An Argument for Teaching Media Literacy

It is my understanding that our district, in an effort to save itself from government restructuring that would result in a loss of control over decisions made about the education we provide, has considered a return to more “traditional”, or my view, “old-fashioned” methods of teaching English/Language Arts. It is my recommendation that the board considers the following argument for teaching Media Literacy, that is, employing the various media to which students are regularly exposed in order to teach students how to analyze, how to synthesize, and how to discern meaning from various source of information.

First, the board argues that teaching Media Literacy detracts from the classic skills necessary to success: the ability to read and write. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a world where reading and writing are simple, straightforward tasks. Because of the development of new ways to read and new types of writing and publishing, students must not only learn how to decode letters and form them into sentences, but they must also learn how to derive meaning from a variety of multi-modal texts and conversely form these multi-modal texts in order to construct that meaning and be understood. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the emergence of media such as websites, interative movies and video games, and the widespread media convergence that exists forces students to now discern meaning and make decisions about meaning that is coming at them very forcefully from many angles. According to the Kaiser Foundation, the average American child spends over eight hours per day engaged in some sort of media consumption. This presents an especially ripe opportunity for those with an agenda, whether it be advertising or political, to saturate the minds of our students. If we decide that teaching our students only “basic” literacy will prepare them for the world they live in, we are gravely mistaken, and we will be sending our students into a manipulative world where they will be powerless to make their own educated decisions.

Thankfully, it appears that even if we decide to ignore the necessity of teaching Media Literacy in our schools our students have, through copious exposure and practice, decided on their own to learn to decode the messages that they are bombarded with. Students today are able to tell the difference between a reliable website and an unreliable one. I have shown this in my own classroom through the use of several wiki-based projects, where students are to create their own websites conveying information about other texts. When I have brought the use of various media into my classroom, the students have commented that it is something they are motivated to be involved in for several reasons. First, they recognize that their work will be judged by their peers, which for seventh graders, is far more motivating than any grade I could impose. Further, they get to make school part of their normal, habitual lives, which is something that does not occur when we force students to simply “sit down and read a book”. These days, research shows that students may sit down and read a book, but they are also taking breaks from the book to visit the book’s website, or to go to wikipedia to look up the origin of a literary allusion. If we are to reach our students in order to improve their ability to read and write for the world in which they live, we must teach them to read and write the texts they use everyday and we must recognize the value and importance of the social interaction they engage in over these texts. As an English teacher, I know that when a student connects the text to his or herself, he or she begins to truly own the information in it, and can therefore begin to construct meaning based upon it.