a practice-oriented document that could inform implementation in schools.  

In this position paper, we align current research and scholarship with core practices in English language arts by identifying four content strands that should be a central part of ELA curriculum and instruction:  

These four strands all rely upon an expanded definition of text, a core concept in ELA education. We define it thus:   

Text is any purposeful meaning-making message—written, spoken, visual, audio, digital, or multimodal—designed for an audience in a particular context and shaped by genre, medium, culture, and power. The word text also includes interactive and networked compositions and works created with tools (including generative AI), where authorship may be individual, collaborative, or human–machine co-produced and must be interpreted with attention to credibility, intent, and ethical use. 

After briefly reviewing recent scholarship on the four strands, we recommend practical actions and other strategies for school districts and English departments to use to ensure that all students have opportunities to develop the knowledge and competencies described in these strands.  

At the time of publishing this statement, a corresponding document of current K–12 instructional resources was also made available. 

Interpreting: Multimodal Reading, Viewing, and Listening 

Comprehend complex texts  

Students apply their knowledge of language conventions, word choice, figurative language, media techniques, and genre to comprehend both print and nonprint texts.   

Videos, films, social media, and other digital media are complex texts because they integrate multiple modes of communication that interact to create meaning. Multimodality and multiliteracies frameworks offer the core academic rationale for classifying media such as film, video, social media, and other digital media as complex texts that can open “civic pathways” (Seglem & Garcia, 2018). They require advanced interpretive, inferential, and evaluative skills comparable to or exceeding those for print (Turner et al., 2025). Eye tracking studies show that traditional text complexity frameworks fail to capture the unique challenges of multimodal texts, especially as readers interact with texts combining words, sound, images, and videos from multiple perspectives, such as social media feeds (Alruthaya et al., 2025).  

Like all comprehension practices, leveraging multimodal texts demands contextual and cultural knowledge (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2023). To make sense of texts used in school and daily life, students and teachers need to understand meaning-making as an active, engaged practice of lifelong learning, appreciating how skills like comprehending, accessing, and evaluating are embedded in our daily interactions with people, texts, devices, and content (Rojas-Estrada et al., 2024). Print media, screen media, smartphones, tablets, as well as digital platforms and technology enable us to understand ourselves and encounter the ideas of others in and beyond our local communities (Tan et al., 2023).  

Analyze textual features 

Students explain what each element (e.g., words, images, sounds, graphic design, and interactivity) contributes to a message and how those elements work together to build meaning.  

Multimodal text analysis is not intuitive and requires explicit instruction and a shared vocabulary that helps students talk precisely about what they notice and how it functions (Sweetland Center for Writing, n.d.). Teachers who explicitly model and practice critical analysis of nonfiction multimedia texts may introduce basic terms associated with design, including emphasis, repetition, contrast, layout, alignment, and proximity. Recognizing features in digital media may also include close examination of headings, captions, hyperlinks, layout cues, thumbnails, hashtags, sound, and moving image media. In all forms of media, text features signal importance, guide attention, compress information, build credibility, evoke emotion, and prompt action (Adami et al., 2022). But text features must also be examined in relation to the communicative purpose, genre, and the wider social, historical, or situational context.  

Teachers who model critical reading practices by noticing, wondering, naming, and interpreting text features may use think-alouds or shared annotation that moves from merely spotting techniques or production features to explaining their effects and evaluating their value. When teachers ask, What does this text feature do for the reader, viewer, or user? students can be guided toward a deeper examination of the choices made by authors for varying purposes and audiences (Hobbs et al., 2025). Older students can analyze how features position audiences, represent or omit viewpoints, and connect to social context. ELA instructors are well-poised to explicitly teach how genres and platforms shape meaning. For example, a teacher may note that a TikTok stitch/duet is a type of citation practice or that comment threads function as coauthored text. Hashtags can communicate indexing and stance, and hyperlinks can serve as evidence trails. Such practices are a form of network-emergent rhetorical inventions; social media texts, performances, interactions, and creations emerge from a complex collection of distributed, converging forces (Richter, 2023).  

Evaluate credibility 

Students describe elements of source credibility including authorial expertise, intent, bias, currency, and accuracy of information. Students engage in both textual analysis and lateral reading strategies. Students compare the reliability of different information sources.   

Well before the rise of so-called “fake news,” public engagement in civic and political life intertwined with digital media, creating both opportunities for and challenges related to civic reasoning and discourse. Supporting and empowering students in making credibility assessments of online information is a key feature of democratic life (Kahne et al., 2024). People need to ask: Who do we believe to be a trustworthy source of information? Why do we believe them? Such inquiries intersect with literary and narrative elements already at the heart of the ELA curriculum. For example, in the children’s picture book Don’t Trust Fish by Neil Sharpson, the author presents absurd conspiracy theories and comical illustrations to young readers, suggesting that fish are plotting against humans. Just as readers can unpack and discuss how they know that the author is untrustworthy, older students can engage with a variety of classic, contemporary, and multimedia texts to discern a character’s motivations, recognize an unreliable narrator, or examine a speaker’s choice of rhetorical devices.  

Lateral reading has become a widely used strategy to promote media literacy competencies because it can help people both assess credible information and identify misinformation, and a significant body of research has shown its effectiveness (Fendt et al., 2025). However, when Reynolds and McGrew (2025) analyzed dialogue in high school classrooms during lateral reading activities, they found that while students recognized the importance of checking credibility, they more commonly engaged in a “gut check,” merely using their existing beliefs and knowledge to determine whether the information made sense. Because lateral reading is a complex strategy that requires layers of knowledge, skill, and motivation to master and apply, instruction must be “sequenced across grade levels as students’ reading comprehension develops” (McGrew, 2024, p. 2).  

Evaluate persuasive texts  

Students determine the intended purpose and target audience of a text. They analyze and evaluate the persuasive techniques (rhetorical and computational) used to shape beliefs or actions of audiences. 

In contemporary ELA, persuasion is traditionally encountered in the reading and critical analysis of arguments, opinion writing, and speeches. Although many students learn to recognize a claim and examine how reasoning and evidence is used, it is less common for ELA teachers to explore genres like advertising, sponsored content, PSAs, advocacy documentaries, social media influencers, memes, or types of contemporary propaganda (Hobbs, 2020a). Additionally, ELA teachers often still rely on a list of persuasive appeals created during the rise of radio as a mass medium (Fleming, 2019).  

People need to ask: What does the author want the audience to think, feel, believe, or do? Now that algorithmic personalization has become embedded in most digital platforms, and data from the behaviors, beliefs, interests, and emotions of the target audience is used to filter content, it is important to examine how personalization that showcases texts activate emotion for aesthetic, commercial, and political purposes (Hobbs, 2020b). Increased attention to persuasion in the context of K–12 literacy education may also help people cope with sponsored content, bots, memes, and other forms of propaganda and persuasion that now circulate online. Children benefit from opportunities to gain knowledge about the many forms of persuasion that they encounter in daily life (Nelson, 2016), and research has shown that even young children can learn to deploy pathos, ethos, and logos to evoke a response from a reader on timely and sensitive topics (Brownell, 2021).  

Analyze representation and power  

Students analyze how stereotypes, cultural contexts, structures of power, material interests, and ideological perspectives are represented, foregrounded, or obscured in a text, medium, or platform. 

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have been concerned with issues of power, voice, and representation because literate individuals are empowered to participate in civic action. Young people’s literacies (especially digital, participatory, and popular culture literacies) shape and are shaped by power, identity, and civic life (Aleo & Hicks, 2024). In ELA contexts, reading and writing are not just skills but social practices tied to civic identities. Core ELA practices (including discussion, response to literature, research, and digital literacy) can be taught in ways that make power and inequity visible while also building civic agency (Mirra et al., 2022). Students examine how language and representation shape perspectives, identity, and social understanding. In this tradition, “reading” involves exploring questions like, Who speaks? Who benefits? Which perspectives are centered, which are omitted?  

ELA learning experiences can empower students by grounding them in critical perspectives that interrogate the relationship between text, identity, and society (Ajayi, 2015). When students learn intersectional reading practices, they explore how texts and institutions produce layered identities (Pandya et al., 2018). Learners can become informed citizens who can evaluate political rhetoric and navigate the realities of book challenges. They understand how stereotypes, tropes, and patterned frames represent the world in ways that shape how people interpret social issues and public life.  

Composing: Writing, Speaking, and Producing  

Communicate with purpose  

Students compose spoken, written, and visual messages for a variety of purposes, including self-expression, information, entertainment, persuasion, and argument. Students are strategic and intentional in their communication, applying their knowledge of language conventions, word choice, figurative language, media techniques, and genre to effectively reach their target audiences.  

Pedagogy built on a multimodal approach empowers student voice through choice based on authentic literacy experiences (Hicks & Turner, 2013). Students who learn in an ELA classroom with a multimodal lens on reading and writing demonstrate their academic achievement measured by high stakes assessments (Grandits, 2019). Students who struggle with traditional print-based literacy comprehension and composition can gain access to literacy skills in modalities they are more successful in, both in and out of school. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) transitioned to digitally based assessments with multimodal, interactive, and scenario-based tasks in order to reflect the vital centrality of composition and critical thinking.  

When students compose media in digital environments, they may use multiple sign systems, including digital storytelling, podcasts, infographics, spoken word poetry, photographs, bilingual books, and more (Marangell & Randall, 2025). A scoping review found that navigating these genres demands higher-order comprehension skills and, in most cases, students are encouraged to reflect on the processes of creating their multilingual and multimodal texts, including the interpretations of their texts that reflect their lived experiences of identity development (Zaidi & Sah, 2024). 

Communicate with credibility 

Students adhere to ethical values and honest public discourse while participating in knowledge communities. As communicators, students support their oral, written, and digital communications using evidence from credible sources with citations that are appropriate to the form, genre, and purpose of their creative work. 

In journalism, communicating with credibility is typically treated not as a character trait but more as a set of learnable, accountable practices. Credibility is tied to the responsibilities of publishing for an authentic audience: this framework emphasizes he organic relationship between voice, agency, publication, and reflection (Anderson et al., 2026). In journalism education, students learn how writers gather, verify, attribute, contextualize, and correct information for a real audience. Credibility is a procedure where “showing your work” and verification involves triangulating claims, corroborating interviews, checking documents, and attributing information so readers can judge reliability (Madison et al., 2025). The National Scholastic Press Association (NSPA) Model Code of Ethics for High School Journalists makes this procedural nature very explicit, encouraging limited use of anonymous sources and maintaining interview notes/recordings as evidence of responsible reporting.  

The practice of youth participatory action research (YPAR) also invites students to see themselves as knowledge producers who gather and analyze data to investigate conditions shaping their lives. This instructional approach encourages examination of how institutions and media shape communication and public understanding. In learning contexts where teachers tap into and build students’ multiliteracies competencies, educational inequities can be challenged. For example, Marciano and Vellanki (2022) found that students who participated in a YPAR summer program developed more nuanced considerations of what constitutes research by conducting individual interviews with peers, taking photographs of their city during small-group community walks, and analyzing interview transcripts. In one unit of study with climate-centered novels, students gathered in literature circles. They explored these questions: Is it possible to be unbiased as a journalist and, if so, should this be the goal? What does it take for you to trust the information someone gives you? What does it mean to tell your/a truth? From this, students developed potential research questions about the community to explore potential actions that they could take to address climate change (Lammert & Kershen, 2025).  

Evaluating: Media Ethics, Relationships, and Well-Being  

Recognize how media texts, platforms, and technologies affect well-being  

Students explore how the ways media activate thoughts and feelings through content, algorithmic personalization, persuasive design, the attention economy, and constant connectivity can influence mood, sleep, attention, and self-image. 

Literacy practices occur not just on a cognitive level but also bodily, emotionally, and socially. English classrooms are places that allow youth to explore emotions, social life, and the larger world, building on traditions that frame engagement with literature and literacy as aesthetic and pleasurable practices that support human development. Major public-health and professional guidance explicitly call for media literacy as a protective support, noting that social media can bring risks like sleep disruption, social comparison, exposure to harmful content, and cyberbullying and emphasizes the role of schools and teachers to reduce harms and strengthen protective factors (Gordon et al., 2025). A meta-analysis of media literacy interventions from 1983–2023 found overall positive effects on outcomes such as knowledge, critical beliefs, and attitudes, with some evidence that changes in attitudes and critical beliefs can predict behavior (Cho et al., 2025). An elementary-school, classroom-based intervention targeting digital resilience found that students improved their capacity to navigate digital life more safely (Lee & Hancock, 2023), and a systematic review and meta-analysis of media health literacy interventions found effects of media literacy education on adolescents’ body image, thin-ideal internalization, as well as eating-related concerns (Zuair & Sopory, 2022).  

ELA practices that focus on meaning-making, rhetoric, audience, and multimodal composition are especially useful for addressing dimensions of today’s digital communications environment because well-being capacities like coping, decision-making, help-seeking, and safer online navigation can be introduced and explored in school. With practice, learners can consider the ways in which stories, words, images, and interactions within this environment affect their thinking, feeling, behavior, and social relationships in ways that affect mental, emotional, and physical well-being.  

Apply mindful strategies to make strategic choices  

Students use metacognition to manage attention to media content and balance digital consumption, engagement behaviors, and creation in ways that align with personal, social, and civic goals and values. 

Media use is a literacy practice that can be planned, monitored, and revised. By making strategic choices in their use of media, students can avoid harmful content, protect privacy, foster healthy online relationships, and practice self-regulation in digital spaces (Weninger, 2023). Mindful strategies also require attention to ethical issues, including privacy and surveillance, academic honesty and plagiarism, and digital divides. Mindful strategies can promote mental, emotional, physical, and social well-being. For example, when a student gets to explicitly consider the “purpose-to-platform fit,” they evaluate when a database, longform article, audiobook, short video, podcast, or social feed is strategically useful to their information or entertainment needs. Students can set an intention before use (What am I here to do?), choose the right medium or platform for the task, and reflect afterward (Did it help or harm my goal or mood?). They can work with family members and teachers to co-design media use agreements and learn to set up their digital devices with “study modes” and “recreation modes” by toggling notification settings, using focus tools, and setting up reading playlists (Tyre, 2024).  

Curation is a key literacy practice that both ELA educators and teacher librarians are especially keen to address. Activities that require students to select, organize, and justify different types of media for different purposes can be powerful in building research skills, facilitating identity exploration, keeping up with current events news, and building habits of mind for the lifelong learner. Curation is important for recreational and leisure use of media, too. To prepare students for living in a constantly changing digital environment, a heightened awareness of technology’s impact on human consciousness, behavior, and social relationships is critical.  

Critically evaluate texts and platforms in relation to social and emotional well-being  

Students analyze how stereotypes, misinformation, harmful narratives, or unhealthy social comparisons may negatively impact well-being and consider appreciation, empathy, respect, and safety in online interactions. 

Because media texts, platforms, and institutions affect the head, heart, hands, and spirit, NCTE’s media education guidance explicitly positions ELA as the place to study how media organize information, ideas, and values—and how they address inequities, omissions, and unjust practices. When critical media literacy analysis is paired with well-being, students learn to integrate habits of inquiry with SEL-style self-regulation routines (like pausing, breathing, labelling emotions, and making choices). Research shows that preservice teachers around the world perceive a need to examine the role of media in the well-being of their students (Gouseti et al., 2024). Clearly, the ability to analyze and evaluate media is the crucial link between media literacy and well-being, according to meta-analyses of recent research (Gordon et al., 2025). In the classroom, ELA teachers routinely ask students questions such as: What emotions did this text evoke? How did these feelings get activated? What do you want to do next—and why? The dialogue and discussion that come from the practice of media analysis can promote empathy, respect, intellectual curiosity, and appreciation for multiple perspectives.  

Exploring the relationship between media texts, platforms, and users involves examination of how features like autoplay, infinite scroll, notifications, streaks, algorithmic feeds, and likes shape the interpretation and meaning-making process—sometimes without the user’s active awareness. Students can perform a design audit of a platform to identify how it tries to capture attention, comparing how they engage with a topic presented in different media formats (print text versus social media feed versus article versus video essay) and what that does to comprehension and emotion. They can explore and propose personal control strategies, including turning off notifications, using timers, and building curated lists. By considering how platforms are designed to foster habitual, almost addictive engagement, students can learn to recognize and resist unhelpful nudges.  

Analyzing: Media, Technology, and Society 

Understand how digital platforms compete for user attention and engagement.  

Students learn how and why technology companies make money by activating emotions, collecting data, and treating human attention as a commodity.  

Books, newspapers, films, and other media circulate within an economic system that has significant implications for both authors and audiences. Digital platforms are not neutral tools but multisided markets shaped by competing technical, social, and political-economic demands (Nichols & Garcia, 2022). Because reading and writing now happen inside attention-optimizing systems, if students don’t understand the business model, they can misread “what matters” by focusing only on what’s trending, recommended, or emotionally amplified, mistaking this for what’s actually true, valuable, or important (Brady et al., 2023).  

Middle school ELA teachers have designed digital reading instruction that includes a close look at algorithms and clickbait along with lessons on the role of emotions while reading online (Nash, 2024). Instruction like this helps students understand how attention is captured and steered. Rhetorical examination of persuasion that focuses on “why this grabbed me” helps students notice (and learn to resist) hooks, outrage, thumbnails, headline design, comment dynamics, and microtargeting (Hobbs, 2020a). State departments of education are now tracking how media economics is taught in K–12 schools (Hobbs et al., 2025). Examining the economics of digital media may also support civic agency and increase equitable participation. After all, platform design is a structural force that shapes who is heard and how public issues are framed (Jung et al., 2024).  

Develop a critical awareness of how AI works and make deliberate decisions about when, why, and how to use AI.  

Students learn how large language models (LLMs) estimate, approximate, and predict answers based on available information and learn to modify generative AI platforms to accomplish specific goals. By comparing similarities and differences between platforms, students evaluate whether the use of AI is appropriate to the task at hand. 

AI literacy can be defined as “the ability to critically analyze and engage with AI systems by understanding their technical foundations, societal implications, and embedded power structures, while recognizing their limitations, biases, and broader social, environmental, and economic impacts” (Roe et al., 2026, p. 186). Generative AI relies on vast quantities of data scraped from the internet to make next-word predictions. As a result, it may perpetuate dominant ideologies and cultural values while producing output that is less varied than other forms of knowledge, contributing to a monoculture that gravitates towards generalities (Nash et al., 2025). This has the potential to reconfigure the relationships between creators, technologies, and audiences.  

Students and teachers should critically evaluate when and how AI tools support learning goals, creativity, communication, and ethical practice. Educators should consider both the opportunities and the limitations of AI technologies, including questions related to accuracy, bias, authorship, labor, privacy, and environmental impact. Writing studies scholars Sano-Franchini et al. (2024) argue for the right to refuse incorporating AI based on issues such as linguistic justice, ideological bias embedded in technology, labor issues, and environmental impact. Because technological change is a series of choices about power, work, and dignity, these choices can and should be contested (Nichols & Garcia, 2022) as a form of civic action.  

Critically analyze claims about the benefits and risks of AI. 

Students consider how AI use has intended and unintended consequences, with the potential to change people’s experience of knowledge, learning, authorship, creativity, and communication. They use reasoning and evidence to evaluate potential AI risks, including undercutting cognition and meaningful effort, exploiting the labor of content creators, increasing need for water and power resources, and reinforcing biases that contribute to prejudices and inequalities.  

Because AI use has intended and unintended consequences, it has the potential to change people’s experience of knowledge, learning, authorship, creativity, and communication. Researchers who see the benefits of AI look at it generally as a tool for creative collaboration (Gee & Zhang, 2024). However, computer science researchers warn against misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and its application in education (Narayanan & Kapoor, 2024). Generative AI models threaten the intellectual property (Smits & Borghuis, 2022), livelihoods (Torres et al., 2024), and the apprenticeship processes of creative people around the world (Goetze, 2024).  

When students learn how algorithms function on the “back end” of programming, they are invited to go “under the hood” and create their own AI chatbots and tools (Byrd, 2023). Generative AI may provide fresh opportunities for students to improve their capacities to articulate their creative intentions, as structured encounters in creativity with generative AI enables them to experiment with creative expression (Bender, 2023). These types of tasks would involve the process of customizing one’s own use of AI as an aid for studying, designing instructions for custom chatbots, collaboratively composing with AI support in a word processor, and employing AI tools for data analysis.  

Increasing Education and Advocacy 

English teachers have long played an important role in developing students’ media literacy competencies, but for these media education strands to become a foundational component of contemporary ELA shape curriculum and instruction, a variety of stakeholders must collaborate in ways that lead to sustained action.  

Students need to be prepared for life in a culture where media, technology and artificial intelligence shape our understanding of the world. Because collaboration and professional engagement are important to support continued innovation, comprehensive media literacy education across the K–12 curriculum must provide for sustained and ongoing professional development opportunities to learn about media technologies.  

Conclusion 

Life in a media- and technology-saturated world means that change is a constant. As new technologies continue to emerge, educators will need to make important decisions about how to best support their students. Improving the efficacy and reach of media literacy education will require deepening collaborations across multiple constituencies. Expanding professional development in media literacy education is an essential, urgent component of ELA education in grades K–12 and teacher education. We call for continued research into each of the learning outcomes identified here, and particularly into the pedagogical practices that will best support such learning in both K–12 and teacher development. These competencies are increasingly important for informed participation in civic, academic, and professional life.   

Access Media Education Teaching Resources [2]

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STATEMENT AUTHORS 

Rachel Lloyd, Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN (co-chair) 

Renee Hobbs, University of Rhode Island (co-chair) 

Earl Aguilera, California State University East Bay   

Philip Belcastro, School District of Philadelphia, PA  

Denise Chapman, Monash University, Australia  

Stephanie Flores-Koulish, Loyola University Maryland  

Troy Hicks, Central Michigan University  

Denise Grandits, Tonawanda Schools, Buffalo, NY  

Katherine Green, St. Cloud Tech High School, MN  

Ioana Literat, Columbia University, NY  

Thomas (Tom) Liam Lynch, The New School, NY  

Cruz Medina, Santa Clara University, CA  

Ernest Morrell, University of Notre Dame, IN  

Brady Nash, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL  

Kristin Ziemke, Big Shoulders Fund, Chicago, IL  

SPECIAL THANKS TO “CRITICAL FRIENDS” REVIEWERS 

 Lucas Jacob, La Jolla Country Day School, CA  

Jennifer LaGarde, Olympia, WA 

Carrie Perry, Prew Academy, Sarasota, FL  

Franki Sibberson, Dublin, OH