A Quick & Dirty Introduction to Media Literacy

media literacy: a quick and dirty introduction and a story about teaching media literacy with really cool fifth graders

I. What is media literacy?

Media literacy means a lot of things. In some ways it is what it sounds like: the ability to read or interpret media. But the kind of media literacy I'm talking about is more than being able to read – it's about how we read (or watch or listen) and what we look for. All of the media we consume or create is full of messages.

Some of these messages are obvious, and some are more hidden. Developing media literacy is about learning how to look for these messages and how to analyze where they come from and how they affect us and other folks who experience the media.

Media is something we consume.

Just as the food we eat affects our bodies in large and small ways, the media we consume fills our minds and our communities with messages that impact our health. If we consume media passively, these messages go unexamined.

Because television, the internet, print, radio, music, movies and other forms of media saturate our daily lives, we learn to experience media as an environment in which we live. This can make the messages, values and opinions in media almost invisible to us. Learning to consume media actively helps us to name and examine the messages we're receiving.

Media literacy means asking questions and talking back to media.

I first learned about media literacy in a feminist context, watching films like “Killing Us Softly (3)” and “Tough Guise”, which analyze messages about gender and power in advertising, television and movies. “Killing Us Softly (3)” is a lecture about advertising – both as a foundation of the

media literacy is a kind of critical thinking. It is a process, and an exercise that we must engage in to understand the world around us. Media can keep us informed, it can facilitate human exchange. Media can also define our experiences without our consent and leave out important stories that matter most to our own communities.

III. Why independent media?

Once we engage in an active relationship with media, and we approach it as a relationship that is taking place in the larger context of our culture, we begin to see the urgent need for independent media. We make our own media because there are stories that need telling. We make our own media because it is inexcusable that a few giant corporations feel entitled to the tools of mass communication. We learn how to access and make accessible technology and information, because these things are being used against us and we must fight back. We make media because how we express, interpret and consume media has an incalculable impact on our communities and our ideas about ourselves. We make media because we have beautiful stories to tell, music we want to make, things we want to share, and new ways of doing it that no one can do but us.

small, specific issues – like air conditioning bills – that they thought about every day at home. Our list covered the whole board. I had to make them stop coming up with ideas so that we could go to recess. One child told me that this activity was “better than recess,” but that kid is crazy. Nothing is better than recess.

Articulate and curious about all these issues they experienced in their community, we tore through stacks of newspapers the next day, finding articles related to issues we had listed the day before. We made a huge poster of these clippings, and we looked specifically at how these issues were or weren't mentioned in coverage of the upcoming elections. When we finished, we asked these questions: -What issues did you find most in the newspapers?

-What issues could you not find in the newspapers?

What my fifth graders found was along the same lines as what many of us making independent media have found. There was generally coverage of only a few big issues, with one or two dominant opinions presented. We found no coverage of many of the issues students had brought up in personal stories. None of the stories in the particular papers we looked through connected the elections to every day experiences in Greensboro. One student pointed out that they couldn't find the word “racism” anywhere, even in an election very charged with issues of race, even though we had put that word on the board.

My students talked about the pictures and graphics used, what they showed and what they didn't show. A huge section of our poster was covered in pictures of tanks, guns and war. A huge section contained dire financial headlines. The students found plenty of grinning pictures of McCain and Obama. They found very little of themselves.

The point of sharing this example is to highlight the idea that

economic engine of the mass media, and as a cultural force that defines norms, desires and social roles. Watching image after image taken out of context and analyzed makes visible the way this part of the media creates and dictates meaning.

She asks question after question – what does this body language imply, what are we being told to desire, what is the ideal of beauty presented in our culture, why are women's bodies dismembered and treated as products?

Starting with questioning advertising is a great entry point into media literacy, because advertisements have a clear objective – to sell something. At work in advertising, of course, are many more systems of meaning and cultural ideas. As we start to unpack these messages, we start to unravel the fabric of the media we are surrounded by. We can start to see both the little pieces and the larger systems at work.

Because most media is something that we receive without much interpersonal interaction, we often feel like it is a one way street. You might yell at the TV, but as an inanimate object, the TV has only a limited capacity to hear you. Part of media literacy is interrupting this channel of information, rejecting the idea that media only puts out and we only take in. We analyze, we choose, we reject, we embrace, and we create media. Learning to treat media as a dialogue helps us break down habits of passive consumption.

Learning to treat our consumption of media as a relationship helps us to ask questions and demands answers about what we are being told and why.

Media literacy means educating yourself about the institution of mainstream media.

Mainstream media is a business. To understand where the messages in media come from, who benefits from them, who

is marginalized by them, and what impact they have on our communities, we have to learn about the companies and government agencies that own, create, and regulate media messages. Media literacy means learning about huge conglomerates, regulatory agencies, legislation, and the companies that own our local papers and radio stations.

Media literacy means applying an understanding of systems of oppression and power.

It might go without saying that all media exists in the same structures and systems of oppression and power as everything else in our culture, but it's worth pointing out because as we continually deepen our own views of the world, we deepen our understanding of media. We have to ask who writes a news story and what the news story tells us and doesn't tell us. We also have to ask what perspective is represented, what perspectives are ignored, and how that fits in in a larger context of oppression. It's not enough to say “What does this article tell me about the people involved in this event?” - we also have to ask how what it tells us reflects dynamics of race, class, gender, sexuality, region, religion, social status, violence and more. What does this article assume is a “norm”? How does this article play into the information and misinformation our culture teaches us about ourselves and others? Who is privileged by this article? Who is not? Who has power? How does the language of this article reflect power and oppression?

II. Learning media literacy: an example from my classroom I used to teach elementary school. Even as a person in my midtwenties, I felt like an old lady, constantly shocked by

“the kids these days” and how much media they consumed.

My students were so saturated in media, technology and advertising. I was surrounded by Hannah Montana folders. I had more than one student respond to a math problem with digits in the millions by spontaneously singing “a milli, a milli, a milli”. A child once asked me what I watched on TV, and when I said I didn't own one she asked me with complete sincerity, “What do you do when you're at home, then?”

Teaching media literacy in my classroom was a wonderful way to engage with media myself, and to learn from my students as they were asked to view media in a different way.

During the 2008 presidential elections, my social studies curriculum instructed me to teach my students about the process of electoral politics. This important political event presented me with an exciting challenge. I wanted to use the topic of the elections to talk more about the way that my students viewed the issues in their community, both nationally and at home. As I planned lessons for my unit, I asked myself a lot of questions. How do I help my students ask questions that this textbook isn't going to about the way that things work in our community? How do I invite their experiences into the classroom?

Looking at media was one way we did this. We started by making a list of “issues” - things the students thought were important problems, events or ideas in their community and in the country as a whole. This day remains one of my favorite days in my still green teaching career, as fifth graders shouted out things like “Jails! We need to talk about how everybody's going to jail!” They told me stories about how the economic collapse was affecting them at home, about how deportation was affecting their community, about how they were angry about racism. They spouted off incredibly complex financial terms, gleaned from the television news, and shared