My my, hey hey,
Rock and roll is here to stay.
-- “Out of the Blue” by Jim Blackburn and Neil Young, from the album Rust Never Sleeps, 1979

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reported that children in the United States spend 5.5 hours a day during out-of-school time engaged with mass media -- watching television, films, and videos; working with computers to do such things as surf the Web and communicate through networks; playing electronic games; and engaging with magazines, billboards, books, Web zines, comics, music, the radio, and cultural events of daily life. The Center for Media Literacy estimates the average American is exposed to more than 400 commercial images every day. Interaction with mass media is by far the most popular leisure activity in the United States (Buckingham, 1993a), and the situation appears similar in other Western countries. Recent findings link media exposure to profound personal and social outcomes including eating disorders, obesity, violence, limited attention spans, materialism, poor body image, confusion over sexuality and sexual identity, risk-taking behaviors, substance abuse, and even epileptic seizures. Despite differences among media scholars regarding the design and interpretations of the studies, there is general agreement that TV (and, many believe, all mass media) “is a powerful source of social learning that shapes attitudes, social and consumer behaviors and people's world views” (Luke, 1999, p. 622).

Carey (1973, p. 78) writes,

Media of communication...are vast social metaphors that not only transmit information but determine what is knowledge; that not only orient us to the world but tell us what kind of world exists; that not only excite and delight our senses but, by altering the ratio of sensory equipment we use, actually change our character.

My my, hey hey. Rock and roll and other, newer media forms are definitely here to stay -- and they offer exciting ways of understanding, teaching, and learning literacy. Over the years, I have discovered many compelling reasons for extending ideas about literacy and for teaching with new technologies and mass media. These include

• The prevalence of electronic media and popular culture in our students' lives (Buckingham, 1993a)



• Making teaching and learning pleasurable, relevant, and interesting (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999)



• Connecting home and school environments (Dyson, 1997)



• Developing learners' positive identities and democratic values (Watts Pailliotet, in press)



• Extending existing print literacy instructional frameworks (Hobbs, 1997)



• Developing critical thinking and appreciation for diverse cultures (Considine & Haley, 1999)



• Fostering literacy learning processes and content (Semali & Hammett, 1999)



• Responding to changing communications environments (Reinking et al., 1998)



• Utilizing useful, up-to-date resources (Leu & Leu, 1999)



• Preparing an educated workforce (Tyner, 1998)



• Encouraging critical consumers (Steinberg & Kincheloe, 1997)



• Promoting democratic values (Kellner, 1990, 1995)

I am, of course, not alone in recognizing changes in our communications environment and the new conceptions of literacy they require. In its 1996 Standards for the English Language Arts, the International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English identified many standards related to media and technology. Forty-eight American states now have technology, media, viewing, and representing categories as well as electronic and mass media requirements within their reading, writing, and communications curricula. In Canada, each province has detailed viewing and media literacy standards for kindergarten through high school, and Australia has identifed six levels of media and visual literacy competencies, spanning preschool to tenth grade. (A PDF file of the full Australian document is available online.) There is an increasing Web presence detailing ways to fulfill standards across the curriculum.

I am concerned with fulfilling new standards. I'm also not a protectionist who seeks to bar children from perceived evils of modern communication environments. Instead, I propose that emerging technologies and new media provide exciting opportunities to fulfill numerous literacy standards and to develop empowered, critical, literate students and citizens. I believe a student or teacher with media and technology savvy, one who can make up her or his own mind, is preferable to an outside censor -- and, indeed, using media and tapping into new literacies enables teachers to make informed decisions about the conflicting demands of censors and would-be censors. My goal with this column is to help readers make informed decisions about their own lives, students, and classrooms.

New literacies and changing communications media raise many issues. For instance, Hobbs (1998) lists seven debates involved in media education: if and how educators should protect children from negative media influences; proper uses of media production and popular culture texts in classrooms; explicitness of political and ideological agendas; the focus of media literacy in K-12 school-based environments; whether media should be taught as a distinct subject or integrated throughout the curriculum; and issues of financial support. Literacy educators seeking to utilize new media and technologies also wrestle with issues of time (Thoman, 1999); implementing mandated media literacy standards (Kubey & Baker, 1999, online document); institutional resistance (Considine, in press); who should create media literacy materials and what form they should take (Hobbs); the “digital divide” of access and equity (Burbules & Callister, 1999; see also http://www.pbs.org/digitaldivide/ and http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org/initiatives.adp for information on this topic); and corporate funding of educational technology. But despite these challenges, use of varied media in classrooms has many rewards and it can further teachers' existing instructional frameworks, including instruction in critical thinking and literature appreciation and study (Considine, Haley, & Lacy, 1994), inquiry learning (Hobbs, 1997; Macaul, Giles, & Rodenberg, 1999), whole language (Fehlman, 1996), multicultural curricula (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997), cooperative learning (Watts Pailliotet, 1998), content area reading (Watts Pailliotet, 1997), constructivism (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999), values education (Considine & Haley, 1999), interdisciplinary and thematic teaching (Considine, 1987; Leveranz & Tyner, 1996), and skills-based literacy programs (Moline, 1995; Thoman).

These are among the topics and issues to be addressed in upcoming columns in the New Literacies department.

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