View from the front lines of media literacy

Journalism teacher Noreen Connolly recalls the day she got her “wake-up call,” as she put it, to begin teaching media literacy.
One of her students, a member of her high school newspaper staff at St. Benedict Prep in Newark, approached her with what he thought was a great story.
“It was all about 9/11 conspiracy theories. It was bazaar, what I thought was phony logic,” she remembered. “The building fell this way, therefore there had to have been a bomb inside the building. He didn’t even name his sources.
“We looked at various websites. One was a bazaar looking site in Denmark. I asked, how can you judge this as a legitimate source? He couldn’t answer,” she said.
Connolly started in earnest to build media literacy into her already crowded curriculum. Her basic credo?
“The news doesn’t just appear. Someone finds it and writes it and decides if it goes on the page,” she said. That lesson is built into everything she does.
Of course, her biggest challenge, and mine, is to get students to be inquisitive about world events and politics. We can’t help them to be critical about their media when they’re not interested in them the first place.
“Basically, they want to look at sports, games, sneakers, fashion or girls,” Connolly said.
Connolly’s school doesn’t have a formal curriculum for media literacy. Neither does mine. She’s in a private school in an urban setting, I’m in a public school in the surburbs. We follow our respective curricula. In public schools, media literacy shows up in the Core Curriculum Content Standards as a brief list of proficiencies appropriate for language arts, history or health class. Click on the Scope and Sequence prompt for more material and there’s not much there. Each clickable spot under “Grade 9-12” gives me a description of an assignment about Thoreau. I teach journalism. It seems I’m on my own to develop a good, solid program that teaches kids how to be critical media consumers.
There’s plenty of material on the Internet. Rutgers has a list of sites, having turned its own media literacy project into a gateway to get to others that are producing great material. For teachers, the best material includes research and lesson plans.
I was surprised to see that one of the best sites for teachers, the Media Education Lab at Temple University, is listed incorrectly on the Rutgers site.
Click on “Media Education Lab and you’re taken to a site called reneehobbs.com. Dr. Renee Hobbs is, indeed, the Temple professor and director of the Media Education Lab. The site you’ve been sent to, though, is apparently her personal site. Teachers beware. The correct address for the Media Education Lab is http://www.mediaeducationlab.com/.
Hobbs has done groundbreaking research in media literacy. Her biography lists her as a founding board director of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA). She wrote a scholarly article called, “Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement -- Circa 2001,” which outlined our challenges. It seems the experts can’t even agree on a way to proceed.
According to Hobbs and other writers on the subject, these experts often gather to set their agenda, then the conference degenerates into debates that rarely move beyond a statement of each side’s positions.
Hobbs’ list of the seven great debates hit on questions that Connolly and I face every day. Should media education aim to protect students from the evils of the mass media? As she points out, we do it at our peril, since kids hate the idea that they’re helpless victims of the media and need to be protected.
Should we teach media production as a part of literacy? Some educators argue that we’re just teaching kids how to imitate Hollywood with all of those bells and whistles, and not how to be critical media consumers.
Should we include political goals in our media lit instruction? For example, should we set goals to clean up commercial TV, or to boost public television?
Should we teach media literacy as a subject of its own, or add it to existing curricula? And should TV networks and newspapers finance our media literacy efforts, or do they have a conflict of interest?
Whatever we decide, we better do it quickly. Our students are in news vacuums, with little interest in entering the world of political discourse.
“I could care less if Palin is too inexperienced to be effective,” one of my students wrote for a blogging assignment. “It does not impact me personally. If a new foreign trade policy is started. . . that doesn't help me. If there is a crack down on illegal immigration. . .that doesn't help me. Even if by some miracle a politician can get gas prices to go down. . . I can't drive so that doesn't impact me!
“… Politics are pointless to everyone unless you are named Barack Obama or John McCain,” he wrote.
We’ve got work to do.