Media Literacy Trough Critical Thinking

This blog post was developed based on the paper "Media literacy through critical thinking" by Chris M. Worsnop, which can be found at: https://depts.washington.edu/nwmedia/sections/nw_center/curriculum_docs/teach_combine.pdf. 

What is Media Literacy? 

It is by now a cliché to say that we live in a media age. For more than twenty years we have been hearing statistics about the number of hours people spend watching TV, listening to popular music and radio. More recently we can add to this list the other hours spent at computer keyboards or in shopping malls. The point of mentioning this new arrangement of human time is not to bewail it as a bad habit, or to moan about it as time wasted, but simply to point it out as a fact. The fact is this: young people today receive nearly all their information through popular culture mass communication; yet schools do little to help them understand popular culture. 

• We are presently living in conditions similar to those in the dark and middle ages when print literacy was limited to a very few privileged people, who consequently enjoyed power that was denied to everyone else. Most of today's population is ignorant when it comes to understanding mass communication. 
• Analyzing mass communication is a set of skills essential for survival in today's society. If we do not learn to control the mass communication that dominates our world we should expect that it will (continue to) control us. 

The materials presented in this manual are intended to begin to fill that gap. By offering teachers a model for teaching students the skills of media analysis, they first acknowledge the importance of mass communication in students' lives, and second, teach students how to partake in the world of mass communication.

Media Education and Literacy

Media teachers do not deny for a moment that print literacy is important, and they give every support to the teaching of print literacy. They also point out, though, that 21st-century culture is not as strongly rooted in print as was the culture of earlier centuries. 19th and 20th Century developments of radio, film, recording, mass production and advertising, television, computers, the Internet have all impacted the culture of our time to the point where a huge proportion of the information we are exposed to is screen-based not paper-based; image-based not word-based. 

The reason that reading and writing were so strongly embedded in the school curriculum in the 19th-century was that the culture at that time was almost exclusively founded in print. In a time when the base of our culture has expanded so greatly, we can not claim to be studying our culture unless we provide a prominent place in the school curriculum - beside print, not instead of it- for the kinds of literacy needed to understand the new media. The old rationale was that everyone should learn to be the master of language, or else they would be doomed to be its servants. The modern rationale merely adds the new media into the slogan beside language - not in place of language. 

The skills of thinking critically about mass communication are essential survival skills in a technological, consumer society such as ours.  The purpose of these materials is to assess students’ abilities to think critically when analyzing mass communication.  But beyond that, the experience and knowledge students acquire from their study of this material will be applicable in all subject areas, in all careers, and in their daily lives.

While using the materials presented here, students will be guided through a series of activities introducing them to skills that will enable them to think critically about media.  Many terms, techniques, and concepts will be introduced.  Tools to measure student understanding are provided throughout Media Literacy Through Critical Thinking. 

Because these texts are contemporary, the texts will eventually become dated.  Below are suggestions on how to keep your files updated: 

• Have colleagues and students bring in unwanted magazines, newspapers, etc. for continuous supply of media texts. 
• Try to develop the habit of clipping, taping, downloading, and filing up-to-date materials that can take the place of or supplement the ones in the manual. 
• Have students perform this clipping, taping, downloading, and filing task as they encounter various samples of media texts. Students may work individually on many of the activities or in groups.  You may already use group interaction within your classroom and know what group size and composition will lead to effective groups.  As always, be specific in communicating your expectations for group behavior to your students.

You Need a Conceptual Framework

A geography teacher once told me that to understand geology, a person needed to know only three things that explained everything else there was to know about the subject. These three things were the underpinnings of the subject: they formed the framework on which everything else depended.
Every subject in school needs such a conceptual framework. Teaching or learning a subject without understanding its conceptual framework is merely rote.
The conceptual framework for media education points out that media texts possess many components and include many influences.
Each text, for instance, is a unique PRODUCT, and media texts or products are the work of various media INDUSTRIES. Media texts contain values and points of view. The audience itself plays an important part in determining the meaning of the text, a process that emphasizes the importance of being aware of the values that reside within the audience as well as those that are in the text.
In Media Education, the conceptual framework is usually organized around what are called key concepts.  There are many versions of these key concepts, and in each the number of key concepts presented varies from as few as four to as many as 27.
All of these sources cover the same ground in the description of Media Education: 

• Media are constructions 

• Media and audiences play interactive roles 

• Media are (commercial) institutions 

• Media contain values

• All media are carefully wrapped packages 

• Media construct versions of reality

• Friction creates heat 

• Heat rises 

• Water runs downhill

These four maxims constitute the basic minimum description of a conceptual framework for studying the media.  In Media Literacy Through Critical Thinking, the first of the four key concepts above has been split into two separate parts:

In Media Literacy Through Critical Thinking, the third key concept—Media are interpreted through individual lenses—is the same as the “audience” key concept. The fourth key concept—Media are about money—is the same as the “institutions” key concept. The fifth key concept—Media promote an agenda—is the same as the “values” key concept.

Everything that is taught and everything that is learned needs to be filtered through these conceptual understandings about media.