Technology and Media Literacy: What Do Teachers Need to Know?
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All of our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end. |
-- Henry David Thoreau |
As a literacy educator who became a teacher before the current technological revolution, it seems like I have always had to play catch up. There are a lot of us out there in the same situation, running as fast as we can to stay abreast of a field where the only constant is change. According to Alvermann and Hagood (2000a, p. 193), literacy is “on the verge of reinventing itself,” and many of us now include visual literacy, technological literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, and other literacies in our thinking about what it means today to be literate. My Reading Online coeditor, Bridget Dalton, and I think that this topic is important enough for its own department in the journal, called New Literacies. Department editor Ann Watts Paillotet has written extensively on the subject.
Discussion of new literacies is not isolated in that department, however. In the Articles section of this issue of Reading Online, for example, Gina Cervetti, Michael Pardales, and James Damico examine the difference between critical reading, or reading analytically, and critical literacy, which involves the stances (or “subjectivities”) taken when readers examine a text within particular sociocultural frameworks. At the very least we need to be teaching critical reading, although many would argue for critical literacy (see, e.g., Alvermann & Hagood, 2000a; Gee, 2000; Luke, 2000). But regardless of whether and how we teach them in school, complex multiliteracies are affecting the personal, social, and academic selves of an entire generation. We fail our students when we fail to acknowledge the necessity of addressing these important issues.
One new literacy that has received considerable attention in Reading Online is media literacy. We live in a “media saturated” world (O’Sullivan, Dutton, & Rayner, 1998). For the children and young adults who are our students, it has always been this way -- but some of us teachers may be playing catch up. How well have we done in helping young people understand that media can both serve and deceive us? What are we doing to teach them media literacy? And what do we know and teach about the new media technologies proliferating in our culture?
Issues and Definitions in Media Literacy
Media literacy is an umbrella term that has been defined in a variety of ways. In the education community, it is usually understood to refer to multiple literacies across the curriculum and the ability to produce multimedia. It can include such varied things as media production, information technology, critical media literacy, Web-based literacies, aesthetic literacies (such as dance, music, theater), communications, and scientific literacy. As Adams and Hamm (2000) state, “Being literate now implies having the ability to decode information from all types of media” (p. 3).
Based on definitions provided by conferees at a 1997 Annenberg School for Communications meeting as well as the Canadian education ministries, one formal definition of media literacy is “the ability to critically understand, question and evaluate how media work and produce meaning, how they are organized, how they mediate and construct reality, and how they impact our lives” (Abdullah, 2000, online abstract).
Christenbury (2000) elaborates on several issues in media literacy, noting that students must become aware of and address access, integration, censorship, plagiarism, and copyright as they interact with media.
Sometimes teachers need to allow their students to take the lead in technology learning, since they are often more often avid consumers of media delivered through these new technologies than we are:
And this is lucky, for here and now we are teaching young people, most of whom are cutting edge consumers of media. Consuming, however, does not always mean carefully selecting, and many of our students need opportunities to become savvy about what they see, what they are invited to believe, and on what they choose to spend their time and money on. In short, our students need to become media literate. (Christenbury, 2000, p. 267)
One of the most important things we can do is situate the current technological explosion in a historical context. Students should realize that there is a social history of communications, that media have developed along a continuum that includes hieroglyphics, the alphabet, the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet, all of which have affected social organization, learning, teaching, knowledge, and power (Luke, 2000). Technology also has created a global information network, which necessitates our students’ reflection on the way media shape diverse populations’ world views. The mass media create and sustain a consumer culture of which students need to be aware.
When considering the proliferation of technology and its instructional applications, teachers need to focus on both hardware and software, but move beyond the simple “how to” focus into the whys, when, and for whom issues of curriculum. Both teachers and students need to be aware of the way that technology and media are changing language and communications. A list of words, some new and some old but with new meanings (boot, browse, URL, search, and so on), could easily be constructed to illustrate the way in which our language has evolved in this technological age. Terms in popular culture made commonplace through the media reveal language evolution in the same way.
Popular Culture
Television and film teach our students. The many ways in which they influence our lives -- the techniques and language used to persuade us to do or buy things, as well as the more hidden influences they contain -- are the subject of considerable study. Radio, for example, as Alvermann and Hagood (2000b) discuss, provides adolescents with a venue for musical fandom that may be explored as one explores response to any other text, from multiple positions or perspectives.
Kellner (1995) prefers the term “media culture” to “popular” or “mass culture” because it has the advantage of “signifying that our culture is a media culture, that the media have colonized culture, that they are the primary vehicle for the distribution and dissemination of culture, that the mass media of communications have supplanted previous modes of culture like the book or spoken word, that we live in a world in which media dominate leisure and culture” (p. 35)
A number of scholars suggest that the connection of popular culture to academic product can often provide the bridge students need to view popular culture in a more analytic and critical frame (see, e.g., Alvermann & Hagood, 2000a, 2000b; Daiute, 1997; Luke, 2000). “As educators, our job is to tap into this media use and teach the evaluative skills that will make the information sources truly useful in an academic setting” (Beaupre, 2000, p. 2; online abstract). Adams and Hamm (2000) offer lesson plans to assist students in analyzing the many media influences they may encounter. Such activities also provide students with much needed written and oral communication practice and offer opportunities for multimedia presentations. Students who use the Internet primarily as a leisure activity may need particular assistance to connect online resources to academic purposes.
Finding Information
Faigley (1999) compares fnding information on the World Wide Web to getting a drink of water from a fire hose. Web sites for the exploration of media literacy certainly abound. For example, the American Association of Pediatrics provides several pages at its site where teachers and parents can find out about the influence of media violence on children. The site notes the following:
By age 18, the average American child will have viewed about 200,000 acts of violence on television alone.The level of violence during Saturday morning cartoons is higher than the level of violence during prime time. There are 3 to 5 violent acts per hour in prime time, versus 20 to 25 acts per hour on Saturday morning. Media violence is especially damaging to young children (under age 8) because they cannot easily tell the difference between real life and fantasy.... They can be traumatized by viewing these images.
Other sites that provide information about media literacy include the Media Literacy Online Project based at the University of Oregon, which offers in its resources an alphabetic listing of media literacy and education organizations. The following are just a few of the dozens of groups named, and contact information is provided for those that do not have Web sites:
Another valuable Web site is the Community Learning Network, which offers teachers help with organizing themes to teach children about media advertising.
Integrating Media and Technology in the Language Arts Curriculum
Beaupre (2000) states that oral communication has long been the concern of the field of communications rather than the field of education. This cannot continue to be the case in the United States, since, as Goulden (1998) points out, national and state standards that include speaking, listening, and media literacy within the language arts curriclum exist in at least 29 states. These states, and other states and provinces in the United States and elsewhere, are setting standards for media literacy that reflect a connection between oral and other mediated forms of communication.
For example, in California, media literacy is subsumed under the standards for research and technology, a strand of the writing standards for grades 4 through 12. The standards state that students will learn to use and analyze multimedia for academic purposes.
“We are heading into a post-typographic world; that is, one in which printed texts are no longer dominant” (Reinking, 1998, p. xi). Already, media sources invariably employ both text and visual content. Today’s students are increasingly visual, swimming in a sea of media. By high school, they are often expected to be able to employ different modes of communication, including images and multimedia, in their oral and written reports.
McEneaney (2000, online document) speaks to the unique demands of constructing texts in a hypertext environment. Traditional linear text varies considerably from hypertext, where a reader may enter at any point and progress along an idiosyncratic path. If we read differently in a hypertext environment, then we will almost certainly write differently. What implications this has for instruction are largely unknown.
Although media texts are theoretically open to various interpretations, most convey a particular meaning to which readers are drawn by various techniques. Learning to use these techniques in creating implies learning also to recognize and analyze them in reading and interpreting. For example, broadcast news sources are widely considered to be credible and documentaries are considered objective, but students need to learn that even these are culturally situated and employ techniques that promote values and ideologies (Abdullah, 2000).
One goal of writing instruction is to help learners identify and understand their audience. Learning how producers of media read their audiences can provide students with skills in writing and critical analysis. But educators do need to keep in mind that audiences are composed of individuals whose responses can vary, whose subjectivities are fragmented rather than monolithic in nature (Alvermann & Hagood, 2000a).
Adams and Hamm (2000, p. 8) offer us a framework for planning and evaluating our efforts in technology and media literacy in the curriculum:
Educators need intense professional development and strong support if we are to use new media effectively. Teacher preparation in this area needs as much effort as any other branch -- maybe more, since schools of teacher education rarely have large technology budgets. It will take time for us to become used to doing things with technology and to gain the resources we need. For example, I can prepare a PowerPoint presentation, but I don’t have the equipment to use it in my classroom.
What works for me in helping technology take hold in my own teaching is to learn as much as I can, and to make at least one change involving technology in my courses each year. New teachers coming into the field tend to know more about and to feel more comfortable with technology than I do, but I am making strides. Last spring I took a course in educational technology that featured ways to design and use multimedia. This spring I took a course on how to use Blackboard. I’m finding ways to incorporate technology into my teacher education classes.
But it takes more than technology to change our schools. Technology can a wonderful teaching tool but, as I noted earlier, it is not the solution to all the ills of education. Teachers are more important than technology when it comes to meeting the needs of the learner. Despite that, it is the well-informed and technologically literate teacher who judiciously uses technology as a instructional tool who can, perhaps, best meet those needs.
Many of us teach in a standards-based milieu where a pedagogical plan is paramount to learning. Our pedagogy must address grade-level curriculum standards. How can technology help us do that? Where is it best applied? How do we address the fact that many students are competent technology users at grade levels earlier than those when technology is first introduced in the curriculum?
Curriculum should drive the way technology is used -- and that means an interactive and recursive planning process that integrates technology with curriculum in ways that makes sense educationally and help students learn and meet standards.
Finally, we must pay attention to access and equity. Schools may provide a means to lessen the digital divide for our students. We can provide experiences that may help diverse students become more technologically adept, even when home resources are not available. Teachers must pay close attention to who has access to school resources so that all of our students have as equal an opportunity as possible to learn.
A Final Note
We need to use every resource available to us to make ourselves more technologically savvy. One excellent way is to begin reading in the field. And where better to read about media literacy and new literacies than in Reading Online. In recent months, the New Literacies department has featured Paul Messaris writing on how to teach students about video production, Roberto Muffoletto on the theoretical and instructional implications of thinking about images as texts, and Renee Hobbs on classroom strategies for analyzing media messages.
I keep running to catch up with a rapidly evolving field, and I invite you to put on your track shoes and start running with me. If you are doing anything exciting with media literacy, or have questions about it, I invite you to talk with me and your colleagues in our Online Communities.
References
Abdullah, M.H. (2000). Media literacy. ERIC Digest D152 (rep. no. EDO-CS-00-03; ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. 442 147). Abstract available: www.edrs.com/Webstore/Detail.CFM?Ednumber=ED442147
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Adams, D., & Hamm, M. (2000). Media and literacy: Learning in an electronic age -- Issues, ideas, and teaching strategies. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas.
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Alvermann, D.E., & Hagood, M.C. (2000a). Critical media literacy: Research, theory, and practice in “new times.” Journal of Educational Research, 93(3), 193-205.
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Alvermann, D.E., & Hagood, M.C. (2000b). Fandom and critical media literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43(5), 436-446.
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Beaupre, B. (2000, November). Blending cultural, academic, and technological communication: Literacy for the new millennium. Research in Education (ERIC Document Reproduction Services No. ED 441 234). Abstract available: www.edrs.com/Webstore/Detail.CFM?Ednumber=ED441234
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Christenbury, L. (2000). Making the journey (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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Daiute, C. (1997). Youth genre in the classroom: Can children’s and teachers’ cultures meet? In J. Flood, S.B. Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (pp. 323-333). New York: Macmillan.
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Faigley, L. (1999). Beyond imagination: The Internet and global digital literacy. In G.E. Hawisher & C.L. Selfe (Eds.), Passions, pedagogies and 21st century technology (pp. 129-139). Logan, UT: Utah University Press.
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Gee, J.P. (2000). Teenagers in new times: A new literacy studies perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43(5), 412-420.
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Goulden, N.R. (1998). The roles of national and state standards: Implementing speaking, listening, and media literacy. Communication Education, 47(2), 194-208.
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Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern.. New York: Routledge.
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Kinzer, C. (2000/2001, December/January). Web watch: Addressing issues of Internet safety. Reading Online, 4(6). Available: www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/webwatch/safety/index.html
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Luke, C. (2000). New literacies in teacher education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43(5), 424-435.
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McEneaney, J.E. (2000, November). Ink to link: A hypertext history in 36 nodes. Reading Online, 4(5). Available: www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/mceneaney2/index.html
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O’Sullivan, T., Dutton, B., & Rayner, P. (1998). Studying the media (2nd ed.). London: Arnold.
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Reinking, D. (1998). Introduction: Synthesizing technological transformations of literacy in a post-typographic world. In D. Reinking, M.C. McKenna, L.D. Labbo, & R.D. Kieffer (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a
post-typgraphic world (pp. xi-xxx). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [Note: This book is reviewed elsewhere in this journal.]
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Citation: Grisham, D.L. (2001, April). Technology and media literacy: What do teachers need to know? Reading Online, 4(9). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/editorial/edit_index.asp?HREF=/editorial/april2000/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted April 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232