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Critical Media Literacy

This version was saved 12 years, 9 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by Jessie Daniels
on July 5, 2011 at 10:07:37 am
 

What is Critical Media Literacy?

 

Kellner and Share (2007) articulate their view of critical media literacy:

 

"The type of critical media literacy that we propose includes aspects of the three previous models, but focuses on ideology critique and analyzing the politics of representation of crucial dimensions of gender, race, class, and sexuality; incorporating alternative media production; and expanding textual analysis to include issues of social context, control, resistance, and pleasure. A critical media literacy approach also expands literacy to include information literacy, technical literacy, multimodal literacy, and other attempts to broaden print literacy concepts to include different tools and modes of communicating (Kellner, 1998). In addition to these elements, critical media literacy brings an understanding of ideology, power, and domination that challenges relativist and apolitical notions of most media education in order to guide teachers and students in their explorations of how power and information are always linked. This approach embraces the notion of the audience as active in the process of making meaning, as a cultural struggle between dominant readings, oppositional readings or negotiated readings (Ang, 2002; Hall, 1980).
 
Critical media literacy thus constitutes a critique of mainstream approaches to literacy and a political project for democratic social change. This involves a multiperspectival critical inquiry, of popular culture and the cultural industries, that addresses issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, and power and also promotes the production of alternative counter-hegemonic media. Media and information communication technology can be tools for empowerment when people who are most often marginalized or misrepresented in the mainstream media receive the opportunity to use these tools to tell their stories and express their concerns. For members of the dominant group, critical media literacy offers an opportunity to engage with the social realities that the majority of the world is experiencing. The new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate, manipulate, or enlighten and it is imperative that educators teach their students how to use and critically analyze these media (Kellner, 2004)."

 

I agree with this definition and think that helping students develop critical media literacy is a crucial pedagogical goal for our media-saturated era. For more on how I use documentaries in the classroom to transform student engagement, please see the forthcoming article in Theory in Action.

 


 

Selected BIbliography about Critical Media Literacy and Documentaries in the Classroom

 

Daniels, Jessie. (2011). "“Transforming Student Engagement through Documentary and Critical Media Literacy.” Theory in Action (forthcoming).

 

Holtman, Janet. (2002). "Documentary Prison Films and the Production of Disciplinary Institutional ‘Truth.’" Postmodern Culture 13.

 

Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. (2005). "Reconstructing Technoliteracy: a multiple literacies approach." E-Learning 2:238-251.

 

Kellner, Douglas. (2004). "Technological Transformation, Multiple Literacies and the Re-visioning of Education." E-Learning 1:9-37.

 

Hobbs, R. (2007). "Media literacy as a dimension of global literacy." UNESCO Regional Conference in Support of Global Literacy. Qatar Foundation Innovations in Education Symposium 3. Literacy Challenges in the Arab Region: Building Partnerships and Promoting Innovative Approaches, March 13, 2007, Doha, Qatar.

 

Hobbs, R. (2006). "Non-optimal uses of video in the classroom." Learning Media and Technology 31(1):35-50.

 

Hobbs, R. and R. Frost. (2003). "Measuring the acquisition of media-literacy skills," Reading Research Quarterly 38(3):330-355.

 

Hodgetts, Darrin, and Kerry Chamberlain. (2006). "Developing a Critical Media Research Agenda for Health Psychology." Journal of Health Psychology 11:217-327.

 

Kellner, Douglas and Jeff Share. (2007). "Critical Media Literacy is Not an Option."  Learning Inquiry, DOI 10.1007/s11519-007-0004-2.

 

Kellner, Douglas and Jeff Share (2005). "Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core concepts, debates, organizations, and policy." Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Volume 26, Issue 3, Pp. 369 – 386.

 

Kellner, Douglas (2004). "Technological transformation, multiple literacies, and the re-visioning of education." Chapter 9,The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger and Peter Trifon (Eds.)

 

LaMarre, Heather L. and Kristen D. Landreville (2009). "When is Fiction as Good as Fact? Comparing the Influence of Documentary and Historical Reenactment Films on Engagement, Affect, Issue Interest, and Learning," Mass Communication and Society 12:537-555.

 

Livingstone, Sonia. (2004). "Media literacy and the challenges of new information and communication technologies." The Communication Review 7:3-14.

 

Muller, Marion. (2008). "Visual competence: a new paradigm for studying visuals in the social sciences?" Visual Studies 23 (2):101-112.

 

Saldaña, Johnny. (2009). "Methods Courses Popular Film as an Instructional Strategy in Qualitative Research." Qualitative Inquiry 15: 247-261.

 

Stack, M., Kelly, D.M.  (2006). "Popular media, education, and resistance" Canadian Journal of Education, Volume 29; Part 1, Pp. 5-26.

 

Swimelar, Safia. (2009).  "Visual Culture and Pedagogy: Teaching Human Rights with Film and Images." global-e: a global studies journal.  Available online.

 

Tobias, J.A. (2008). "Culturally Relevant Media Studies: A Review of Approaches and Pedagogies"  SIMILE: Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 8, Number 4 / November, Pp.1-17.

 

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