Mapping the Media Education Terrain
Created by Marie Heath, Dan Krutka, and Cathryn van Kessel, 2022
Most educators recognize a need to teach students to think critically about the information they encounter through different types of media. By media, we are referring to any technology that mediates, or represents, information about the world. Books, newspapers, websites, and infographics mediate through the print, images, and their design; Radio and podcasts mediate information through the audio, sound effects and their pace; Television and social media mediate information through complex combinations of audio, visual, and textual information. These media are created by people with different levels of power, influence, and purposes from multinational media corporations to independent bloggers.
The most common name for this curriculum in schools is “media literacy.” Media literacy often focuses on helping students decipher the credibility of media content and sources for informed decision-making. As the “literacy” metaphor suggests, media literacy has its roots in focusing on the “reading” and “writing” of content. However, there are other forms of media analysis that require different types of approaches. In some cases, we consciously make meaning about media and, in other instances, we unconsciously experience media. Media can normalize some people’s identities or experiences and make invisible, misrepresent, or malign the identities and experiences of others. Media is important to study because it can change who we are, how we feel, and even create new realities that affect the world in profound ways.
Therefore, we will use the term “media education” here to recognize these different approaches and their purposes, solutions, and limitations. We believe that quality media education experiences are most likely to occur when teachers make thoughtful choices about which approaches best align with their pedagogical aims for the students and communities with whom they work. In the following table, we share initial efforts to support teacher decision-making by mapping out different approaches to media education. Where will your media education journey begin?
Think about Sources
Explanation
A think about sources approach to media education encourages students to focus on analyzing the content of media to determine whether the source of information is credible. In this approach, “media literacy” or “civic online reasoning” address the problem of misinformation, propaganda, or misleading information by asking students to critically think about who is providing the information in posts, videos, or stories, and whether that information is trustworthy. However, our responses to media content, particularly television or social media, are not always rational. Analyzing media content does not always account for how people view media content through their prior beliefs, experiences, and feelings. It also does not recognize how people experience different types of media such as print or video news differently even if the content is similar. People’s responses to media from certain sources can be unconscious, especially in a fast-paced media environment of media-rich videos, social media feeds, and hyperlinked websites that people must navigate today.
Resources
The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) aims for a media literacy that “empowers people to be critical thinkers and makers, effective communicators, and active citizens.” They focus on teaching students “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication” (see NAMLE’s definition, principles, and questions for more). While NAMLE primarily encourages people to think about sources, they also touch on other media education approaches such as reflect on feelings and identify power. The Stanford History Education Group’s (SHEG) “civic online reasoning” curriculum focuses on teaching “students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.” This curriculum includes three questions: Who’s behind the information? What’s the evidence? What do other sources say? They also offer lessons where students analyze the credibility of posts from sources such as Wikipedia or Twitter, and apply strategies such as lateral reading that encourage students to leave a website to investigate a source. They even partnered with Crash Course to create 10-video course on “Navigating Digital Information.” Investigate the curriculum and resources from each of these organizations to encourage your students to think about sources.
Respond to Posts
Explanation
A respond to posts approach to media education offers an approach that helps students make quick decisions about what media to consume or share. This approach addresses the problem of decision-making about credibility in a fast-paced media environment of social media feeds, hyperlinked websites, and YouTube videos. Analyzing all sources for their credibility can be unrealistic with so much content and backfire if students end up spending lots of time with misinformation. A respond to posts approach encourages quick decision-making about what content to ignore. However, this approach “is designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research” (Warzel, 2021). It also requires people to show restraint that can be difficult to sustain in a media environment filled with content to play on people’s emotions. This approach may not sufficiently address people’s personal feelings, sensory differences in media, or the influence of media power.
Resources
Michael Caulfield of Washington State University Vancouver developed four SIFT moves that students can use when looking at a source: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context. This approach is intended to help people make quick decisions when faced with unfamiliar sources and content so they can avoid spending time with misinformation and turn attention to credible information. Read Michael’s blog post, this 2021 New York Times feature, or complete this SIFT starter course to encourage your students to respond to posts.
Reflect on Feelings
Explanation
A reflect on feelings approach to media education encourages students to focus on how their prior beliefs, feelings, and worldviews affect the ways they view, or deflect, media content. This approach recognizes that emotions and unconscious biases can prevent people from engaging with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, lead them to justify their previously held assessments of what makes evidence valid, and lead them to deflect information that challenges their opinions and beliefs. For example, stories shared by friends with similar belief systems or politicians we support can be viewed differently than stories from people with whom we often disagree or politicians we dislike. While this emotionally-informed approach can help students reflect on how their feelings affect media, it should be combined with approaches aimed at analyzing information and determining whether sources are credible.
Resources
A psychosocial approach to media education addresses both how our minds (psycho-) and society (-social) interact with and affect media experiences. Cathryn van Kessel created an explanation of psycho-social approaches for our Civics of Technology project and included strategies students can use before, immediately before, and after engagements with media to reflect on feelings.
Observe the Media
Explanation
An observe the media approach to media education encourages students to focus on the medium, or channel, through which information is conveyed. This approach addresses the problem that people do not recognize how the type of media may be more important than than the content. In other words, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out that “the medium is the message.” This means that people who write a book or newspaper article will convey a different message than a professionally produced news broadcast or amateur YouTube video. This approach recognizes that the dominant mediums in society—whether oral storytelling, books or newspapers, or television and social media—significantly shift the meaning of concepts such as community, politics, democracy. However, this approach largely ignores how messages or narratives sway public opinion on important issues that affect people’s lives.
Resources
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan offered figure/ground analysis as a way to study the medium. In this approach, the things we pay attention to are the figure, and the things we tend to ignore are part of the ground. You can find these terms explored in art and design, as artists play with how to place certain elements in the foreground and others in the background. McLuhan and other media ecologists wrote about media environments, and explored how media technologies (which to him was everything from radio and TV to air conditioning and automobiles) create a ground that we often ignore as we pay attention to media messages. Michelle Ciccone created an explanation of Figure/Ground analysis for our Civics of Technology project and our contributors have added activities you can try in your class to observe the media.
Identify Power
Explanation
An identify power approach to media education encourages students to critically examine the power media has in reproducing and shaping culture and society through representations, beliefs, and systems. This approach confronts the problem of how multinational corporations profit from the use media to maintain or gain power over beliefs, representations, and policies. This approach focuses on “who has power to create particular ways we see, know and understand the world, ourselves, and others.” Students should question “representations of class, gender, race, sexuality and other forms of identity,” and challenge “media messages that reproduce oppression and discrimination,” and celebrate “positive representations and beneficial aspects of media.” This approach recognizes that media messages are constructed and include values and points of view, interpreted or experienced differently by different people or groups, and often created for profit or power (Kellner & Share, 2005).
Resources
The Critical Media Project offers an example of the identify power approach to media education. Their curriculum includes “a range of curated playlists that can be used for individual lessons or extended over an entire unit” that “cover each of the main identity categories (e.g. gender, race & ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, age, disability) on the site as well as other focused topics that may be germane to school curriculum (e.g. immigration, bullying & self-esteem).” They also have do it yourself (DIY) activities such as an identity collage that can be “used to elicit class discussion and critical thinking” and help students identify power.
Choose Your Own Media Education Adventure
All educators can be media educators! Now that you have reviewed some of the media education options, it is time to choose your own media education adventure for your classroom. You can start by doing the following:
Identify at least two media education approaches that you would like to try in your classroom context. You should choose at least one approach from the first two approaches and one from the last three.
Describe which approaches you chose and why
Identify a specific lesson from one of those approaches which you can use, adapt, or modify from the media education approaches for your classroom. You will need to click on the links for each approach to learn more and find specific lessons.
Explain what problem your lesson addresses, solution(s) it offers, and limitations it includes.
Explain how you can address the limitations in your classroom.
