critical media literacy democracy and the reconstruction of education

Digital Technologies, Multi-Literacies, and Democracy: Toward a Reconstruction of Education

First Online: 07 October 2021

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Douglas Kellner 4

Part of the book series: Medienkulturen im digitalen Zeitalter ((MEDIZE))

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Chapter 10 Engages “Digital Technologies, Multi-Literacies, and Democracy: Toward a Reconstruction of Education,” which explores how technology can be used for a democratic reconstruction of education and society in the spirit of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Herbert Marcuse. I argue that educators, students, and citizens need to cultivate multiple critical media and digital literacies for contemporary technological and multicultural societies. To meet the challenges of a digital era, teachers, students, and citizens need to develop critical media and digital literacies of diverse sorts, including a more fundamental importance for print literacy, to meet the challenge of restructuring education for a high-tech, multicultural society, and global culture. In a period of dramatic technological and social change, education needs to help produce a variety of types of literacies to make current pedagogy relevant to the demands of the contemporary era.

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While all people born in this millennium have been alive since the invention of the Internet, cellular phones and cable and satellite television, this does not mean that everyone can access key components of digital technology or media culture. Since large numbers of the world’s population still lives without electricity and many people do not even have computers (see Note 10 below), billions of people are being left behind the so-called technological revolution. I am writing from the perspective of my situation as an educator since 1968 working in the U.S. and am proposing the transformation of education based on the situation I have experienced and am documenting here, although since many parts of the world are increasingly saturated with digital technologies and social media, the analysis here has relevance elsewhere.

This data is based on random telephone interviews in 2003 with 1,065 parents of children between six months and six years of age. “Screen media” refers to watching TV, watching videos/DVDs, using a computer and playing video games. This research was reported in the Kaiser Family Foundation Zero to Six study available on-line at https://www.kff.org/entmedia/3378.cfm (accessed October 4, 2009). The following year, a study indicated that the number of hours spent with media increased. See the research based on questionnaires from a 2004 national sample of 2,032 students between 8 and 18 years of age, as well as 694 media-use diaries, as reported in the Kaiser Family Foundation Generation M study available on-line at https://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm (accessed on October 4, 2009). The figure of 6½ hours per day, includes ¼ of that time spent multitasking with several different media at the same time, thereby increasing media exposure to an estimated 8½ hours per day. Discussions with colleagues suggest that screen-time during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic that led to shut downs of schools and cities in many parts of the world, including Los Angeles where I live, increased significantly with kids scheduling recess events, weekend play dates, and other events on-line, as well as their on-line school classes, so it appears that young people throughout the United States spend more time on screen than ever before.

See South Coast Medical Group, “Screen Time: The Effects on Your Child’s Health,” July 26, 2020 at https://southcoastmedgroup.com/2020/06/screen-time-the-effects-on-your-childs-health/ (accessed December 25, 2020).

U.S. Census Bureau, “Home Computers and Internet Use in the United States: August 2000.” Special Studies, Issued September 2001 at https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p23-207.pdf (accessed December 26, 2020).

See Camille Ryan, “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2016,” American Community Survey Reports, August 2018, at https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2018/acs/ACS-39.pdf (accessed December 25, 2020).

For documentation, see the PEW Research “Mobile Fact Sheet” which indicates that: “The vast majority of Americans-96%-now own a cellphone of some kind. The share of Americans that own smartphones is now 81%, up from just 35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011.” Available at https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ (accessed on January 19, 2021).

There are growing attempts to assess the impact of computers in class and computer-based learning, studies that will need to be supplemented after the amount of on-line learning forced upon schools by the 2020–2021 global COVID-19 pandemic that closed downs many schools for months and forced moving toward on-line education. This phenomenon intensifies the importance of critical digital literacies for intelligent and productive use of computers in schools and home. For recent studies before the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown hit, see Anne Boring, “What is the Impact of Students’ Use of Computers in Class?,” S ciencedPo Learning Lab, November 21, 2017 at https://www.sciencespo.fr/learning-lab/en/what-is-the-impact-of-students-use-of-computers-in-class/ (accessed December 25, 2020). See also the critical take on on-line learning by Debbie Truong, “More students are learning on laptops and tablets in class. Some parents want to hit the off switch.” Washington Post , February 1, 2020 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/more-students-are-learning-on-laptops-and-tablets-in-class-some-parents-want-to-hit-the-off-switch/2020/02/01/d53134d0-db1e-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html (accessed December 25, 2020).

For an articulation of the concept of critical media and digital literacies in this paper with practical applications in the classroom, see Kellner and Share 2019, and on techno-literacies see Kahn and Kellner 2006.

Studies at the turn of the twenty first century reveal that women, minorities, and immigrants now constitute roughly 85 percent of the growth in the labor force, while these groups represent about 60 percent of all workers; see Duderstadt 1999–2000: 38. More recently, Pew Research News in the Numbers reveals “The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.7% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.8%) in 1970. However, today’s immigrant share remains below the record 14.8% share in 1890, when 9.2 million immigrants lived in the U.S.” See Abby Budiman, Key findings about U.S. immigrants, NEWS IN THE NUMBERS , August 20, 2020 at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/ (accessed December 25, 2020).

See the studies in Marcuse’s Challenge to Education , co-edited by Cho, Kellner, Lewis, and Pierce, 2009. See also Courts 1998; Weil 1998; and Kellner and Share 2019.

On the “digital divide,” see Chapter 2 , Note 22.

See the report by “Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Access to Energy.” Our World in Data. First published in September 2019; last revised in November 2019 at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access (accessed December 25, 2020). The report summary notes: “940 million (13% of the world) do not have access to electricity. 3 billion (40% of the world) do not have access to clean fuels for cooking. This comes at a high health cost for indoor air pollution. Per capita electricity consumption varies more than 100-fold across the world. Per capita energy consumption varies more than tenfold across the world.”

The quote was found on the official UNESCO web site. Retrieved October 23, 2006, from: https://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=8270&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (accessed October 4, 2009).

On the consequences of language loss, see Anthony Woodbury, “Endangered Languages,” Linguistic Society of America , 2020 at https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/endangered-languages (accessed December 25, 2020).

The report is posted at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Presidents-Advisory-1776-Commission-Final-Report.pdf (accessed on January 19, 2021).

See William J. Bennett, “The War Over Culture In Education.” Heritage Foundation, September 5, 1991 at https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-war-over-culture-education (accessed January 19, 2021).

For an important text on the need for revitalizing civics education, see The Association of American Colleges & Universities, “The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future. A Call to Action and Report from The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement,” at https://www.aacu.org/crucible , (accessed on January 28, 2021). I should note that there are also more boring and less Deweyean concepts of civic education that would reduce it to “Civics can teach you about the rights granted to citizens, as well as their responsibilities, such as serving on juries and engaging in the political process.” Or: “Mandatory Duties of U.S. Citizens. 1) Obeying the law. Every U.S. citizen must obey federal, state and local laws, and pay the penalties that can be incurred when a law is broken. 2) Paying taxes. … 3) Serving on a jury when summoned. … 4) Registering with the Selective Service.” The report is found at = https://www.civics.ks.gov/kansas/citizenship/responsibilities-of-citizens.html (accessed on January 22, 2021). These duties and responsibilities may be part of citizenship, but citizenship for democracy, training individuals to know the fundamental principles of democracy, and to learn to participate in democracy and defend its institutions, principles, and forms of life against authoritarianism and anti-democratic societies and principles is an important part of a stronger Deweyean conception of citizenship.

For a good study of Dewey and citizenship education see Sarah M. Stitzlein, “Habits of Democracy: A Deweyan Approach to Citizenship Education in America Today” at https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1514&context=eandc (accessed January 19, 2021).

While the Trump administration challenged voting results in almost all swing states and made over 50 legal challenges, in all cases votes were recounted, often by hand, many of Trump’s challenges were thrown out by the court, and experts declared it one of the fairest and most secure elections in U.S. history; see Jen Kirby, “Trump’s own officials say 2020 was America’s most secure election in history. Homeland Security put out a statement with state and local officials that countered the president’s fraud claims.” Vox.com , November 13, 2020, at https://www.vox.com/2020/11/13/21563825/2020-elections-most-secure-dhs-cisa-krebs (accessed on January 29, 2021). See also Pam Fessler, “As States Certify Ballot Totals, An Extraordinary Election Comes To An End,” NPR , November 25, 2020 at https://www.npr.org/2020/11/25/938617688/as-states-certify-ballot-totals-an-extraordinary-election-comes-to-an-end (accessed on January 29, 2021).

The Pro-Trump mobs that invaded the White House carried signs repeating the Trump lie that the 2020 election was stolen and many of the rioters interviewed repeated the Big Lie that Trump won the election, a lie he repeated almost daily in the days after both media announcements of his decisive loss to Biden and the formal certification of Biden’s election. According to The Washington Post “Fact Checker” team “In four years, President Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims,” Updated Jan. 20, 2021 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/ (accessed on January 22, 2021). The Wikipedia entry on “Veracity of statements by Donald Trump” cites other data bases collecting his lies and offer well-documented examples of Trump’s stunning amount of lying throughout his career at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump (accessed on January 22, 2021).

I wish to thank Kimberly Rosenfeld for impressing upon me the importance of civics education.

In 1991, the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) concluded: “Information literacy equips individuals to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in the global information society. Information literacy should be a part of every student's educational experience. ASCD urges schools, colleges, and universities to integrate information literacy programs into learning programs for all students” (AASL, 1996). The project has been taken up by the national Forum on Information Literacy (NFIL). Building on these projects, it is thus important to see that computer literacy involves developing a wide range of information literacies, and that the latter also involve developing multi-literacies that access and interpret images, media spectacles, narratives, and multimedia cultural sites in an expanded concept of information that resists its reduction to print paradigms alone. For other conceptions of multimedia literacy, see the discussions of multiple literacies in reading hypertexts in Burbules and Callister 1996; the concept of multiliteracy in the New London Group 1996 and Luke 1997; the concept of hyperreading in Burbules, 1997; the papers in Snyder 1997, and the studies in studies Semali and Watts Pailliotet 1998; Bus and Neuman 2008; and Mills 2015.

Kris Rodriguez, “‘La Clase Magica’ program helps children succeed by using technology,” UTSA Today , June 17, 2010), at https://www.utsa.edu/today/2010/06/magica.html (accessed December 26, 2020).

There are two major modes and concepts of hypertext, one that is primarily literary, that involves new literary/writing strategies and practices and one that is more multimedia, multisemiotic, and multimodal. Hypertext was initially seen as an innovative and exciting new mode of communication that increased potentials for writers to explore new modes of textuality and expression and to expand the field of writing. As multimedia hypertext developed, it was soon theorized as a multisemiotic and multimodal form of communication. Yet some early advocates of hypertext attacked the emergence of the World Wide Web as a debased medium which brought back into play the field of earlier media, like television, forcing the word to renegotiate its power with the image and spectacles of sight and sound, once again decentering the written word (see, for instance, Landow 2006; Lankshear and Snyder 2000; Snyder 2002 and the articles in Snyder 1997).

While I have not myself researched the policy literature on this issue, in the many discussions of SAT tests and their biases which I have read, I have not encountered critiques that indicate the obsolescence of many standardized tests in a new technological environment and the need to come up with new testing procedures based on the new cultural and social fields that we are increasingly immersed in. I would predict that proposals for devising such tests are emerging and that this issue will be hotly debated and contested in the future. I should note that the University of California system has suspended SAT tests until Fall 2024 and that the COVID-19 pandemic required new modes of teaching and learning for which the standardized SAT tests were inappropriate and becoming obsolete. See Sarah Moon, “University of California will suspend SAT and ACT testing admission requirement until 2024” CNN News , May 22, 2020 at https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/uc-suspends-sat-act-for-admissions-until-2024/index.html (accessed January 23, 2021).

For my take on postmodern theory, see Kellner 1989b and 1989c; Best and Kellner 1991, 1997, and 2001. For my earlier sketch of postmodern pedagogy, see Kellner 1989c.

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Kellner, D. (2021). Digital Technologies, Multi-Literacies, and Democracy: Toward a Reconstruction of Education. In: Technology and Democracy: Toward A Critical Theory of Digital Technologies, Technopolitics, and Technocapitalism. Medienkulturen im digitalen Zeitalter. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31790-4_10

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Article contents

Critical media literacy in teacher education, theory, and practice.

Jeff Share , Jeff Share University of California Los Angeles
Tatevik Mamikonyan Tatevik Mamikonyan School of Education, University of California Los Angeles
and Eduardo Lopez Eduardo Lopez University of California Los Angeles
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1404
Published online: 30 September 2019
This version: 20 September 2023
Previous version

Democracy in the digital networked age of “fake news” and “alternative facts” requires new literacy skills and critical awareness to read, write, and use media and technology to empower civic participation and social transformation. Unfortunately, not many educators have been prepared to teach students how to think critically with and about the media and technology that engulf us. Across the globe there is a growing movement to develop media and information literacy curriculum (UNESCO) and train teachers in media education (e-Media Education Lab), but these attempts are limited and in danger of co-optation by the faster growing, better financed, and less critical education and information technology corporations. It is essential to develop a critical response to the new information communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithms that are embedded in all aspects of society. The possibilities and limitations are vast for teaching educators to enter K-12 classrooms and teach their students to use various media, critically question all types of texts, challenge problematic representations, and create alternative messages. Through applying a critical media literacy framework that has evolved from cultural studies and critical pedagogy, students at all grade levels can learn to critically analyze the messages and create their own alternative media. The voices of teachers engaging in this work can provide pragmatic insight into the potential and challenges of putting the theory into practice in K-12 public schools.

critical literacy
critical pedagogy
media education
media literacy
critical media literacy
social justice
politics of representation
cultural studies
teacher education

Updated in this version

The authors made minor revisions to this text to reflect more recent scholarship. The reference list and further readings have similarly been updated.

Introduction

It is a formidable challenge to prepare critical educators to work inside a system in which every brick in the wall has been laid to transmit the information, skills, and ideas necessary to reproduce the social norms, inequities, ideologies, and alienation that are undermining the quality and sustainability of life on this planet. However, education can be a powerful tool to challenge these problems and create opportunities for students to work in solidarity with others to create a more socially and environmentally just world. To support these changes, we need teachers ready to engage students in critical inquiry by posing questions about systemic and structural issues of power, hierarchies of oppression, and social injustice. In the current media and information age, information communication technologies (ICTs) are available to either continue the control and degradation or to deconstruct the systems of oppression and reconstruct a more just and sustainable society.

Digital technology is opening opportunities for individual participation and alternative points of view, while at the same time a handful of enormous media and technology corporations have become the dominant storytellers, often repeating the same story at the expense of countless different perspectives and creative ways of thinking. Many of these storytellers are actually story-sellers, more interested in peddling ideas and products than informing, enlightening, inspiring, or challenging. While young people are using more media, they are also being used more by media companies. Giant transnational corporations are targeting youth as one of the most valuable markets for building brand loyalty and selling to advertisers. Researchers found 8- to 18-year-olds in the United States spend well over 10 hours a day interacting with various forms of media, such as music, computers, video games, television, film, and print ( Rideout et al., 2011 ). Another investigation discovered that 95% of American 13- to 17-year-olds have access to a smartphone and 97% say they are online daily and 46% use it constantly ( Vogels et al., 2022 ).

Not only is the amount of time with media increasing but the quality of that engagement is also changing by becoming more commercial and rarely critical. Researchers at Stanford University administered six tasks to 3,466 high schools across 14 states in the US to judge their ability to assess online information. In one task, students were asked to evaluate the credibility of a website that claimed to “disseminate factual reports” and 96% failed to learn about the site’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a different task, over half of students believed an anonymously posted video purporting to show voter fraud in the US was real, even though it was filmed in Russia ( Breakstone et al., 2021 ). In another study, Vosoughi et al. (2018) examined approximately 126,000 stories tweeted over 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017 . The researchers were interested in understanding what accounted for the differential diffusion of verified true and false news stories. They found that false news stories spread “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it” (p. 5). In analyzing the tweets, the authors concluded, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted because people found them not only more novel but the stories also inspired emotional responses of fear, disgust, or surprise.

The concern about “fake news” has encouraged many people to recognize the need for critical readers and writers of media. Some have suggested that we simply need better cognitive skills to determine truth from lies. However, making sense of the media and our information society is far more complicated than a reductionist idea of simply finding the truth. Rather than judging information as either true or false, students need to learn to search for multiple sources, different perspectives, and various types of evidence to triangulate and evaluate findings. In order to best evaluate and understand the information, they also need to question the influence of media in shaping the message and positioning the audience. Since all knowledge is an interpretation ( Kincheloe, 2007 ), interpreting the meaning of a message is a complex process that requires skills to probe empirical evidence, evaluate subjective biases, analyze the medium and construction of the text, and explore the social contexts.

This is an opportunity for educators to guide their students to think critically with and about the ICTs and media that surround them. Morrell et al. (2013) argue that the technology itself will not bring about transformative educational change. “That change will only come through teachers who draw on critical frameworks to create learning communities where the use of these tools becomes an empowering enterprise” (p. 14). Therefore, the changes in media, technology, and society require critical media literacy (CML) that can support teachers and students to question and create with and about the very tools that can empower or oppress, entertain or distract, inform or mislead, and buy or sell everything from lifestyles to politicians. Now more than ever, teachers should encourage students to be reading, viewing, listening to, interacting with, and creating a multitude of texts, from digital podcasts to multimedia productions.

Teacher Education

Even though youth are immersed in a world in which media and technology have entered all aspects of their lives and society, few teacher education programs are preparing teachers to help their students to critically understand the potential and limitations of these changes. It is crucial that new teachers learn how to teach their K-12 students to critically read and write everything, from academic texts to social media.

This means that schools of education responsible for training the new wave of teachers must be up to date, not just with the latest technology, but more importantly, with critical media literacy (CML) theory and pedagogy in order to prepare teachers and students to think and act critically with and about media and technology. In Canada, where media literacy is mandatory in every grade from 1 to 12, most new teachers are not receiving media literacy training in their preservice programs ( Wilson & Duncan, 2009 ). Researchers investigating media education in the United Kingdom and the US have found that many teachers are unprepared to teach media education and that professional learning opportunities are limited ( Butler, 2020 ; Kirwan et al., 2003 ). The progress has been slow, especially considering that inclusion of media literacy in formal public education has a history dating back to the 1980s in Australia, Britain, and Canada. However, nonformal media education has been occurring in many parts of the world for decades ( Hart, 1998 ; Kaplún, 1998 ; Kubey, 1997 ; Pegurer Caprino & Martínez-Cerdá, 2016 ; Prinsloo & Criticos, 1991 ).

While it is difficult to know for sure who is and who is not teaching critically about media and technology ( Mihailidis, 2008 ), there seems to be an increased interest in media literacy in the United States. In 2022 , the National Council of Teachers of English published a position statement recommending implementation of media education in English Language Arts along with two special issue journal publications ( Lynch, 2021 ; Kist & Christel, 2022 ) devoted to critical media literacy, arguing that “media education must be an essential component of the professional identity of teachers” ( National Council of Teachers of English, 2022 ).

As technology and media continue to evolve and increasingly enter public and private spaces, more educators are recognizing the need for training new teachers about media literacy ( Domine, 2011 ; Goetze et al., 2005 ; Hobbs, 2007a ) and some are even addressing the need to teach about CML ( Flores-Koulish et al., 2011 ; Funk et al., 2016 ; Robertson & Hughes, 2011 ; Trust et al., 2022 ). Researchers Tiede et al. (2015) studied 64 universities or colleges of teacher education in Germany and 316 U.S. public educational institutions that provide teacher training and graduate studies, concluding that very few offer more than media didactics (basic educational technology that teaches with media, not about media). From their data in the United States, they report, “media education, with emphasis on the instructional practices associated with the critical evaluation of media, culture, and society, were scarce, representing only 2% of all study programs in teacher training programs” (pp. 540−541). In Germany, the percentage increases to 25%, but “media didactics tends to be emphasized to the disadvantage of media education in both countries” (p. 542).

In 2011 , the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a curriculum guide online in 11 languages for training teachers in media education ( Grizzle & Wilson, 2011 ), declaring that “teacher training in media and information literacy will be a major challenge for the global education system at least for the next decade” ( Pérez-Tornero & Tayie, 2012 , p. 11). 1 In Europe, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) analyzed the successes and challenges of training preservice and in-service teachers about media and digital literacy. An initiative called e-Media Educational Lab, funded by the European Commission, provided blended training to 279 preservice teachers and 81 in-service teachers in six countries. Based on surveys and fieldnotes, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) reported that the preservice and in-service teachers found critical media analysis and media production to be very important; they described their intent to transfer their media competency to their classrooms and expressed a desire to learn more practical ways to help their students develop media competencies.

UNESCO’s approach to media education combines media and information literacy (MIL) to include many competencies, from learning about and using information communication technologies to thinking critically about ethics and democracy. Carolyn Wilson (2012) explains, “MIL is both a content area and way of teaching and learning; it is not only about the acquisition of technical skills, but the development of a critical framework and approaches” (p. 16).

Combining information technology with media-cultural studies is essential, but still infrequent. Within the current wave of educational reform that prioritizes the newest technology and career readiness over civic engagement and critical inquiry, schools are more likely to adopt only information technology or information literacy and not critical media education. In the United States, few universities offer more than a single course in media literacy and most do not even offer that ( Goetze et al., 2005 ; Meehan et al., 2015 ).

Schwarz (2001) asserts that because of the power of emerging literacies, “teacher education needs media literacy as an essential tool and an essential topic in the new millennium” (pp. 111−112). She calls for integrating media literacy across all subject areas of teacher education, “from methods courses and educational psychology to foundational courses and student teaching” (p. 118). This interdisciplinary approach for media education could be easier now for K-12 teachers in the United States since the Common Core State Standards require literacy to be taught and technology to be used across the curriculum ( California Common Core State Standards, 2013 ; Moore & Bonilla, 2014 ; Trust et al., 2022 ).

Two studies with a total of 31 preservice teachers found a discrepancy between their positive attitudes for teaching media literacy and the lack of attention and support in their teacher education programs to prepare them to teach MIL ( Gretter & Yadav, 2018 ). Based on interviews with these preservice teachers, Gretter and Yadav (2018) report that they associated MIL with critical thinking skills and expressed concerns about not knowing how to teach MIL because their teacher preparation program encouraged “teaching with technology and not necessarily about technology” (p. 115). These preservice teachers complained about “a lack of preparation to help them transfer their knowledge of digital media to MIL pedagogies that would benefit students” (p. 111). This highlights the importance of preparing educators with the theory and conceptual understandings as well as the pedagogy and practical applications for how to teach their students to critically analyze and create media.

Teaching Teachers Critical Media Literacy

Transforming education to critically use media, technology, and popular culture for social and environmental justice is the overarching goal of a critical media literacy (CML) course in the teacher education program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The authors of this article have been involved in designing and teaching this course to in-service and preservice teachers. Through combining theory from cultural studies and critical pedagogy with practical classroom applications of digital media and technology, this course prepares K-12 educators to teach their students how to critically analyze and create all types of media. In 2011 , this four-unit course on CML was officially approved and became a required class for all students working on their teaching credential at UCLA.

The teacher education program at UCLA is primarily a two-year master’s and credential program that accepts about 130 candidates annually. The program is committed to developing social justice educators to work with and improve the schooling conditions of California’s ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse children. While most of the students go through the two-year program, additional pathways for earning a teaching credential and master’s degree have been offered, such as a master’s-only program for in-service teachers with two years or more of full-time teaching experience.

The CML class is taught in separate sections, usually divided by subjects, with 25−50 students per section. Most of the candidates taking the class are student teaching at the same time, except for the master’s-only candidates, who were teaching full-time while attending the class once a week in the evening. The class includes lectures, discussions, and activities interwoven into each session during the 10-week quarter.

Beginning with a theoretical overview, the course explores the development of media education that is defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills and more as a framework of conceptual understandings ( Buckingham, 2003 ). Much of the theory behind CML has evolved from cultural studies, a field of critical inquiry that began in the 20th century in Europe and continues to grow with new critiques of media and society. From the 1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used critical social theory to analyze how media culture and the new tools of communication technology induce ideology and social control. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham added to the earlier concerns of ideology with a more sophisticated understanding of the audience as active constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of an external reality. Kellner (1995) explains that cultural studies has continued to grow and incorporate concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Incorporating a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audience theory, cultural studies critiques media culture as dynamic discourses that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities for counter-hegemonic alternatives ( Hammer & Kellner, 2009 ).

Critical media literacy includes three dimensions ( Share & Gambino, 2022 ). The first involves the content students learn about systems, structures, and ideologies that reproduce hierarchies of power and knowledge concerning race, gender, class, sexuality and other forms of identity and environmental justice, as well as general understandings about how media and communication function. The second dimension engages the skills to critically think and question media representations and biases, to deconstruct and reconstruct media texts, and use a variety of media to access, analyze, evaluate, and create. The third involves developing a disposition for empathy, critical consciousness, and empowerment to take action to challenge and transform society to be more socially and environmentally just. This third dimension is based on Freire’s (2010) notion of conscientização , a revolutionary critical consciousness that involves perception as well as action against oppression. These three dimensions of critical media literacy pedagogy are supported through an inquiry-based democratic approach that follows ideas of transformative educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire. We incorporate feminist theory and critical pedagogy to analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power ( Carlson et al., 2013 ; Garcia et al., 2013 ). When we first began teaching the course, we used a simple framework with five core concepts and key questions from the Center for Media Literacy. 2 To emphasize the critical potential of these ideas, while providing an accessible tool for teachers to use in the classroom, the following critical media literacy framework was developed, with six conceptual understandings and questions, as shown in Table 1 ( Kellner & Share, 2019 ).

These six conceptual understandings and questions are referred to regularly and are addressed in all lesson plans. It is important for teachers to understand the concepts and questions because theory should inform practice for all three dimensions. However, it is better for K-12 students to learn to ask the questions rather than memorize the concepts, since the questions, with appropriate guidance, can lead students on a path of inquiry where they are more likely to make meaning themselves, related to the conceptual understandings.

The CML framework is designed to help teachers and their students question the role of power and ideology that socialize and control society through making some people and ideas seem “normal” and “natural” while the rest are “othered” and “marginalized” ( Hall, 2003 ). This critical framing supports teachers and students to deepen their explorations of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, overconsumption, environmental exploitation, and other problematic representations in media. Candidates analyze and discuss current media examples, while also learning how to use various ICTs to create their own media with alternative counter-hegemonic representations. Using an inquiry process and democratic pedagogy, problems are posed to the students to collaboratively wrestle with, unpack, and respond to through media production.

Critical media literacy promotes an expansion of our understanding of literacy to include many types of texts, such as images, sounds, music, video games, social media, advertising, popular culture, and print, as well as a deepening of critical analysis to explore the connections between information and power. In our digital networked media age, it is not enough to teach students how to read and write just with print while their world has moved far beyond letters on a page. Literacy education in the 21st century requires breaking from traditional practices to include all the varied ways people communicate with media, technology, and any tool that facilitates the transfer of information or connects people. This calls for new skills and understandings to decode and analyze as well as to create and produce all types of texts. The California Teaching Performance Expectations also require teacher education programs to expand this view of literacy and integrate media and technology into coursework in order to “deepen teaching and learning to provide students with opportunities to participate in a digital society and economy” ( California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2016 , p. 9).

Each class starts by reviewing and applying the conceptual understandings and questions. Since one goal of the course is for candidates to understand that literacy includes reading and writing all types of texts, we encourage students to analyze as well as produce media. A series of assignments requires candidates to work together to create various types of media projects such as visual posters, photographs, podcasts, memes, digital stories, and social media. The candidates are also expected to work collaboratively on a CML lesson plan and learning segment that they write up, present a summary of to the whole class, and when possible, also teach it. For a detailed description of this course, see Share (2015) and visit the UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide for links to articles, videos, and websites used in the course. 3

Table 1. Critical Media Literacy Framework

From a desire to explore if and how former students are applying the skills and knowledge gained from the critical media literacy (CML) course into their teaching practice, we created an online survey for students who had taken the course. Through purposeful sampling, we sent out the survey to the 738 students who had taken the CML course and ended up with 185 usable responses (25% response rate), 153 preservice and 32 in-service teachers. Of the 185 respondents, 53 taught elementary school and 132 were secondary-level teachers. The breakdown of the middle school and high school teachers was: 38 science, 34 math, 33 social sciences, 28 English, and several reported teaching a combination of subjects as well as some who taught other areas such as music, visual arts, Spanish, English language development, or adult education. The span of experience was wide; some just started teaching and some had been teaching over seven years, yet most of the teachers (52%) had been teaching between two and three years.

The mixed method survey included 20 questions. The first eight sought to identify participants’ teaching background. The remaining 12 questions inquired about their experiences teaching CML skills and concepts to their K-12 students. Ten quantitative questions used a Likert scale with a choice of responses, including very frequently, frequently, occasionally, rarely, and never, as well as an option to choose not applicable. The final two qualitative questions were open-ended in which respondents could type their thoughts about any “memorable moment(s) teaching critical media literacy” and “any additional comments.” During the analysis phase, we found it helpful to combine the categories very frequently and frequently and refer to them as VF/F.

Voices From the Field

Using mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative data, we analyzed the survey responses to explore teachers’ ideas about what they had been doing with their students. The overall feedback suggested that the majority of the respondents had brought aspects of media literacy education into their K-12 classrooms, and sometimes even incorporated CML. One of the most recurring patterns we noticed was that these teachers had been expanding the traditional concept of literacy by engaging their students with various types of media.

Teaching With Media

In reply to the first question, most of the respondents reported having integrated media into their class activities: 64% VF/F, 30% occasionally, 6% rarely, and no one responded never ( N = 185). The responses to Question 1 were very similar for elementary and secondary teachers, with only a 1% to 5% difference. Where we saw greater variation was when comparing the subject matter of secondary teachers. The English and science teachers had the highest percentages (75% and 76%) of VF/F responses to Question 1 about integrating media into class activities. Math teachers, by contrast, reported the lowest percentage, with 44% reporting VF/F and 15% rarely integrating media into the curriculum (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Responses from secondary teachers to Question 1 about how often they integrated media into class activities.

While these responses demonstrated an overall high amount of media integration, it was not clear how the teachers integrated media and what students were doing with the media. The responses from Question 5 (“my students have created the following media”) provided more information about the students’ interactions with media, showing that the vast majority of respondents (92%) had their students create some type of media (see Figure 2 for a list of the various media students created).

Since the question only asked teachers to check the box for the type of media their students created, we did not know how often this occurred or with what degree of analysis. Questions 1 and 5 indicated that teaching with media occurred with over 90% of the respondents.

Figure 2. Responses to Question 5 about the different types of media that all 185 respondents report their students have created. They were asked to choose all that apply.

Teaching About Media

The second question tried to find out more about those interactions with media by asking respondents to rate how often they had given their “students opportunities to engage in media analysis.” For Question 2, about one-third of all 185 respondents, 32%, reported VF/F, 43% occasionally, 21% rarely, and 4% never. When comparing responses from Questions 1 and 2, the respondents seemed to have been doing more teaching with media (Question 1) than teaching about media (Question 2) (see Figure 3 ). A similar finding was mentioned in the research conducted in Germany and the United States by Tiede et al. (2015) .

Figure 3. Comparing all responses from Question 1 about integrating media into class activities (teaching with media) with Question 2 about engaging in media analysis (teaching about media).

A more nuanced perspective of Question 2 is possible when comparing the responses about media analysis from different content area secondary teachers. In response to Question 2, the teachers who reported VF/F were the following: 63% of English teachers reported giving the most opportunities for their students to engage in media analysis, as compared to almost half as often by 32% of science teachers and about five times less often by 12% of math teachers (see Figure 4 ). Since literacy is a primary goal of English instruction, it is not surprising that English teachers reported the highest levels of media analysis ( Hobbs, 2007b ).

It is important to recognize that teaching about media can be a highly complex and multifaceted undertaking, especially when done through a CML lens. For example, the second conceptual understanding encourages students to analyze the codes and conventions of the media text and the medium through which they travel by asking how the text was constructed and delivered or accessed. This, in itself, can have many layers and yet is just one of six questions intended to help students think critically about media. Livingstone (2018) asserts, “media literacy is needed not only to engage with the media but to engage with society through the media .” As Luke and Freebody (1997) argue, it is not enough to only have a psychological approach to literacy, as if reading and writing is just an individual cognitive process. We need to also bring a sociological lens into the process of questioning the contexts, the dominant ideologies, and the systems that make some things seem “natural” or “normal.” The CML framework is a holistic tool for thinking about and questioning the dynamic role media play in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and society. Responses and comments to other questions in the survey provide more insight into how some teachers have engaged their students in various types of media analysis.

Figure 4. Comparing responses from different content areas about Question 2 regarding how often secondary teachers gave their students opportunities to engage in media analysis.

Evaluating Information and Advertising

In the qualitative responses to Questions 11 and 12, teachers mentioned embracing basic media literacy principles in the ways students were evaluating the credibility of information and advertising as well as creating different types of media. The popularity of the term “fake news” and the growing amount of disinformation have increased the challenge to distinguish misinformation and propaganda from journalism and scientifically researched facts ( Rogow, 2018 ). An elementary teacher who reported “frequently” integrating media into the classroom, asserted:

Though my students are younger and some of these concepts are more difficult to teach than others, I find it important to bring up especially in terms of making sure they don’t believe every YouYube video they watch. We’ve had many meaningful discussions about what can be created for a video shouldn’t just be accepted as the truth. For example, the ‘mermaid’ documentary that came out a few years ago had all of my students convinced that they had found a mermaid. It led to an interesting discussion on hoaxes and further reading about Bigfoo[t] and other such stories.

Since all media contain bias because they are created by subjective humans, it is important for teachers to help their students to recognize the bias and also be able to judge the credibility of information. A high school math teacher wrote:

It has not happened until this school year, when I began teaching Statistics. I introduced some pictographs for students to analyze and an article for students to read about how a website stated that if polls were unskewed, Trump would be leading the polls for election. I had students read and discuss about the validity and why/why not it is trustable.

Several respondents mentioned having their students study political advertising, and since all U.S. elections are now multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns (e.g., Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign won the top prizes at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards), there is little distinction between selling products, ideas, and political candidates.

Analyzing advertising is an important aspect of media education because advertising is the motor that drives commercial media and has become so common in our lives that there are few spaces that are completely ad-free ( Jhally, 2003 ). Several respondents reported about their students investigating advertisements for false health messages, misleading packaging, political campaigns, tobacco, alcohol, and different perspectives. One secondary English teacher wrote, “My students took pictures of advertisements that surrounded their neighborhood and we analyzed them for patterns, themes, and purposes.” A high school science teacher reported, “I had many times this past year where students were able to reflect on marketing strategies and how they affect the viewer’s perspective of their life and themselves. Students made great connections.”

During the critical media literacy (CML) class, students scrutinize consumer culture and the role advertising plays in creating anxieties, shaping desires, and normalizing representations about all things, from consumption to gender, race, and class. Candidates in the CML class learn about these ideas through readings, by analyzing advertisements, and also by creating ads for different target audiences. When asked about the media their students had created, one third reported their students created advertisements.

Creating Different Types of Media

When students are taught print literacy, they are instructed how to decode letters on a page and how to write with those letters to construct words, sentences, and paragraphs. The same process of teaching reading and writing should be applied to visual images, movies, songs, video games, social media, and all the various multimedia texts that students are encountering daily. In responses from the survey, teachers reported about having their students write and create many different types of texts beyond print (see Figure 2 ).

One English teacher wrote that having students create media was “very successful. They loved being able to create memes, posters, Prezis, etc. to present their work.” An elementary teacher shared about students “creating podcasts/npr style news stories regarding UN sustainability goals.” Several respondents commented on their students designing commercials or challenging ads by producing spoofs that parody the ads. One middle school teacher shared, “students analyzed ads for nicotine and alcohol products, then used the practice with critical media skills to create ‘anti-ads’ with Google drawings.”

During the first year of teaching, a high school science teacher reported about a memorable moment when “creating a multi-lingual, easy-to-understand and scientifically supported pamphlet on the hazards in LA’s environment.” A high school Spanish teacher wrote about his students creating critical memes in Spanish, like the ones they created in the critical media literacy (CML) class. During the session exploring racism and media, candidates challenge racist representations through creating racial myth-busting memes. As a strategy to demonstrate the value of media production, the CML class has students create various media in almost every session, and these activities are often the favorite lessons mentioned in the end of course evaluations.

Increasing Engagement

While engagement is not a learning objective, all teaching benefits from students being engaged in their learning. One of the patterns that emerged from the responses was teachers’ observations that student engagement increased. An eighth-grade English teacher wrote that after incorporating media literacy, the students’ “entire attitude toward learning shifted. Especially the hard to reach students.” An elementary teacher reported, “Media literacy has made great contributions in my class with science research in the past. The simple act of using google images, google maps and finding credible sources has sparked learning and interest in my class.” Another elementary teacher shared about using critical media literacy (CML) to analyze food justice issues: “They were instantly engaged and students who had a difficult time writing and with critical thinking then did not.”

A secondary science teacher reported, “Students spent the entire class engaged in discussion when I intended for it to only be an introduction to the unit.” Another high school science teacher wrote, “When I did teach a class specifically geared towards media literacy, it was great because students were engaged. They were quick at analyzing images and creating their own.” A third science teacher wrote, “using critical media literacy made engaging my students in abstract chemistry concepts more meaningful and engaging.” Engagement tends to increase when students are genuinely interested and intrinsically motivated, something that often comes out of personal connection, a sense of meaningfulness, and an authentic belief in the value of the learning ( Dewey, 1963 ). These are all elements of good CML pedagogy. A high school science teacher described the feelings of students and their parents as they responded to their CML work: “My favorite moments are students exuding pride and passion over the work they are creating that speaks to their perspectives and experiences; parents proud of their students’ media creations.” Feelings of pride and passion are important for all students to experience; they help lower students’ affective filters for learning ( Krashen, 1995 ) and increase intrinsic motivation to want to learn.

Critical Media Literacy

As we analyzed teachers’ written responses, we saw a number of comments in which they were taking basic media literacy concepts to deeper levels of criticality. Several mentioned how useful the class was to understanding critical theory and be able to see how it can be enacted in their K-12 classroom. Similar findings were mentioned after Joanou (2017) analyzed data about a critical media literacy (CML) class taught to master’s-level practicing K-12 educators. Joanou (2017) reported, “critical media literacy helps bridge the gap between theory and practice” (p. 40). The use of media texts and popular culture can provide relevant examples for entry into abstract concepts that are often politically and emotionally charged, and sometimes too sensitive or too distant to begin discussing on a personal level.

Teaching about the connections between information and power reflects a key goal of CML ( Kellner & Share, 2007 ) and our respondents demonstrated this through their qualitative comments about recreating counter-narratives, analyzing the politics of representation, making critical connections between history and current events with media texts, and engaging in political, social, and environmental media activism. Questions 3 and 4 attempted to assess the frequency in which teachers were bringing critical aspects of media education to their students.

Question 3 asks teachers to rate how often: “My students have engaged in media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.” Elementary and secondary teachers reported almost identical frequencies in response to Question 3: 22% in both groups reported VF/F while 42% (elementary) and 45% (secondary) stated occasionally. When asked Question 4 about making connections between information and power, the differences increased: 39% of the secondary teachers responded doing this VF/F while just 23% of the elementary teachers reported doing this VF/F.

In-service teachers reported higher frequencies for Question 3: 54% of in-service teachers reported VF/F while preservice teachers reported 14% VF/F. For Question 4: 56% of in-service teachers reported VF/F compared with 30% of preservice teachers who reported VF/F.

When comparing responses separated by subject matter with secondary teachers, 33% of English teachers and 30% of social science teachers reported VF/F for engaging in critical media analysis, as seen in Question 3 about exploring media representations. This is considerably higher than the 16% of science teachers and 9% of math teachers reporting VF/F. The math and science teachers reported the highest percentages for rarely or never having their students explore media representations of social justice issues (see Figure 5 ). The literature supports similar findings. Garii and Rule (2009) reported that student teachers had a difficult time integrating social justice into math and science content due to several factors. In their research with novice elementary teachers, Garii and Rule discovered that the candidates were not confident in their ability to teach math and science and had limited and unsophisticated knowledge of the content. They also viewed math and science “to be a set of routinized, algorithmic practices that lead to a single, correct answer and neither science nor mathematics are assumed to be closely connected to real-world issues and concerns” (p. 491). Given that they are struggling to learn and understand the content, math and science candidates turned to classroom textbooks to guide instructional practices. Incorporating nontraditional practices or making connections to students’ lives becomes a challenge because they disconnect social justice from their teaching and focus on teaching to the content ( Garii & Rule, 2009 ).

Figure 5. Responses to Question 3 from secondary teachers about how often they engaged their students in critical “media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.”

One of the more significant findings of the study is the number of respondents reporting they “noticed that using critical media literacy encourages critical thinking among students” (Question 9). Of the preservice respondents, 61% reported VF/F, and for the in-service teachers, the percentages jump to 81% who reported VF/F. In both cases, the majority of respondents expressed their feelings that CML promotes critical thinking most of the time (see Figure 6 ). A middle school social science teacher wrote that after teaching CML, “students were deeper thinkers and our discussions were so much richer. Students were highly engaged and more invested in the classroom.” When comparing grade levels for Question 9, we see 78% of elementary teachers reported that using CML VF/F encourages critical thinking, and 61% of secondary teachers reported VF/F. This large percentage of elementary teachers reporting about CML encouraging critical thinking shows great promise for the potential of CML in the early grades.

Figure 6. Comparison of preservice and in-service teachers’ responses to Question 9 about how often they have noticed CML encourages critical thinking among their students.

Creating Counter Narratives and Supporting Students’ Voices

Many of the responses regarding transformative education centered on guiding students to create counternarratives and supporting student ideas and voices. Respondents mentioned activities that enabled their students to recreate media texts with a critical lens. These counternarratives included recreating superhero comic books, news, advertisements, digital storytelling, national holiday observances, and poems. A high school English teacher noted, “after analyzing recent and popular superhero comic books, my students used the comic medium to tell an autobiographical story wherein they exhibited power in the face of oppression.” A middle school English teacher reported:

The most memorable lesson I’ve taught involving critical media literacy was a unit based on perseverance and the power of the human spirit in regards to power structures and oppression. After analyzing multiple types of media, students created their own VoiceThread using spoken word in order to share their own messages of perseverance. It was incredibly powerful to hear their messages.

For most respondents, the notion of enabling their students to share personal stories using multimedia tools meant that they were integrating critical media pedagogy into their teaching practice. Traditionally, personal and experiential knowledge as a form of literacy is not often valued; thus, it is a critical pedagogical orientation to encourage students to recreate media texts that reflect their intersecting realities and challenge the pervasive dominant ideologies. Students’ personal histories become scholarly pursuits when digital storytelling encompasses media production skills taught through a critical media literacy (CML) framework. Vasquez (2017) asserts, “students learn best when what they are learning has importance in their lives, using the topics, issues, and questions that they raise should therefore be an important part of creating the classroom curriculum” (p. 8). A middle school math and technology teacher commented about incorporating CML into her master’s inquiry project:

The project we ultimately created was a digital storytelling project, in which students interviewed their parents or someone they admire and created some sort of media project around that story to tell counter-narratives to the dominant story told in media about people of color.

Guiding students to create counternarratives can be an empowering instructional strategy that nurtures their personal realities and supports their voice. Considering the context of urban education, it becomes particularly important for low-income students and students of color, who have been historically denied the power to be heard, to engage in their learning as empowered subjects through creating digital counter-narratives.

Politics of Representation

A major difference between critical media literacy (CML) and the more common media literacy practiced in the United States is the rigorous examination of the politics of representation; an analysis of how historically disenfranchised social groups are represented in media ( Funk et al., 2016 ). Many of the respondents discussed analyzing issues related to representations of different identities with their students. A high school visual arts teacher reported that through “using current events in the media, students created headline news with people of color perspective.” The majority of the responses highlighted engaging in discussions related to gender and a few responses about race. One elementary teacher noted:

My grade level did a Critical Media Literacy unit and after it was over, a week later, a student showed me a box of Chips Ahoy cookies and said that it was made to be sold to boys and girls. She compared it to a rainbow pop tarts box made for girls and a basketball cereal box made for boys that we had discussed during the CML unit.

A high school social science teacher reported:

My 11th and 12th grade Sociology class created representation boards. Each group was assigned an identity (‘white male,’ ‘Asian male,’ ‘black female,’ etc.). When each group was done, we compared the images and discussed the similarities between representations of race and gender. It really opened their eyes.

The politics of representation explores the complexities and intersections of identity markers, such as ethnicity, culture, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, and ableism. Several candidates alluded to the intersectionality between race and gender in their responses, mostly engaging their students in discussions related to the unequal representation and socialization of gender roles. They also noted that discussing stereotypical gender roles challenged their students’ internalized notions of gender. Responses such as the following highlight the shift in their students’ perspectives about gender: An elementary teacher wrote, “We’ve had some successful discussions around gender stereotypes and I’ve heard the language change in the classroom and students be more thoughtful about others’ choices.” Another elementary teacher reported, “My students showed greater acceptance. After teaching a lesson invoking gender all my male students felt accepted to choose any color paper—the favorite was pink for the rest of the year.”

Making Critical Connections

In response to the open-ended questions, an array of items was mentioned that demonstrate critical engagement, from teaching about racism and whitewashing, to numerous examples of analyzing gender and sexism, as well as projects on environmental justice and climate change at all grade levels. Some respondents discussed their transformative practice through the way their students analyzed and created media to make critical connections between historical and current events.

A high school social science teacher stated, “I had students create videos explaining the situation in Ukraine and relating it to the Cold War. In United States history, I often had students look at political cartoons and think about current examples of imperialism and how they’re represented in media.” Similarly, another social science teacher described a memorable moment of teaching critical media literacy (CML) as: “When students could make the connection between yellow journalism in Spanish-American War and media sensationalism during the War on Terror.” An elementary school teacher wrote:

My students began to think critically about history after showing them the spoken word poem ‘History Textbooks,’ which talked about world history being American Propaganda. Through this poem, they began questioning: who gets to write history and whose stories are told? It was a really powerful lesson we returned to over and over again throughout my course.

Analyzing media texts by acknowledging their historical continuity is vital because marginalization and exploitation are historically bound. Discovering these historical connections helps teachers and students learn how dominance and ideology are perpetuated, transcending time and space. Bridging the gap between the past and the present enables students to identify the common thread of hegemony across various spheres of social life. This instructional approach of CML promotes critical thinking with a social justice emphasis.

Another topic on which respondents commented was using CML to teach about environmental issues, especially the climate crisis. This is an important area for CML, since so many media messages about climate change distort the scientific evidence and mislead the public ( Beach et al., 2017 ; Share & Beach, 2022 ). A high school science teacher reported, “My class analyzed the politics behind climate change denial and how climate change is represented in the media. It was very easy for my students to see the connection between the message and its creators.” Exploring the connection between media ownership and media messages, another high school science teacher commented that a memorable moment was having a “discussion with students about where they were getting their information about environmental issues, and talking about who owns and controls Univision.”

In addition to becoming more aware, being engaged in critical analysis and creating counternarratives, some respondents noted that their students had engaged in political, environmental, and social media activism. A high school science teacher mentioned:

My class was looking at environmental justice and one student took that information and used it for an English project she was working on and that project transformed into a petition to the city council to plant more trees as her contribution to offsetting pollution in the inner city.

Another science teacher reported about how his “students created social media campaigns to raise awareness about animals affected by climate change. Different groups created the ‘Puffin Dance’ and #peekatmypika to help their campaigns get going.” A kindergarten teacher wrote about her students creating a video with opinion posters for change they shared with their school community.

Activism can be enacted in multiple ways; some efforts are more explicit, like petitions and protests, while others are more subtle, such as creating alternative media. Teacher responses reflect their students’ activism related to social, environmental, and political issues materialized through local and issue-specific efforts.

In analyzing the responses, we found many encouraging and hopeful comments about how critical media literacy (CML) has helped teachers rethink their pedagogy and increase student engagement. However, the responses also highlight challenges for implementing CML, such as limited resources, support, and clarity about how to integrate it into the curriculum. An elementary teacher wrote about the scarcity of technology at the school and how that “makes it difficult to do anything around critical media.” From the answers to Question 7 (incorporating CML into my teaching is difficult), secondary teachers reported more difficulty teaching CML (35% VF/F) than elementary teachers (26% VF/F). This is another place where the potential for CML in the lower grades surfaced, since they seem to have less difficulty incorporating it than secondary teachers. The design of most elementary classrooms, which requires the same teacher to cover all subject matter to the same group of students throughout the day, opens the potential for integrating CML pedagogy through thematic teaching, project-based learning, or problem-posing pedagogy.

A first-year middle school social science teacher shared wanting to use more CML, but had little departmental and administrative support. An elementary teacher shared about an administrator who “is reluctant to have me teach how to be critical of all media.” Three responses focused on wanting more resources, instructional strategies, and school-appropriate material in order to be able to implement CML in their classrooms. These qualitative statements of lack of support can be seen in the quantitative responses to Question 10 in which respondents rated the statement: “I feel supported by people at my school when teaching critical media literacy”: 36% VF/F, 24% occasionally, 18% rarely, 6% never felt supported, and 17% not applicable.

The group that shared the most challenges for implementing CML consisted of five teachers who taught secondary math and science. Their qualitative responses broadly discussed the difficulty of integrating CML into their content and finding only limited application. One of these responses from a high school math teacher mentioned:

I remember how when I was in the [CML] class, it seemed all over the place. I was unable to fully find the purpose of the class and how we can use it in a math class. In a traditional math class, such as Pre-Calculus or Calculus, it was rather difficult to find ways to incorporate the idea of CML.

This same person also commented that once he began teaching statistics, he was able to find ways to integrate CML. Of the 34 math teachers who answered Question 7, 59% of them reported that incorporating CML into their teaching was difficult VF/F. This is about double the VF/F responses from the other subjects.

A high school math teacher saw the value in teaching students CML but limited its application to challenging students’ misinformation about math and who is or is not a mathematician:

Critical Media Literacy is pretty important for students, especially in an age where they’re exposed to various forms of media, a lot of which is very skewed in one way or the other, and usually takes a reductionist viewpoint of the issues it addresses. I try to use CML to help students understand the misinformation about mathematics, the nature of mathematics, and challenge stereotypes of who is or isn’t a mathematician (examples: Not all mathematicians are white or Asian, there are Latino and African/African American mathematicians, there are mathematicians from faith backgrounds, mathematics isn’t just about calculations, etc.).

Two additional respondents also acknowledged the benefits of CML but felt challenged by the additional work needed to integrate it into the curriculum. A high school science teacher shared:

When I took the Critical Media Literacy class, it felt like it was more geared towards the humanities and not necessarily for the sciences. While it would be great to come up with lessons that connect chemistry and critical media literacy, it is immensely time-consuming when I can’t find other people to brainstorm with.

Another secondary science teacher also felt CML was important but struggled to find ways to integrate it into the classroom:

It was a great shared learning space and I got a ton of inspiration from taking the class; however, it has been difficult to use CML when direct instruction does focus on the explanation of scientific concepts. That’s not to say it is impossible, it just does take one more step of planning and student buy in.

Researchers in Canada found that after teaching CML concepts and skills in a Language Arts methods course, their preservice teachers felt enthusiastic about teaching media literacy, but challenged when designing CML lessons ( Robertson & Hughes, 2011 , p. 51). Robertson and Hughes (2011) list five reasons why teaching CML was so challenging for their students: (1) when these preservice teachers were K-12 students, most did not experience CML lessons; (2) the majority of their mentor teachers did not teach CML or know much about it; (3) critical analysis practices are not easy; (4) few resources are available; and (5) some schools have little technology and technical support. These are many of the same challenges that our teachers reported.

Intent and Importance of Incorporating Critical Media Literacy

Numerous teachers wrote about how meaningful, vital, transformative, and important this class was for them. A high school science teacher shared that the critical media literacy (CML) class, “was transformative! I’m still working on ways to fully integrate what I learned, but I have had my students creating media ever since.” A middle school English teacher commented about how the CML class “gave us techniques, projects, lessons that we can incorporate in our classrooms. Teaching students how to be critical of information related through the media is highly important because student[s] gain that critical awareness necessary for a technology-based society!”

A desire to bring more CML into the classroom surfaced throughout many of the qualitative responses. When asked to indicate any additional comments, 16 out of 64 respondents (25%) expressed their intention to integrate concepts related to media literacy or CML. A high school math teacher who wrote about having students create ads to represent data in graphs stated, “I wish I could incorporate more. I’ll keep trying.” A kindergarten teacher commented, “I wish I had more time to engage my students in this topic. As I grow in experience and expertise, I incorporate it more and more. Teaching in urban areas is a challenge but I do find the ideas of the course to be valuable in the classroom.”

The data and voices of these teachers raise practical, theoretical, and policy implications for future work in supporting teachers in adopting a pedagogical approach that can ignite engagement, make learning relevant, and deepen critical thinking with media, technology, and all information. In order for this to happen, teacher education programs need to address some of the challenges and limitations highlighted in the study.

The teachers surveyed reported challenges for implementing critical media literacy (CML) such as limited access to resources, lack of support, and a struggle to understand how to integrate it into the curriculum. This was especially evident for the math and science teachers. CML courses need to help teachers in all content areas rethink the silo approach to separate subject matter instruction and recognize the ways literacy is used in all areas and how information is connected to students’ lives through issues of power, privilege, and pleasure. To help teachers integrate CML into the curriculum, it is important for them to see content and grade-level examples while also receiving ongoing support and resources.

One way to support teachers in various subject matter is to create groups or projects modeled after the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) or the Center X professional development projects. 4 The SHEG is a research and development group that provides free online resources and lesson plans for history teachers to support students in developing historical thinking skills. In a similar way, the Center X projects provide resources, lesson ideas, and professional development to support working teachers and administrators, while also creating curriculum, providing trainings, and engaging in research. The creation of a CML project or research and development group could provide ongoing professional development for new and experienced teachers in order to sustain CML implementation and support the growth of CML as an important field of investigation.

In-service teachers in our survey reported higher rates of integration of CML, perhaps because experienced teachers have figured out issues of classroom management, lesson planning, and how to balance work and life expectations. As a result, they are better situated to build and expand their curricula and teaching practices to bring CML into their classrooms. While creating a site modeled after the SHEG or Center X projects will require a significant investment of time and money, a more immediate and economical way to provide support for preservice teachers could be through integrating CML across various teacher preparation courses, especially in methods classes. This integration would require working with teacher educators to explore the CML theoretical framework and co-construct new practices and curricula for integrating these ideas throughout different content areas.

Despite the challenges reported by our teachers, the data also suggest promising possibilities for CML. While we do not claim causality between their teaching and the CML course, the data provide a window into how our preservice and in-service teachers have supported critical engagement with the information, entertainment, and social media embedded in the lives of students.

The similarities between elementary and secondary teachers suggest that CML can be just as appropriate for lower grades as it is commonly assumed to be for older students. The work in critical literacy by Comber (2013) and Vasquez (2014) offers support for the notion that young children can engage deeply in critical thinking and social justice education. The elementary teachers in our study demonstrate these ideas through the work they have done to engage their young students with media analysis and critical media production from kindergarten on up. While some teachers reported deep levels of critical analysis more often than others, many expressed their belief in the importance of CML and their desire to teach about social justice. Vasquez (2017) reminds us that critical literacy should not be a topic to teach: “Instead it should be looked on as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond. What this means is that critical literacy involves having a critical perspective or way of being” (p. 8). Developing social justice educators who internalize a critical way of looking at the world and questioning systems of power is the project for which CML provides a pragmatic framework and pedagogy.

It is impressive to see the majority of teachers reporting that using CML encourages critical thinking, something more important than ever in the age of fake news and alternative facts. There is hope in the teachers’ voices as they describe the activities they have been doing with their students, the successes they have encountered, and the challenges they have struggled to overcome. The comments about their intentions to teach CML and the importance they attribute to teaching these concepts provide encouragement for teacher educators to embrace CML. More than anything, the data demonstrate the potential for teaching CML in elementary and secondary settings with preservice and in-service teachers and in all content areas, even though some are more challenging than others. The use of media and technology offers opportunities for teachers to build on students’ prior knowledge, create a bridge to connect the outside world with school learning, and provide the raw material to examine everyday experiences of power, marginalization, and resistance.

Simply integrating media into the curriculum is not enough to develop critical literacies given the changing and multiple literacies associated with new digital information and communication technologies and practices. In the contemporary moment, there is a pressing pedagogical need to navigate the increasingly consequential artificial intelligence (AI) systems that collect, collate, process, predict and disseminate information determined by algorithms. Data from the survey suggest that our teachers are teaching more with media than critically analyzing it. Further studies are needed in order to better understand how to develop teachers’ CML frameworks and support more implementation.

Preparing educators to teach CML is not easy, and unfortunately, few institutes of higher education are attempting the challenge. However, it is possible, and in fact, it can be highly rewarding. By listening to the voices of teachers who have taken a CML course, we see the potential. As one high school science teacher commented, “CML changed me, changed my teaching, continues to change my students.”

While information communication technologies are integrating into all aspects of our lives, we are also witnessing increasing divisions between the haves and have nots, out-of-control climate change, and the weaponization of information and media. In order to create a socially just democratic society and sustainable planet, we must have people who can critically read and write the word and the world ( Freire & Macedo, 1987 ). The need for CML has never been greater. A high school English teacher wrote, “there is no literacy without media literacy. There is not critical pedagogy without critical media literacy.” It is our hope that this article serves as a resource to continue exploring the potential that CML offers to transform students, schools, and society.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following educators who helped us design and teach this critical media literacy course: Shani Byard, Peter Carlson, Steven Funk, Antero Garcia, Mark Gomez, Clifford Lee, Elexia Reyes-McGovern, and Martin Romero. We are grateful to Megan Franke for her guidance with the creation of the survey. We also appreciate the assistance of Jarod Kawasaki, Jose-Felipe Martinez, and Brandon McMillan with helping to organize the survey data.

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Critical Theory and Pedagogy

Towards the Reconstruction of Education

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About the author
About the book
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Table of Contents
Foreword (Steve Gennaro and Jeff Share)
Chapter One: Toward a Critical Theory of Education
Chapter Two: Marxian Perspectives on Educational Philosophy: From Classical Marxism to Critical Pedagogy
Chapter Three: Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative
Chapter Four: Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and Radical Democracy: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
Chapter Five: Multimedia Pedagogy and Multicultural Education for the New Millennium (Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner)
Chapter Six: Reading Images Critically: Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy
Chapter Seven: New Technologies/New Literacies: Reconstructing Education for Democracy and Social Justice
Chapter Eight: Digital Culture, Media, and the Challenges of Contemporary Cyborg Youth (Steve Gennaro and Doug Kellner)
Series Index

For more than half a century Douglas Kellner has helped shape the critical consciousness of academics, students, media critics, and activists. His writings have called for critical engagement with media, information, and technology, what he has termed “critical media literacy” (CML). He asserts the need to redesign public education to include CML with critical analysis and production, taught through dialogical Freirean pedagogy that engages students as co-constructors in the learning process. In the same way that Kellner himself once occupied John Dewey’s desk while a graduate student at Columbia University in New York in the 1960s, he has always believed in the Deweyian notion of the democratic potential of education and the responsibility of the education system to serve the people as centers for civic engagement and social justice, and not ideological indoctrination that perpetuates inequality, injustice, and oppression.

After earning his PhD at Columbia, Kellner spent several years studying in Europe with many of the academic giants of the time, from Ernest Bloch to Jacques Derrida. In 1969, he met Herbert Marcuse, a moment that changed his life, leading him to write numerous articles and books about Marcuse and upon his death, Kellner became the executor of Marcuse’s archives. In the early 1970s Kellner began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) where he created one of the longest running public access TV shows called Alternative Views. With his co-host, Frank Morrow, they interviewed many of the leading ←vii | viii→ intellectuals and progressives who were ignored by the commercial media. The popularity of this community television show made Kellner a celebrity of the left, as he was often recognized, even on the streets of New York.

During this period while teaching at UTA, Kellner received grants to travel throughout Texas and the Mississippi Delta giving workshops on critical media literacy to high school teachers. It was not enough to teach and produce media, Kellner has also been a prolific author writing almost fifty books and hundreds of articles. After twenty-five years in Texas, Kellner moved to California where he held the George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) until his retirement in 2019.

At the time of the publishing of this book, many of the same concerns from Kellner’s time as a graduate student in Philosophy at Columbia remain. Capitalism reigns and the divide between the world’s richest 2 % and the remaining 98 % widens as digital media mammoths like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have taken a stronghold on the digital commons and reap the massive economic benefits of globalization, digitization, and yes, even pandemics. According to separate reports by Oxfam and the Institute for Policy Studies, during the first year of COVID 19’s global pandemic, the number of people of living in poverty doubled to more than 500 million at the very same time as the world’s richest, a mere 2,365 billionaires, witnessed an increase of more than $4 trillion dollars to their wealth. Adding more than 50 % to their global monetary dominance. Of the ten wealthiest people in the world, more than half own media or technology empires: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle and more. Kellner has always recognized the significant power of media and of technology and has spent a lifetime encouraging others to speak to the truth, to challenge the ideology of capitalism and the inequity it produces, and to recognize the liberatory potential of democratic pedagogy.

For more than half a century, Douglas Kellner has continued to write about the importance of political economy and remind us that as technology changes, the need to understand and question the means of production in media, and now digital media, remains of utmost importance. Kellner’s writings invite us to connect our understanding of current media and technology to a public pedagogy and civic engagement that at its core equals and underpins participatory democracy. Critical Media Literacy is social justice. It is pedagogy as lived out and experienced by many and not just by few. It is a necessity for understanding our past and a fundamental requirement to our democratic future. Critical Media Literacy and the reconstruction of Education are an important part of Douglas Kellner’s legacy, and this collection of essays stands as a reminder for us all—that our struggle is far ←viii | ix→ from over and we have the tools at our disposal to name the word and the world that surrounds us.

Steve Gennaro is a Lecturer in the Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto. He is the co-editor of Selling Youth (2010) and co-editor of Youth and Social Media (2021). He regularly publishes in areas relating to the philosophy of technology and critical media studies of youth, identity and politics.

Jeff Share teaches in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-authored with Douglas Kellner (2019), The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education.

Chapter One

Toward a critical theory of education.

It is surely not difficult to see that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto the world of its existence and imagination and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form. To be sure, the spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressing motion …. the spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward the new form, dissolving one particle of the edifice of its previous world after the other, …. This gradual crumbling … is interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once reveals the edifice of the new world. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit , (1965 [1807])

As the second decade of the second millennium unfolds, against the backdrop of COVID-19, the human species is undergoing one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history, one that is changing everything from the ways that people work to the ways that they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. The technological revolution centers on a removal of time and space as the precedents for education and bears witness to online, blended, hybrid, virtual, AI, and even gamified synchronous and asynchronous options for teaching and learning no longer occupying the periphery of education, but instead now holding steady as normalized educational options. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the emergent technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure education to ←1 | 2→ respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes now encompassing the globe. 1

At the same time technological revolution is underway, important demographic and socio-political changes are taking place throughout the world. COVID-19 has left no corner of the world untouched and has altered all forms of daily living on a global scale. The global explosion of COVID-19 provides a reminder of how earlier conceptualizations and critiques of globalization may not have gone far enough to note the true interconnectedness of all peoples on this globe. Early colonization by imperial European nations brought pandemic and death to large segments of the colonized world, as Europeans imported deadly diseases throughout the colonized world. Ironically, this time the pandemic came from a former colonized part of the globe, so that the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as revenge of the colonized world, just as the pandemic can be seen as the revenge of nature for slaughtering animals in monstrous conditions of mass production and mechanized killing to feed hungry humans. 2

In this context, as Gennaro noted in 2010, our definition of globalization needs to be expanded to account for “the movement, interaction, sharing, co-option, and even imposition of economic goods and services, cultures, ideas, ideologies, people’s lives and lived experiences, food, plants, animals, labor, medicine, disease, learning, play, practices, and knowledge(s) across time and space(s) previously thought to be impossible or at the very least improbable.” 3 Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter and other liberation movements brought into perspective the very real challenge of providing equitable access to people from diverse races, classes, and backgrounds to the tools and competencies to succeed and participate in an ever more complex and changing digital world despite institutions that have institutionalized and normalized their very oppression. 4

In this chapter, I propose developing a critical theory of education for democratizing and reconstructing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society. This involves articulating a metatheory for the philosophy of education and providing a historical genealogy and grounding of key themes of a democratic reconstruction of education which indicates what traditional aspects of education should be overcome and what alternative pedagogies and principles should reconstruct education in the present age. Education has always involved colonization of children, youth, the underclasses, immigrants, and members of the society at large into the values, behavior, labor skills, competitiveness, and submission to authority to serve the needs of white, patriarchal capitalism and to transmit the ideologies that Marx and Engels saw as the “ruling ideas of the ruling class” ( 1978 ), and which bell hooks (1994) reminds us also includes the ruling ideas of ←2 | 3→ white men and colonization of the subjects of education into White, Patriarchal Capitalism.

Biographical notes

Douglas Kellner (Author)

Douglas Kellner is Distinguished Research Professor of Education at UCLA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history, philosophy, and culture, including Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism and six edited volumes of his collected papers. Kellner’s work in social theory and cultural studies includes Media Culture; Guys and Guns Amok; Media Spectacle; American Nightmare and the American Horror Show on the presidency of Donald Trump, followed by Technology and Democracy.

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Critical Media Education, Radical Democracy and the Reconstruction of Education

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Critical Media Literacy , Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education

Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share

Introduction

The world we live in today is very different than the world that most of us remember from our childhood. The twenty-first century is a media saturated, technologically dependent, and globally connected world. However, most education in the United States has not kept up with advances in technology or educational research. In our global information soci- ety, it is insufficient to teach students to read and write only with letters and numbers. We live in a multimedia age where the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources and more typically from highly constructed visual images, complex sound arrangements, and multiple media formats. The influential role that broadcasting and emer- gent information and computer media play in organizing, shaping, and disseminating information, ideas, and values is creating a powerful public pedagogy (Giroux, 1999; Luke, 1997). These changes in technology, media, and society require the development of crit- ical media literacy to empower students and citizens to adequately read media messages and produce media themselves in order to be active participants in a democratic society (Kellner, 1995; Kellner & Share, 2005). medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 4

4 Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education

Even so, despite the ubiquity of media culture in contemporary society and everyday life, and despite criticism of the distorted values, ideals, and representations of the world in popular culture, media education in K-12 schooling in the United States has never really been established and developed. The current technological revolution, however, brings to the fore, more than ever, the role of media like television, popular music, film, and adver- tising, as the Internet rapidly absorbs these cultural forms and creates ever-evolving cyber- spaces and emergent forms of culture and pedagogy. It is highly irresponsible in the face of saturation by the Internet and media culture to ignore these forms of socialization and education. Consequently, a critical reconstruction of education should produce pedagogies that provide media literacy and enable students, teachers, and citizens to discern the nature and effects of media culture. From this perspec- tive, media culture is a form of pedagogy that teaches proper and improper behavior, gen- der roles, values, and knowledge of the world. Individuals are often not aware that they are being educated and positioned by media culture, as its pedagogy is frequently invisible and is absorbed unconsciously. This situation calls for critical approaches that make us aware of how media construct meanings, influence and educate audiences, and impose their messages and values. Critical media literacy expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication and popular culture as well as deepens the potential of education to crit- ically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. It involves cultivating skills in analyzing media codes and conventions, abilities to criticize stereotypes, dominant values, and ideologies, and competencies to interpret the multiple meanings and messages generated by media texts. Media literacy helps people to discrim- inate and evaluate media content, to critically dissect media forms, to investigate media effects and uses, to use media intelligently, and to construct alternative media. In this chapter, we explore different approaches commonly used for teaching media edu- cation and propose a conception of critical media literacy that moves media education into the sphere of twenty-first-century transformative pedagogy. We present competing approaches to media education and, building on these conceptions, develop a critical media literacy addressing issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and power to explore the interconnections of media, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy . We argue that alterna- tive media production can help engage students to challenge media texts and narratives that appear natural and transparent. In the contemporary era of standardized high stakes test- ing and corporate structuring of public education, radical democracy depends on a Deweyan reconceptualization of literacy and the role of education in society. We argue that critical media literacy must expand our understanding of literacy so that these ideas become inte- grated across the curriculum at all levels from pre-school to university, leading to a recon- struction and democratization of education and society.

Literacy involves gaining the skills and knowledge to read, interpret, produce texts and arti- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 5

Reading Media Critically 5

facts, and to gain the intellectual tools and capacities to fully participate in one’s culture and society. Both traditionalists and reformists would probably agree that education and literacy are intimately connected. “Literacy,” in our conception, comprises gaining com- petencies involved in effectively learning and using socially constructed forms of commu- nication and representation. Because literacies are socially constructed in various institutional discourses and practices within educational and cultural sites, cultivating lit- eracies involves attaining competencies in practices in contexts that are governed by rules and conventions. Literacies evolve and shift in response to social and cultural change and the interests of elites who control hegemonic institutions, as well as to the emergence of new technologies. To the domains of reading , writing , and traditional print literacies, one could argue that in an era of technological revolution educators must develop robust forms of media liter- acy, computer literacy , and multimedia literacies, thus cultivating “multiple literacies” in the restructuring of education.1 Computer and multimedia technologies demand novel skills and competencies, and if education is to be relevant to the problems and challenges of con- temporary life, engaged teachers must expand the concept of literacy and develop new cur- ricula and pedagogies. We would resist, however, extreme claims that the era of the book and print literacy are over. Although there are new media and literacies in the current constellation, books, reading, and print literacy continue to be of utmost significance. Indeed, in the current information-communication technology environment, traditional print literacy takes on increasing importance in the computer-mediated cyberworld as people need to critically scrutinize and scroll tremendous amounts of information, putting new emphasis on devel- oping reading and writing abilities. For instance, Internet discussion groups, chat rooms, e-mail, text-messaging, blogs, wikis, and various Internet forums require writing skills in which a new emphasis on the importance of clarity and precision is emerging.2 In this con- text of information saturation, it becomes an ethical imperative not to contribute to cul- tural and information overload and to concisely communicate thoughts and feelings. The traditional ideas of literacy that focus on a standard national language and pho- netic decoding are no longer sufficient in an age of proliferating communication systems and increasing linguistic and cultural diversity (The New London Group, 1996). The psy- chological model of reading and writing as individual cognitive skills needs to advance to a deeper understanding of literacy as a social practice “tied up in the politics and power relations of everyday life in literate cultures” (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 185). Today, novel forms of media and technoculture are proliferating and evolving as tech- nology develops and spreads. These changes in technology and society have led to a call for a broader approach to literacy by many, including The New London Group (1996) whose members propose a pedagogy of “multiliteracies” to address multiple cultural and linguis- tic differences, as well as the multitude of communication media; advocates of “silicon lit- eracies” to engage new computers, information, communication, and entertainment technologies (see, for example, Snyder, 2002); or advocacy of “multiple literacies” to take account of the full range of proliferating and emergent technologies (Kellner, 1998, 2004). medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 6

6 Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education

These scholars suggest that media literacy is one of the many literacies that students need in the twenty-first century to participate more effectively in the democratic process. We agree with these perspectives and in the following analysis suggest how critical media lit- eracy can reconstruct education for the contemporary era, expand the concept of literacy, and contribute to the radical democratization of education and society.

Approaches to Media Education

While there is growing interest in the need for media literacy, there is also much debate about why and how to teach it (Hobbs, 1998). Four major approaches to media education have appeared, which we will discuss, and then sketch out our own conception of critical media literacy. Just as we suggest that new literacies studies should build on and not leave behind traditional print media, so too do we argue that development of new multiple lit- eracies should build upon and not abandon contributions within the field of media educa- tion that have emerged to counter the growing impact of broadcasting media.

Protectionist Approach

One approach to media education emerges from fear of media and aims to protect or inoculate people against the dangers of media manipulation and addiction. This protection- ist approach posits media audiences as passive victims and values traditional print culture over media culture as exemplified by Neil Postman (1985) in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman warns that TV has become a powerful force of pedagogy that dominates the attention, time, and cognitive habits of young people. Many activists on both sides of the political spectrum come to media education as a way to push their agenda through blam- ing the media. Some conservatives blame the media for causing teen pregnancies and the destruction of family values while some on the left criticize the media for rampant con- sumerism and making children materialistic. Critics of this anti-media approach suggest that it will cause students to either regurgitate “politically correct” responses to media critiques or reject the ideas of media literacy altogether (Buckingham, 1994). While we are not claiming that media do not contribute to and at times cause many social problems, we take issue with this approach because of its decontextualization and anti- media bias which over-simplifies the complexity of our relationship with media and takes away the potential for empowerment that critical pedagogy and alternative media produc- tion offer. When the understanding of media effects is contextualized within its social and historical dynamics, then issues of representation and ideology are extremely useful to media education to explore the interconnections between media and society, information and power (Ferguson, 1998, 2004). This approach is important when it addresses the natural- izing processes of ideology and the interrelationships with social injustice, but it is deeply flawed when it does so through dogmatic orthodoxy and undemocratic pedagogy where teachers merely denounce the media and students are encouraged or coerced to follow this anti-media line. medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 7

Reading Media Critically 7

Media Arts Education

A second approach to teaching about media is present in media arts education, where students are taught to value the aesthetic qualities of media and the arts while using their creativity for self-expression through creating art and media. These programs can be found most often inside schools as stand-alone classes or outside of the classroom in community- based or after-school programs. While many of these programs are excellent examples of critical media literacy, we have concerns with the media arts approach that favors individ- ualistic self-expression over socially conscious analysis and alternative media production. Education loses its transformative potential when programs unproblematically teach stu- dents the technical skills to merely reproduce hegemonic representations or express their voice without the awareness of ideological implications or any type of social critique. Feminist standpoint theorists explain that coming to voice is important for people who have seldom been allowed to speak for themselves, but without critical analysis it is not enough (Collins, 2004; Harding, 2004; Hartsock, 1997). Critical analysis that explores and exposes the structures of oppression is essential because merely coming to voice is some- thing any racist or sexist group of people can also claim. Spaces must be opened up and opportunities created so that people in marginalized positions have the opportunity to col- lectively struggle against oppression, to voice their concerns, and create their own representations. Incorporating the arts and media production into public school education holds important political benefits for making learning more experiential, hands-on, creative, expressive, and fun. Media arts education can bring pleasure and popular culture into main- stream education, thereby making school more motivating and relevant to students. When this approach moves beyond technical production skills or relativist art appreciation and is steeped in cultural studies that address issues of gender, race, class, and power, it holds dramatic potential for transformative critical media literacy.

Media Literacy Movement

A third approach to media education can be found in the media literacy movement in the United States. While the movement is relatively small,3 it has made some inroads into mainstream educational institutions and established two national membership organiza- tions in the United States (Kellner & Share, 2005). According to the definition of media literacy provided by one of these organizations, “media literacy is seen to consist of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVAL- UATE and COMMUNICATE.”4 This approach attempts to expand the notion of liter- acy to include multiple forms of media (music, film, video, Internet, and so on) while still working within a print literacy tradition. While we agree with the need to begin with these ideas of expanding our understand- ing of how we communicate with more than just printed words, this is not enough to bring about a democratic reconstruction of education and society. Robert Ferguson (1998) uses medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 8

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the metaphor of an iceberg to explain the need for critical media analysis. Many educators working under an apolitical media literacy framework guide their students to only analyze the obvious and overt tip of the iceberg they see sticking out of the water. Ferguson asserts that this is a problem because “The vast bulk which is not immediately visible is the intel- lectual, historical and analytical base without which media analysis runs the risk of becom- ing superficial, mechanical or glib” (p. 2). The critical component of media literacy must transform literacy education into an exploration of the role of language and communica- tion media in order to define relationships of power and domination because below the sur- face of that iceberg lie deeply embedded ideological notions of white supremacy, capitalist patriarchy, classism, homophobia, and other oppressive forces. Many media educators working from a conventional media literacy approach openly express the myth that education can and should be politically neutral, and that their job is to objectively expose students to media content without questioning ideology and issues of power. Giroux writes, “The notion that theory, facts, and inquiry can be objectively deter- mined and used falls prey to a set of values that are both conservative and mystifying in their political orientation” (1997, p. 11). The mainstream appeal of the U.S. media literacy movement, something that it is only just starting to develop, can probably be linked to its conservative base that does not engage the political dimensions of education and especially literacy. While this ambiguous non- partisan stance helps the dissemination of media education, thereby making some of the ideas and tools available to more students, it also waters down the transformative poten- tial for media education to become a powerful instrument to challenge oppression and strengthen democracy. The media literacy movement has done excellent work in promot- ing important concepts of semiotics and intertextuality, as well as bringing media culture into public education. However, without cultural studies, transformative pedagogy, and a project of radical democracy, media literacy risks becoming another cookbook of conven- tional ideas that only improve the social reproductive function of education.

Critical Media Literacy

The type of critical media literacy that we propose includes aspects of the three previ- ous models, but focuses on ideology critique and analyzing the politics of representation of crucial dimensions of gender, race, class, and sexuality; incorporating alternative media pro- duction; and expanding textual analysis to include issues of social context, control, and pleas- ure. A critical media literacy brings an understanding of ideology, power, and domination that challenges relativist and apolitical notions of much media education in order to guide teachers and students in their explorations of how power, media, and information are linked. This approach embraces the notion of the audience as active in the process of mak- ing meaning, as a cultural struggle between dominant readings , oppositional readings, or negotiated readings (Hall, 1980; Ang, 2002). Critical media literacy thus constitutes a critique of mainstream approaches to literacy and a political project for democratic social change. This involves a multiperspectival crit- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 9

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ical inquiry of media culture and the cultural industries that address issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and power and also promotes the production of alternative counter- hegemonic media. Media and information communication technology can be tools for empowerment when people who are most often marginalized or misrepresented in the main- stream media receive the opportunity to use these tools to tell their stories and express their concerns. For members of the dominant group, critical media literacy offers an opportu- nity to engage with the social realities that the majority of the world are experiencing. The new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate, manip- ulate or enlighten, and it is imperative that educators teach their students how to critically analyze and use these media (Kellner, 2004a). These different approaches to media education are not rigid pedagogical models, but they are rather interpretive reference points from which educators can frame their concerns and strategies. Calling for critical media literacy is important to identify the elements and objectives necessary for good media pedagogy, understanding that principles and pro- grams may be different in varying contexts. Alan Luke and Peter Freebody (1997) have been developing a dynamic understand- ing of literacy as a social practice where critical competence is one of the necessary com- ponents. This sociological framing of literacy as a family of practices, in which multiple practices are crucial and none alone is enough, fits well into our multiperspectival approach to critical media literacy. Luke and Freebody (1999) write that effective literacy requires four basic roles (not necessarily sequential or hierarchical) that allow learners to: “break the code,” “participate in understanding and composing,” “use texts functionally,” and “crit- ically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral.” This normative approach offers the flexibility for literacy education to explore and critically engage students with the pedagogy that will work best for individ- ual teachers in their own unique situation with the different social and cultural needs and interests of their students and local community. When educators teach students critical media literacy, they often begin with media arts activities or simple decoding of media texts in the mode of the established media literacy movement, perhaps adding discussion of how audiences receive media messages. However, critical media literacy also engages students in exploring the depths of the iceberg with crit- ical questions to challenge “commonsense” assumptions concerning the meaning of texts with negotiated and oppositional interpretations, as well as seeking alternative media with oppositional and counterhegemonic representations and messages, and, where feasi- ble, teaching critical media literacy through production. While not everyone has the tools to create sophisticated media productions, we strongly recommend a pedagogy of teach- ing critical media literacy through project-based media production (even if it is as simple as rewriting a text or drawing pictures) for making analyses more meaningful and empow- ering as students gain tools for responding and taking action on the social conditions and texts they are critiquing. The goal should be to move toward critical media literacy with the understanding of literacy as a social process that involves multiple dimensions and inter- actions with multiple technologies and that is connected with the transformation of edu- cation and democratization of society. medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 10

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For example, in her course on critical media literacy at UCLA, Rhonda Hammer has her students work in teams to create their own counterhegemonic movies and Web sites that explore issues they feel are underrepresented or misrepresented in the mainstream media (see Hammer, 2006).5 During the ten-week quarter, her students produce movies and Web sites that challenge the “commonsense” assumptions about a wide assortment of issues deal- ing with gender, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, power, and pleasure. Through the dialectic of theory and practice, her students create critical alternative media while engaging the core concepts of critical media literacy as they apply to audience, text, and context. Along with the media production, students are also required to do particular readings from the course reader, as well as produce a short analytical final paper in which they dis- cuss their group project within the context of critical media literacy. They are asked to incor- porate course readings, guest lectures, and films presented in the class. Notions of ideology and hegemony as well as the “politics of representation” in media (which includes dimen- sions of sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia, to name a few) are central concerns. Also, the ideas and realities of resistance, social and political change, and agency are emphasized.

Feminism and Critical Media Literacy

Feminist theory and standpoint epistemologies provide major contributions to the field of critical media literacy. Carmen Luke (1994) combines cultural and feminist studies to allow for an “epistemological standpoint which acknowledges difference(s) of identity, the cul- tural constructedness of ‘Theory,’ ‘History,’ and ‘Truth,’ and the cultural dynamics of our own labor as academic researchers and teachers” (p. 33). She links a feminist political com- mitment to transformation with recognition of media misrepresentation and stereotyping. This approach requires unveiling the political and social construction of knowledge, as well as addressing principles of equity and social justice related to representation. Through the inclusion of some groups and exclusion of others, representations benefit dominant and pos- itively represented groups and disadvantage marginalized and subordinate ones. These biases become especially pernicious when two factors exist:

■ limited and dominant groups do the majority of the representing, as in the case of the multinational corporate mass media; ■ when the messages are naturalized, people seldom question the transparent social construction of the representations.

Luke argues that it is the teacher’s responsibility within the classroom to make visible the power structure of knowledge and how it benefits some more than others. She insists “that a commitment to social justice and equity principles should guide the media educa- tor’s work in enabling students to come to their own realizations that, say, homophobic, racist or sexist texts or readings, quite simply, oppress and subordinate others” (p. 44). Further, a student-centered, bottom-up approach is necessary for a standpoint analy- sis to come from each student’s own culture, knowledge, and experiences. Luke suggests that medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 11

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collaborative inquiry and media production can be ways for students to voice their discov- eries. Poststructuralist, feminist, and critical pedagogies all stress the importance of valu- ing students’ voices for deconstructing media as well as creating their own. While these practical suggestions are congruent with much current advice on media literacy education, Luke asserts the need to take media education beyond just analyzing the production of mean- ing. She writes that critical media studies must “extend to explorations of how individual and corporate sense-making tie in with larger socio-political issues of culture, gender, class, political economy, nation, and power” (Luke, 1994, p. 31). Feminist standpoint epistemologies offer a methodology to study up from subordinate positions to reveal structures of oppression, the functioning of hegemony and alternative epistemologies. Uma Narayan states, “[I]t is easier and more likely for the oppressed to have critical insights into the conditions of their own oppression than it is for those who live outside these structures. Those who actually live the oppressions of class, race, or gender have faced the issues that such oppressions generate in a variety of different situations. The insights and emotional responses engendered by these situations are a legacy with which they confront any new issue or situation” (2004, p. 220). Standpoint theories thus offer important concepts for seeing through the naturalization of the dominant perspective. Sandra Harding (2004) suggests we begin our attempt to perceive and understand phenom- ena from the standpoint of marginalized groups in order to gain multiple perspectives on issues and phenomena that appear as common sense.

Cultural and Media Studies

While media education has evolved from many disciplines, an important arena of theo- retical work for critical media literacy comes from the multidisciplinary field of cultural stud- ies. This is a field of critical inquiry that began decades ago in Europe and continues to grow with new critiques of media and society. From the 1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used critical social theory to analyze how media culture and the new tools of communication technology induce ideology and social con- trol. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham added to the earlier concerns of ideology with a more sophis- ticated understanding of the audience as active constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of an external reality. Applying concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, and post- modernism, a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audi- ence theory has evolved in which media culture can be analyzed as dynamic discourses that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities for counterhegemonic alternatives (see Kellner, 1995). In the 1980s, media studies research began to enter the educational arena. With the publication of Len Masterman’s Teaching the Media (1985), many educators around the world embraced media education less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills, and more as a framework of conceptual understandings (Buckingham, 2003). Different people and organ- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 12

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izations across the globe have generated and continue to create different lists of media lit- eracy concepts6 that vary in number and wording but, for the most part, tend to coincide with a handful of basic principles:

1 recognition of the construction of media and communication as a social process as opposed to accepting texts as isolated neutral or transparent conveyors of information; 2 some type of semiotic textual analysis that explores the languages, genres, codes, and conventions of the text; 3 an exploration of the role audiences play in actively negotiating meanings; 4 problematizing the process of representation to uncover and engage issues of ide- ology, power, and pleasure; 5 examination of the production and institutions that motivate and structure the media industries as corporate profit seeking businesses.

Critical media literacy challenges the power of the media to present messages as non- problematic and transparent. Because messages are created by people who make decisions about what to communicate and how to communicate, all messages are influenced by the subjectivity and biases of those creating the message as well as the social contexts within which the process occurs. Along with this encoding subjectivity come the multiple read- ings of the text as it is decoded by different audiences in different contexts. Media are thus not neutral disseminators of information because the nature of the construction and inter- pretation processes entails bias and social influence. Semiotics, the science of signs and how meanings are socially produced from the struc- tural relations in sign systems, has contributed greatly to media literacy. Roland Barthes (1998) explains that semiotics aims to challenge the naturalness of a message, the “what- goes-with-out-saying” (p. 11). Masterman (1994) asserts that the foundation of media education is the principle of non-transparency. Media do not present reality like transpar- ent windows or simple reflections of the world because media messages are created, shaped, and positioned through a construction process. This construction involves many decisions about what to include or exclude and how to represent reality. Exposing the choices involved in the construction process is an important starting point for critical inquiry because it disrupts the myth that media can be neutral conveyors of information. From the study of semiotics, media literacy practitioners analyze the existence of dual meanings of signs: denotation and signifier (the more literal reference to content) and con- notation and signified (the more associative, subjective significations of a message based on ideological and cultural codes) (Hall, 1980). When connotation and denotation become one and the same, representation appears natural, making the historical and social construc- tion invisible. Therefore, a goal of cultivating media literacy is to help students distinguish between connotation and denotation and signifier and signified (Fiske, 1990). With younger students the terms are simplified into separating what they see or hear from what they think or feel. Creating media can be a powerful vehicle for guiding students to explore these ideas and learn how different codes and conventions function. For example, discus- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 13

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sion of the representation of class, gender, and race in media such as television or film requires analysis of the codes and stereotypes through which subordinate groups like work- ers, women, and people of color are represented, in contrast to representations of bosses and the rich, men, and white people. The analysis of different models of representation of women or people of color makes clear the constructedness of gender and race representa- tions and that dominant negative representations further subordination and make it look natural. Thus, while signifiers that represent male characters like Arnold Schwarzenegger seem to just present a male actor, they construct connotative meanings and signify certain traits such as patriarchal power, violent masculinity, and male dominance. Media texts are thus highly coded constructions with specific rules and practices. One of the most important components of critical media literacy evolves from work at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK and involves the notion of an active audience, challenging previous theories that viewed receivers of media as passive recipients and often victims. Building on semiotic conceptions developed by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, Stuart Hall (1980) argues, in a study of “Encoding/Decoding,” that a distinction must be made between the encoding of media texts by producers and the decoding by consumers. This distinction highlights the ability of audi- ences to produce their own readings and meanings, to decode texts in aberrant or opposi- tional ways, as well as the “preferred” ways in tune with the dominant ideology. The cultural studies approach provides a major advance for understanding literacy as Ien Ang (2002, p. 180) explains: “Textual meanings do not reside in the texts themselves: a certain text can come to mean different things depending on the interdiscursive context in which viewers interpret it.” The notion that audiences are neither powerless nor omnipotent when it comes to reading media contributes greatly to the potential for media literacy to empower audiences in the process of negotiating meanings. As bell hooks (1996, p. 3) puts it: “While audiences are clearly not passive and are able to pick and choose, it is simultaneously true that there are certain ‘received’ messages that are rarely mediated by the will of the audience.” Empowering the audience through critical thinking inquiry is essential for students to challenge the power of media to create preferred readings. Audience theory views the moment of reception as a contested terrain of cultural strug- gle where critical thinking skills offer potential for the audience to negotiate different read- ings and openly struggle with dominant discourses. The ability for students to see how diverse people can interpret the same message dif- ferently is important for multicultural education because understanding differences means more than merely tolerating one another. Research, for example, has shown that the U.S. television series Dallas (Katzman et al., & Preece et al., 1978–1991) has very different cul- tural meanings for people in various countries. Dutch and Israeli audiences, for instance, decode it very differently from American audiences (Ang, 2002). Likewise, different sub- ject positions like gender, race, class, or sexuality will also produce different readings and one’s grasp of a media text is enriched by interpreting from the standpoint of different audi- ence perspectives. This process of grasping different audience readings and interpretations enhances medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 14

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democracy as multicultural education for a pluralistic democracy depends on a citizenry that embraces multiple perspectives as a natural consequence of varying experiences, histories, and cultures constructed within structures of dominance and subordination. Feminist Standpoint Epistemologies offer a starting point for this type of inquiry by beginning all analyses from a subordinate position whereby the preferred hegemonic readings are denat- uralized and exposed as merely one of many ways to understand the message. Understanding dissimilar ways of seeing is essential to understanding the politics of representation. Critical media literacy involves the politics of representation in which the form and content of media messages are interrogated in order to question ideology, bias, and the con- notations explicit and implicit in the representation. Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, and Critical Pedagogy offer arsenals of research for this line of inquiry to question media representations of race, class, gender, and so on. Beyond simply locating the bias in media, this concept helps students recognize the ideological and constructed nature of all communication. For example, reading the content of a TV series like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (Berman et al., & Whedon et al., 1997–2003) discerns more positive representations of young women than are typical in mainstream media artifacts and sends out messages of teen female empowerment (Kellner, 2004b). The positive representations of gays and lesbians on the show also transmit messages that suggest more multiple and pluralistic representations of sexuality than is usual in U.S. network TV programs (although representations of sexual- ity have greatly expanded over the past decade). The monsters on Buffy can be read as sig- nifying dangers of drugs, rampant sexuality, or gangs producing destructive violence. Content is often highly symbolic and thus requires a wide range of theoretical approaches to grasp the multidimensional social, political, moral, and sometimes philosophical mean- ings of a cultural text. Analyzing content also requires questioning the omissions in media representations. Working with students as young as preschool age, Vivian Vasquez (2003) encourages them to ask the following questions: “Whose voice is heard? Who is silenced? Whose reality is presented? Whose reality is ignored? Who is advantaged? Who is disad- vantaged?” (p. 15). In terms of critically engaging the forms of media culture, semiotic analyses can be con- nected with genre criticism (the study of conventions governing established types of cul- tural forms, such as soap operas) to reveal how the codes and forms of particular genres follow certain meanings. Situation comedies, for instance, classically follow a conflict/resolution model that demonstrates how to solve certain social problems by correct actions and val- ues, and thus provide morality tales of proper and improper behavior. Soap operas, by con- trast, proliferate problems and provide messages concerning the endurance and suffering needed to get through life’s endless miseries, while generating positive and negative mod- els of social behavior. Advertising in turn shows how commodity solutions solve problems of popularity, acceptance, success, and the like. In a high school media literacy class, stu- dents retold the same story in different media genres as a method of exposing how differ- ent genres position audiences for different readings (Hobbs, 2007). Other formal techniques also contribute to the construction of meaning such as analy- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 15

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sis of narrative, editing, the assemblage of scenes and images, and how the technical fea- tures of specific media like film contribute to the construction of meaning. A semiotic and genre analysis of the film Rambo (Kassar, Vajna, & Kotcheff, 1982) for instance, would show how it follows the conventions of the Hollywood genre of the war film that dramatizes con- flicts between the United States and its “enemies” (see Kellner, 1995). A semiotic analy- sis would describe how the images of the villains are constructed according to the codes of World War II movies and how the resolution of the conflict and happy ending follows the traditional Hollywood classical cinema, which portrays the victory of good over evil. A semiotic analysis would also include the study of the strictly cinematic and formal ele- ments of a film like Rambo, dissecting the ways that camera angles present Rambo as a god, or slow-motion images of him gliding through the jungle code him as a force of nature, or images of him on a Russian torture-wrack with a halo of light illuminating his head con- struct him as Christ on a cross. Critical media literacy also encourages students to consider the question of why the mes- sage was sent and where it came from. Too often students believe the role of media is sim- ply to entertain or inform, with little knowledge of the economic structure that supports it. Where once there were many media outlets in every city competing for viewers and read- ers, a few years ago, there were less than ten transnational corporations dominating the global media market. In the most recent revised edition of Ben Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly (2004), Bagdikian states that there are now just five corporations that dom- inate the U.S. media market. He writes:

Five global-dimension firms, operating with many of the characteristics of a cartel, own most of the newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios, and radio and television sta- tions in the United States . . . These five conglomerates are Time Warner, by 2003 the largest media firm in the world; The Walt Disney Company; Murdoch’s News Corporation, based in Australia; Viacom; and Bertelsmann, based in Germany. (p. 3)

The consolidation of ownership of the mass media has given control of the public air- waves to a few multinational oligopolies to determine who and what is represented and how. This concentration of ownership threatens the independence and diversity of information and creates the possibility for the global colonization of culture and knowledge (McChesney, 1999a, 2004). Robert McChesney (1999b) insists that the consolidated ownership of the media giants is highly undemocratic, fundamentally noncompetitive, and “more closely resembles a cartel than it does the competitive marketplace found in economics textbooks” (p. 13). For example, mainstream media in the United States tended to present Republican can- didates and presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush favorably because, in part, the conservative Republican agenda was in line with the corporate interests of media com- panies that favored deregulation, absence of impediments to corporate mergers, and tax breaks for their wealthy employees and advertisers (Kellner, 1990 and 2001). Certain media corporations, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and Fox television network, pursue aggressively right-wing agendas in line with the corporate interests of its owner, board of directors, and top executives who closely follow Murdoch’s conservative line. Thus, know- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 16

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ing what sort of corporation produces a media artifact, or what sort of system of production dominates given media, will help to critically interpret biases and distortions in media texts.

Transformative Pedagogy and Multiculturalism

Our multiperspectival approach to critical media literacy is most relevant to progressive and transformative education when taught through a democratic approach with critical peda- gogy that follows the ideas of progressive educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire . Dewey championed education for democracy and placed emphasis on active learning, experimen- tation, and problem solving. Dewey’s pragmatic approach connects theory with practice and requires students to similarly connect reflection with action (1916/1997). Using a problem- posing pedagogy, Freire (1970) calls for critical consciousness that involves perception of concrete situations and problems, as well as action against oppression. The problem-pos- ing alternative that Freire exercises requires dialogical communication between students and teachers where both are learning and teaching each other. This method necessitates praxis , critical reflection, together with action to transform society. For this reason, media education should ideally involve both critical analysis and alternative student media production. Developing critical media literacy involves perceiving how media like film or video can be used positively as well to teach a wide range of topics, like multicultural understanding and education. If, for example, multicultural education is to champion genuine diversity and expand the curriculum, it is important both for groups marginalized from mainstream education to learn about their own heritage and for dominant groups to explore the expe- riences and voices of minority and oppressed people. When groups often underrepresented or misrepresented in the media become investigators of their representations and creators of their own meanings, the learning process becomes an empowering expression of voice and democratic transformation. Thus, critical media literacy can promote multicultural literacy, conceived as under- standing and engaging the heterogeneity of cultures and subcultures that constitute an increasingly global and multicultural world (Cortés, 2000; Courts, 1998; Weil, 1998). Critical media literacy not only teaches students to learn from media, to resist media manipulation, and to use media materials in constructive ways, but it is also concerned with developing skills that will help create good citizens and that will make individuals more moti- vated and competent participants in social life. In the evolving multimedia environment, media literacy is arguably more important than ever. Cultural and media studies have begun to teach us to recognize the ubiquity of media culture in contemporary society, the growing trends toward multicultural education, and the need for media literacy that addresses the issue of multicultural and social differ- ence.7 There is expanding recognition that media representations help construct our images and understanding of the world and that education must meet the dual challenges of teaching media literacy in a multicultural society and sensitizing students and the pub- medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 17

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lic at large to the inequities and injustices of a society based on gender, race, and class inequalities and discrimination. Recent critical studies see the role of mainstream media in exacerbating or diminishing these inequalities and how media education and the pro- duction of alternative media can help create a healthy multiculturalism of diversity and a more robust democracy. They confront some of the most serious difficulties and problems that currently face us as educators and citizens.

Radical Democracy

Critical media literacy in our conception is tied to the project of radical democracy and concerned to develop skills that will enhance democratization and civic participation. It takes a comprehensive approach that teaches critical skills and how to use media as instru- ments of social communication and change. The technologies of communication are becoming more and more accessible to young people and ordinary citizens and can be used to promote education, democratic self-expression, and social progress. Technologies that could help produce the end of participatory democracy, by transforming politics into media spectacles and the battle of images, and by turning spectators into passive consumers, could also be used to help invigorate democratic debate and participation. Indeed, teaching critical media literacy should be a participatory, collaborative proj- ect. Watching television shows or films together could promote productive discussions between teachers and students (or parents and children), with an emphasis on eliciting stu- dent views, producing a variety of interpretations of media texts, and teaching basic prin- ciples of hermeneutics and criticism. Students and youths are often more media savvy, knowledgeable, and immersed in media culture than their teachers, and can contribute to the educational process through sharing their ideas, perceptions, and insights. Along with critical discussion, debate, and analysis, teachers ought to be guiding students in an inquiry process that deepens their critical exploration of issues that affect them and society. Because media culture is often part and parcel of students’ identity and a most powerful cul- tural experience, teachers must be sensitive in criticizing artifacts and perceptions that stu- dents hold dear, yet an atmosphere of critical respect for difference and inquiry into the nature and effects of media culture should be promoted (Luke, 1997).

A major challenge in developing critical media literacy, however, results from the fact that it is not a pedagogy in the traditional sense with firmly established principles, a canon of texts, and tried-and-true teaching procedures. It requires a democratic pedagogy that involves teachers sharing power with students as they join together in the process of unveiling myths and challeng- ing hegemony. Moreover, the material of media culture is so polymorphous, multivalent, and pol- ysemic, that it necessitates sensitivity to different readings, interpretations, perceptions of the complex images, scenes, narratives, meanings, and messages of media culture, which in its own ways is as complex and challenging to critically decipher as book culture.

Teaching critical media literacy involves occupation of a site above the dichotomy of fandom and censor. One can teach how media culture provides significant statements or insights about the social world, empowering visions of gender, race, and class, or complex medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 18

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aesthetic structures and practices, thereby putting a positive spin on how it can provide sig- nificant contributions to education. Nevertheless, we ought to indicate also how media cul- ture can advance sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice, as well as misinformation, problematic ideologies, and questionable values, accordingly pro- moting a dialectical approach to the media.

Critical media literacy gives individuals power over their culture and thus enables people to create their own meanings and identities to shape and transform the material and social conditions of their culture and society. Many critical educators have been promoting these goals, including Masterman (1994) who proposes that media education aim for critical auton- omy, empowering students to be independently critical. Robert Ferguson (2001) suggests that our relationships with media are not autonomous; rather, they depend on taking posi- tions related to social contexts. Because we are always taking sides, Ferguson calls for crit- ical solidarity, which he describes as “a means by which we acknowledge the social dimensions of our thinking and analysis. It is also a means through which we may develop our skills of analysis and relative autonomy” (p. 42). Critical solidarity means teaching stu- dents to interpret information and communication within humanistic, social, historical, political, and economic contexts for them to understand the interrelationships and con- sequences of their actions and lifestyles. If we combine critical autonomy with critical sol- idarity, we can teach students to be independent and interdependent critical thinkers, who will be less dependent on media framing and representations. Critical media literacy offers an excellent framework to teach critical solidarity and the skills that can challenge the social construction of information and communication, from hypertext to video games. The absence of critical analysis and production in most schools, along with the last decades of unprecedented technological innovations and globalization, make critical media literacy so vital and timely. The current fascination with technology and interest in com- puter literacy has been receiving significant public support yet lacks a critical-analytical framework to analyze these new tools. The focus on acquiring technological skills, as if tech- nology were neutral, has left a major pedagogical void that presents an excellent opportu- nity for critical media literacy. Carmen Luke (2004) suggests that if media literacy can be brought into schools through “the ‘backdoor’ into computer literacy education,” then it may have a better chance of being accepted and greatly improving computer education. We agree with this position and would propose that critical media literacy be applied to new infor- mation and computer technologies, as well as more (now) traditional broadcast media. We believe twenty-first century schools must change the way they teach by empower- ing students to analyze and use media and technology to express their views and visions in critical solidarity with the world around them. Literacy instruction needs to change, and this movement must come from both the top down and the bottom up. This is a big proj- ect and to be successful, it requires that teachers, administrators, and policy makers work medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 19

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together. Literacy must be reframed to expand the definition of a text to include new modes of communication and to enhance our critical analytical processes to explore audience recep- tion, ideology, social justice, and oppression, as well as the political, economic, historical, and social contexts within which all messages are written and read. Cultural studies and a radically democratic transformative pedagogy offer the theoret- ical and pedagogical background to inform practice that can democratically reconstruct edu- cation and society. To move forward with critical media literacy we need to lobby for better funding for education, especially where it is needed most—in the inner cities and other oppressed areas. We need to challenge the false wisdom of high stakes testing and deficit thinking, as well as to train teachers in critical pedagogy and empower them to use their creativity more than scripted curricula. In addition, we need conferences, teacher educa- tion, and continuing professional development that teach cultural studies, critical peda- gogy, and practical applications for how to engage students in the classroom with critical media literacy concepts. We recommend that media education programs be instituted throughout K-12 and that linking media literacy with production become a regular practice. Standards for media lit- eracy programs should include criticizing how media reproduce racism, sexism, homopho- bia, and other prejudices and encouraging students to find their own voices in criticizing media culture and producing alternative media. Media education should be linked with edu- cation for democracy, where students are encouraged to become informed and media lit- erate participants in their societies. Critical media literacy should thus be linked with information literacy , technological literacy , the arts, and the social sciences, and the dem- ocratic reconstruction of education. Critical media literacy should be a common thread that runs through all curricular areas because it deals with communication and society. The basis of media literacy is that all messages are constructed, and when education begins with this understanding of the social construction of knowledge, the literacy process can expand critical inquiry into multiple forms of information and communication, includ- ing television and other modes of media culture, the Internet, advertising, artificial intel- ligence, biotechnology, and, of course, books. Literacy is thus a necessary condition to equip people to participate in the local, national, and global economy, culture, and polity. As Dewey (1916/1997) argued, education is necessary to enable people to participate in democracy, for without an educated, informed, and literate citizenry, strong democracy is impossible. Moreover, there are crucial links between literacy, democracy, empowerment, and social participation in politics and everyday life. Hence, without developing adequate literacies, differences between “haves” and “have nots” cannot be overcome, and individ- uals and groups will be left out of the emerging global economy, networked society, and culture. Living in what Marshall McLuhan (1964/1997) coined the global village, it is not enough to merely understand media, students need to be empowered to critically negoti- ate meanings, engage with the problems of misrepresentations and underrepresentations, and produce their own alternative media. Addressing issues of inequality and injustice in media representations can be a powerful starting place for problem-posing transformative medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 20

20 Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education

education. Critical media literacy offers the tools and framework to help students become subjects in the process of deconstructing injustices, expressing their own voices, and strug- gling to create a better society.

1 On multiple literacies, see Kellner (1998, 2004). 2 On the new forms of Internet culture and online communities,see Kahn & Kellner (2003 and 2005). 3 See Kellner & Share, 2005. In 2006, the two national US media literacy organizations boasted mem- berships of about 500 people each. 4 This is part of The Alliance for a Media Literate America definition available online at: http://www.amlainfo.org/medialit/index.php 5 Hammer's course website can be viewed at: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/05F/womencm178-1/ 6 Canada's Ontario Ministry of Education's Eight Key Concepts, British Film Institute's Signpost Questions, The Center for Media Literacy's Five Core Concepts, and so on. See the latter's website at: http://www.medialit.org/bp_mlk.html 7 For examples of analyses of media literacy and pedagogy, see Cortés (2000), Fleming (1993), Giroux (1992, 1993, 1994, 1996), Giroux and McLaren (1994), Giroux & Shannon (1997), Goodman (2003), Kellner (1995a, 1995b), Kellner & Ryan (1988), Luke (1994, 1997), Masterman (1985/2001), McLaren, Hammer, Sholle, and Reilly (1995), Potter (2001), Semali and Watts Pailliotet (1999), Schwoch, White & Reilly (1992), Sholle and Densky (1994). See also the work of Barry Duncan and the Canadian Association for Media Literacy (website: http://www.nald.ca/province/que/litcent/media.htm) and the Los Angeles based Center for Media Literacy (www.medialit.org). It is a scandal that there are not more efforts to promote media literacy throughout the school system from K-12 and into the university. Perhaps the ubiquity of computer and multimedia culture will awaken educators and citizens to the importance of developing media literacy to create individuals empowered to intelligently access, read, interpret, and criticize contemporary media and cyberculture.

Ang, I. (2002). On the politics of empirical audience research. In M.G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: key works (pp. 177–197). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bagdikian, B. H. (2004). The new media monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press. Barthes, R. (1998). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Berman, G., et al. (Producers), & Whedon, J., et al. (Directors). (1997–2003). Buffy the vampire slayer [Television series]. USA: WBTN and UPN. Buckingham, D. (1994). Children talking television: The making of television literacy. London: Falmer. Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Collins, P. H. (2004). Learning from the outsider with: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. In S. Harding (Ed.), Feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies (pp. 103–126). New York: Routledge. Cortés, C. (2000). The children are watching: How the media teach about diversity. New York: Teachers College Press. Courts, P. L. (1998). Multicultural literacies: Dialect, discourses, and diversity. New York: Peter Lang. medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 21

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Dewey, J. (1916/1997). Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press. Ferguson, R. (1998). Representing ‘race’: Ideology, identity and the media. New York: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, R. (2001). Media education and the development of critical solidarity. Media Education Journal, 30, 37–43. Ferguson, R. (2004). The media in question. London: Arnold. Fiske, J. (1990). Introduction to communication studies (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Fleming, D. (1993). Media teaching. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Giroux, H. (1997). Pedagogy of the politics of hope: Theory, culture, and schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giroux, H. (1999). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Giroux, H., & McLaren, P. (Eds.). (1994). Between borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media: A critical guide to literacy, video production, and social change. New York: Teachers College Press. Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language (pp. 128–138). London: Hutchinson. Hammer, R. (2006). Teaching critical media literacies: Theory, praxis and empowerment. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 2(1). Retrieved February 17, 2006, from http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/v012/iss1/art7/ Harding, S. (Ed.). (2004). Feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. New York: Routledge. Hartsock, N. (1997). The feminist standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. In S. Kemp & J. Squires (Eds.), Feminisms (pp. 152–160). New York: Oxford University Press. Hobbs, R. (1998). The seven great debates in the media literacy movement. Journal of Communication, 48(1), 16–32. Hobbs, R. (2007). Reading the media: Media literacy in high school English. New York: Teachers College. hooks, b. (1996). Reel to real: Race, sex, and class at the movies. New York: Routledge. Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2003). Internet subcultures and oppositional politics. In D. Muggleton (Ed.), The post-subcultures reader (pp. 299–314). London: Berg. Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2005). Oppositional politics and the Internet: A critical/reconstructive approach. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 75–100. Kassar, M., & Vajna, A. G. (Executive Producers), & Kotcheff (Director). (1982). Rambo: First blood [Motion picture]. United States: Orion. Katzman, L., et al. (Producers), & Preece, M., et al. (Directors). (1978–1991). Dallas [Television series]. New York: CBS. Kellner, D. (1990). Television and the crisis of democracy. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press. Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmod- ern. London and New York: Routledge. medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 22

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Kellner, D. (1998). Multiple literacies and critical pedagogy in a multicultural society, Educational Theory, 48(1), 103–122. Kellner, D. (2001). Grand theft 2000: Media spectacle and a stolen election. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Kellner, D. (2003). Media spectacle. London and New York: Routledge. Kellner, D. (2004a). Technological transformation, multiple literacies, and the re-visioning of education, E-Learning, 1(1), 9-37. Kellner, D. (2004b). Buffy the vampire slayer as spectacular allegory. In S. Steinberg & J. Kincheloe (Eds.), Kinderculture: The corporate construction of childhood (2nd ed.) (pp. 49–71). Boulder, CO: Westview. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2005). Toward critical media literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations and policy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26 (3), 369–386. Kellner, D., with R. Kahn). (2003). Internet subcultures and oppositional politics. In D. Muggleton (Ed.), The post-subcultures reader (pp. 299–314). London: Berg. Kellner, D., & Ryan, M. (1988). Camera politica: The politics and ideology of contemporary Hollywood film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1997). Shaping the social practices of reading. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching & learning textual practice. Sydney: Allen & Unwin; and Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes on the four resources model. Reading Online. Retrieved February 12, 2006, from http://www.readingonline.org/research/lukefreebody.html Luke, C. (1994). Feminist pedagogy and critical media literacy. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 18(2), 30–47. Luke, C. (1997). Media literacy and cultural studies. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching & learning textual practice (pp. 19–49). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc. Luke, C. (2004). Re-crafting media and ICT literacies. In D. E. Alvermann (Ed.),. Adolescents and literacies in a digital world. (pp. 132–146). New York: Peter Lang. Masterman, L. (1985/2001). Teaching the media. New York: Routledge. Masterman, L. (1994). A rationale for media education:First part. In L. Masterman & F. Mariet, Media edu- cation in 1990s’ Europe (pp. 5–87). Strasbourg: Council of Europe. McChesney, R. (1999a). Rich media, poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McChesney, R. (1999b, November 29). The new global media: It’s a small world of big conglomerates [Special issue]. The Nation, 269(18), 11–15. McChesney, R. (2004). The problem of the media: U.S. communication politics in the 21st century. New York: Monthly Review Press. McLaren, P., Hammer, R., Sholle, D., & Reilly, S. (1995). Rethinking media literacy: A critical pedagogy of rep- resentation. New York: Peter Lang. McLuhan, M. (1964/1997). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Narayan, U. (2004). The project of feminist epistemology: Perspectives from a nonwestern feminist. In S. Harding (Ed.), Feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies (pp. 213–224). New York: Routledge. The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 23

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Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin Books. Potter, J. (2001). Media literacy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Schwoch, J., White, M., & Reilly, S. (1992). Media knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press. Semali, L., & Watts Pailliotet, A. (1999). Intermediality: The teacher’s handbook of critical media literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sholle, D., & Denski, S. (1994). Media education and the (re)production of culture. Westport, CT.: Bergin & Garvey. Snyder, I. (Ed.). (2002) Silicon literacies. London and New York: Routledge. Vasquez, V. (2003) Getting beyond “I like the book”: Creating space for critical literacy in k-6 classrooms. Newark, NJ: International Reading Association. Weil, D. K. (1998). Toward a critical multicultural literacy. New York: Peter Lang.

critical media literacy democracy and the reconstruction of education

I also completed and sent to press Vol. 5 Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation , of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcus, edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce which will appear with Routledge in 2010. I published Herbert Marcuse. Art and Liberation. Volume Four, Collected Papers of Herbet Marcuse , edited with Introduction by Douglas Kellner, with Routledge in 2006.

Two books appeared in 2009 coauthored with my students at UCLA which constitute one of the first systematic attempts to show the critiques of education by Herbert Marcuse and his pedagogical alternatives in Marcuse’s Challenge to Education , co-edited with K. Daniel Cho, Tyson E. Lewis, and Clayton Pierce (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009). This is a reader that has many essays pertinent to Marcuse’s critique and reconstruction of education. I also participated in publication of an Introduction On Marcuse: Critique, Liberation, and Reschooling in the Radical Pedagogy of Herbert Marcuse , co-authored with Tyson E. Lewis and Clayton Pierce appearing with Sense Publishers in 2009.

My other major work during 2009 constitutes a reader Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches , co-edited with Rhonda Hammer appearing with Peter Lang Publishing. This text contains an overview by Douglas Kellner and Rhonda Hammer of media and cultural studies and a new paradigm that combines media/communication studies with cultural studies. Contributions engage contemporary media, consumer, and digital culture.

My 2008 book Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombings to the Virginia Tech Massacre , published by Paradigm Press, won the 2008 AESA award as best book in the field of education. As school shootings and acts of domestic terrorism and violence intensify this book is increasingly relevant to our present condition.

In 2005, I published Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy , which argues that 'media spectacles' have come to dominate news covereage and distract the public from the substance of real public issues. Exploring the role of media spectacle in the 9/11 attacks and subsequent Terror Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it documents the centrality of media politics in advancing foreign policy agendas and militarism.

In 2005, Rainer Winter edited in Germany Medienkultur, Kritik und Demokratie. Der Douglas Kellner Reader , which collects in German translation essays on new technologies and new literacies; cultural and media studies; the reconstruction of education and other themes of my recent work.

In 2004, I edited the third volume of The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s . In the other sections of this website, you can find the full texts of many of my previous books and essays archived and made freely available, as well as a number of streaming audio and video files. Here are some of the latest essays added to the website:

International Peace and Security
Higher Education and Research in Africa
Andrew Carnegie Fellows
Great Immigrants
Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy
Reporting Requirements
Modification Requests
Communications FAQs
Grants Database
Philanthropic Resources
Grantmaking Highlights
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Media Center

Media Literacy for Students in a Digital Age

Whether you call it digital, information, news, visual, or media literacy – it is vital for civic engagement and democracy

High school students sit next to each other, each on their computers, at Manor New Tech High School, in Manor, Texas. (Photo Illustration: Carnegie Corporation of New York; Photo: Getty Images)

No facet of our lives is untouched by media. Our public spaces are infused with an unending cascade of media messages promoting an array of corporations, causes, candidates, events, and teams. Social media has reshaped our culture, even for those who never log on. And AI is making it easier than ever before for anyone to create content that feels real — even when it’s not.

This presents schools and educators with a new challenge. In this rapidly evolving digital world, literacy means more than knowing how to use digital tools. Powerful computers now fit in the palms of our hands, and the resulting access to information and audiences requires new thinking and reasoning skills, not just knowledge of how to use a device or app.

Yet media literacy education is a contested domain with divergent ideas about its purposes and best practices. While many educators have met the challenge with energy and creativity, a lack of school, district, or statewide coordination around media literacy education has left a dizzying array of practices and priorities. Some teachers dismiss media literacy education as extraneous or view it as someone else’s job. Some address media issues that are important to them, without considering the specific needs or experiences of the students they teach. The result creates unnecessary repetition for some students while others receive no media literacy instruction at all. The status quo is a recipe for reinforcing existing inequities.

What Is Media Literacy Education?

Media literacy education teaches students to routinely apply critical inquiry, reading, and reflection skills to all forms of media that they encounter, use, and create. Rather than offering predetermined interpretations, educators ask students what they notice and then help them to develop the skills and knowledge to notice more, creating a space where everyone can think more deeply.

Just as media exists in all areas of our lives, media literacy can’t be reduced to a single lesson or something that’s separate from the rest of school. It can’t be the job of one educator or librarian; it needs to be integrated into a student’s entire education.

A lesson, activity, project, curriculum, or initiative is likely to meet the goals of media literacy education if it

goes beyond merely using media to teach; media are used to help students acquire new or improved critical thinking skills.
teaches students to ask their own questions about media messages rather than just responding to questions that the teacher asks.
teaches students to ask questions of all media (not just the things that they find suspicious or objectionable, and not just screen or digital media but also printed media like books or posters).
includes media representing diverse points of view (e.g., does not reduce complex debates to only two sides and/or actively seeks alternative media sources).
encourages students to seek multiple sources of information and helps them learn to determine which sources are most appropriate or reliable for any given task.
requires students to justify opinions or interpretations with specific, document-based evidence.
seeks rich readings of texts, rather than asking people to arrive at a predetermined “true” or “correct” meaning.
does not replace the investigative process with declarations about what a teacher or a cultural critic believes to be true.
incorporates an examination of how media structures (e.g., ownership, sponsorship, or distribution) influence how people make meaning of media messages.
teaches students to ask questions when they are making (not just analyzing) media, helping them to notice and evaluate their choices, and also to understand that their social media posts are media.

How Is Media Literacy Connected to Civic Engagement?

If a central purpose of schooling is to prepare future generations to exercise their civic responsibilities, then educators must encourage students to investigate rather than doubt media sources. They go from being consumers to interrogators of news and information.

The specific strategies of media literacy education are designed to provide students with the skills, knowledge, habits, and dispositions necessary to become the lifelong learners, critical and creative thinkers, effective communicators, and engaged, ethical community members and citizens needed to sustain a vibrant democracy in a digital world.

Media literacy students are given opportunities to hear diverse, evidence-based views. Freed from the need to convince others that there is only one right answer (and it must be theirs), students learn to engage in dialogue for the purpose of learning rather than winning. In the process, they learn about the lesson’s subject matter and about one another. Speaking things out loud can lead to surprising and powerful insights.

It can also build community and lay a strong foundation for civic engagement. That’s because, rather than uniform agreement, media literacy uses the process of logic and evidence-based inquiry as the group’s common ground. So, media literacy discussions provide excellent practice for living in a nation that values pluralism.

Media literacy skills involve an understanding that all media are constructed, that is, media messages are always the product of human choices, and demonstrates an understanding of how and why those choices are made. These are foundational, essential skills needed to navigate life in a digital world and participate effectively as a citizen in a healthy democracy. They are not the only skills, just the starting point.

Faith Rogow is an independent scholar and the Media Literacy Education Maven at InsightersEducation.com , which she founded in 1996 to help people learn from media and one another. She has taught thousands of teachers, students, child care professionals, media professionals, parents and guardians to understand and harness the power of media.

This article is an edited excerpt from Preparing for Civic Responsibility in our Digital Age: A Framework for Educators to Ensure Media Literacy Education for Every Student (2023), published by DemocracyReady NY, a nonpartisan coalition and a project of the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, and supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Andrew Selee, president of Corporation grantee Migration Policy Institute, assesses how shifts in American immigration policy might reverberate across the region and more broadly around the world

A cross-ideological coalition is working to expand and improve civic learning across states

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VIDEO

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Charles Coughlin, The Nazi Priest
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Youth Testimony: Why Media and Information Literacy is important?

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PDF Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education
Critical media literacy should thus be linked with information literacy, technological literacy, the arts, and the social sciences, and the dem- ocratic reconstruction of education. Critical media literacy should be a common thread that runs through all curricular areas because it deals with communication and society.
Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education
Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education. D. Kellner, J. Share. Published 2007. Education, Political Science. The world we live in today is very different than the world that most of us remember from our childhood. The twenty-first century is a media saturated, technologically dependent, and globally connected world.
Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education
PDF | On Jan 1, 2007, Douglas Kellner and others published Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
PDF Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations
ISSN 0159-6306 (print)/ISSN 1469-3739 (online)/05/030369-18 # 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/01596300500200169. to the problems and challenges of contemporary life, engaged teachers must expand the concept of literacy and develop new curricula and pedagogies. We would resist, however, extreme claims that the era of the book and print ...
Critical Media Literacy: crucial policy choices for a twenty-first
In response to these changes in society, critical media literacy that teaches the skills of analysis and production in multimedia as well as print literacy is essential to meet the twenty-first-century needs of participatory democracy. Critical media literacy expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication and ...
Digital Technologies, Multi-Literacies, and Democracy: Toward a
Jeff Share and I wrote a The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education (2019) in which we attempt to lay out and illustrate key concepts, principles, and practices of what we call "critical media literacy." The "critical" component involves engaging the dimensions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in ...
Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education
The world we live in today is very different than the world that most of us remember from our childhood. The twenty-first century is a media saturated, technologically dependent, and globally connected world. However, most education in the United States has not kept up with advances in technology or educational research. In our global information society, it is insufficient to teach students ...
Critical Media Literacy: Crucial Policy Choices for a Twenty-First
Focusing on media literacy policy in the USA, different approaches commonly used for teaching media literacy are explored and a hybrid critical media literacy framework is proposed. In this day and age of standardized high-stakes testing and corporate solicitations in public education, radical democracy depends on a Deweyan reconceptualization ...
Critical Media Literacy in Teacher Education, Theory, and Practice
Similar findings were mentioned after Joanou (2017) analyzed data about a critical media literacy (CML) class taught to master's-level practicing K-12 educators. Joanou (2017) reported, "critical media literacy helps bridge the gap between theory and practice" (p. 40). The use of media texts and popular culture can provide relevant ...
Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era
Critical media literacy (CML) education is an approach to teaching about power, ideology, and hegemony through media. ... Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education. In Macedo D., Steinberg S. R. (Eds.), Media literacy: A reader (pp. 3-23). Peter Lang. Google Scholar. Lim M. (2020). Algorithmic enclaves: Affective ...
Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations
Despite decades of struggle since the 1970s by individuals and groups, media education is still only reaching a small percentage of K-12 schools in the US. ... In this paper we set forth some models of media literacy, delineate key concepts of critical media literacy, and then examine some of the most active organizations in the USA and ...
Critical Theory and Pedagogy
Critical Theory and Pedagogy presents a theory for decolonizing, democratizing, and reconstructing education in order to meet the challenges of a global and technological society. A democratic and intersectional reconstruction of education must build on and synthesize perspectives of classical philosophy of education, Deweyean radical ...
Critical Media Literacy framework: Conceptual Understandings and
This 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 ...
Critical Media Education, Radical Democracy and the Reconstruction of
Critical Media Education, Radical Democracy and the Reconstruction of Education
The Critical Media Literacy Guide
The Critical Media Literacy Guide is a powerful resource to analyze and challenge representations and narratives of multiple forms of identity, privilege, and oppression. Since the struggle for social justice and democracy require new theories and pedagogies to maneuverer the constantly changing terrain, this book is essential for all educators.
Critical Media Literacy as Engaged Pedagogy
Given the escalating role of media and new media in our everyday lives, there is an urgent need for courses in Critical Media Literacy, at all levels of schooling. The empowering nature of these kinds of courses is demonstrated through a discussion of a Critical Media Literacy course taught at UCLA.
Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education
Critical media literacy should thus be linked with information literacy, technological literacy, the arts, and the social sciences, and the dem- ocratic reconstruction of education. Critical media literacy should be a common thread that runs through all curricular areas because it deals with communication and society.
Douglas Kellner, George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair, UCLA
Critical Media Literacy, Democracy and the Reconstruction of Education (w/ Jeff Share) Critical Media Literacy is Not an Option (w/ Jeff Share) The Media and the Crisis of Democracy in the Age of Bush-2; The Dangers of Human Cloning (w/ Steven Best) Communication, Democratization, and Modernity: Critical Reflections on Habermas and Dewey (w ...
Critical Media Literacy as Transformative Pedagogy
This chapter provides a theoretical framework of critical media literacy (CML) pedagogy and examples of practical implementation in K-12 and teacher education. It begins with a brief discussion of literature indicating the need for educators to use a critical approach to media. The historical trajectory of CML and key concepts are then reviewed. Following this, the myths of "neutrality ...
Media Literacy for Students in a Digital Age
The specific strategies of media literacy education are designed to provide students with the skills, knowledge, habits, and dispositions necessary to become the lifelong learners, critical and creative thinkers, effective communicators, and engaged, ethical community members and citizens needed to sustain a vibrant democracy in a digital world.
A New Media Literacy: Using Film Theory for a Pedagogy That Makes
For students to become well-rounded and inclusive media makers, educators need to help students gain critical media literacy skills when producing content. This can be done through understanding and using film theory, which demonstrates to educators how canonized visual language is systemically discriminatory.

Digital Technologies, Multi-Literacies, and Democracy: Toward a Reconstruction of Education

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Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education

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Article contents

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Introduction

Teacher Education

Teaching Teachers Critical Media Literacy

Table 1. Critical Media Literacy Framework

Voices From the Field

Teaching With Media

Teaching About Media

Evaluating Information and Advertising

Creating Different Types of Media

Increasing Engagement

Critical Media Literacy

Creating Counter Narratives and Supporting Students’ Voices

Politics of Representation

Making Critical Connections

Intent and Importance of Incorporating Critical Media Literacy

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Preview Citation

Critical Theory and Pedagogy

Table Of Contents

Chapter One

Biographical notes

Key Subject Areas

Critical Media Education, Radical Democracy and the Reconstruction of Education

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