Mass Communication Commons^™

Determining The Feasibility Of An Online, Media Mediation Program For Parents To Improve Parent-Child Sexual Health Communication, Tracy M. Scull, Christina V. Malik, Elyse M. Keefe

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media Aware Parent is an interactive, web-based program designed to equip parents to communicate with their adolescent child about sexual health and media by enhancing parental communication and media mediation skills, as well as provide them with medically-accurate sexual health knowledge. In a small feasibility study, 56 parents of 7th and 8th graders in the United States were randomly assigned to complete a prototype of Media Aware Parent or receive online resources about adolescent sexual health. Results indicated that after using the program, participants in the intervention group discussed more new sexual health topics with their child and also had …

Book Review: Fact Vs. Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills In The Age Of Fake News, Morgan Carter

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Fact vs. Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in the Age of Fake News, is a book full of resources and instructional strategies to help educators teach media literacy skills in today’s fake news environment. Arguably, media literacy skills are needed now more than ever, and this review provides a brief overview and key takeaways from each chapter.

Commercials As Social Studies Curriculum: Bridging Content & Media Literacy, Shanedra D. Nowell

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This essay explores ways television commercials can teach both media literacy skills and social studies content knowledge. Because of their brevity and concise messages, commercials offer teachers a wide assortment of engaging, content focused lesson topics that can be used to introduce new ideas, as writing or discussion prompts to further explore concepts, or as creative media projects to assess the content and media literacy knowledge. I examine different approaches to integrate commercials into social studies classes and include resources to guide students through deconstructing commercials, understanding advertisers’ creative techniques and appeals, and creating their own commercials.

Mediacy: A Way To Enrich Media Literacy, Eva Berger, Robert K. Logan, Anat Ringel, Andrey Miroshnichenko

Journal of Media Literacy Education

We propose that the discipline or practice of media literacy defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms can be enriched and made more effective by incorporating two of Marshall McLuhan’s insights into the nature of media. The first insight is that the effects of media that are independent of their content and intended function are subliminal and they are important because they “shape and control the scale and form of human association and action.” The second insight is that the notion of media includes not just communication media but also all …

Abolish Censorship And Adopt Critical Media Literacy: A Proactive Approach To Media And Youth In The Middle East, Abeer Alnajjar

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This paper challenges the dominant patronizing approach to youth and media in the Middle East and argues that the calls for censorship of youth media exposure are obsolete and counterproductive. It argues that although censorship advocates have a legitimate concern over media risks, their approaches are ineffective, short-lived and alienating, disregarding the potential that media hold for young people. The author believes that elites in MENA should shift their focus to empower youth to use media to learn; to voice their worldviews and experiences; and to work for the betterment of themselves and their societies. The paper recommends two strategies:1) …

Professors’ Perspectives On Truth-Seeking And New Literacy, Zachary W. Arth, Darrin J. Griffin, William J. Earnest

Journal of Media Literacy Education

New media and new literacy are essential in our contemporary paradigms of education and communication research. Though truth-seeking is one of the primary objectives inherent in higher education, the process for students may be less clear than it may be for trained academics or professors. The current study sought to explore how professors recommend that students seek truth in the information age. Relying on an assignment from a communication course, this study examined responses from student-led interviews with professors from across the U.S. and categorized trends in their recommendations for students. Overall twelve themes taken from advice on student truth-seeking …

Piloting Journalistic Learning In A Rural Trump-Supportive Community: A Reverse Mentorship Approach, Ed Madison

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Partisan politics challenge educators to determine how best to navigate discussions of controversial subjects within their classrooms. This can be particularly true for new educators in the early stages of developing their confidence and classroom management skills. This qualitative case study uses situated learning and the communities of practice theoretical constructs to investigate a new approach to educator training and co-facilitation. The new approach places recent journalism school college graduates in classrooms alongside teachers to foster real-time professional development through a process best described as reverse mentoring. The model could potentially provide educators with new pedagogical strategies during divisive political …

History Of Youth Media Production In Maine 1960-2010, Gemma A.P. Scott

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Research in media literacy seeks to understand multiple branches of inquiry, including the practice of media production. Youth in Maine have produced media independently and in organized venues for more than 50 years. This paper describes results from surveying primary source materials produced by youth in Maine between 1960 and the 2000s. Research started with media artifacts, looking to primary source materials to understand what, if anything, can be revealed from their content. A deep dive into the provenance of archival collections uncovered stories of a local history of youth media production, and expanded the inquiry to identify who was …

News Literacy And Fake News Curriculum: School Librarians’ Perceptions Of Pedagogical Practices, Lesley Farmer

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The high profile of fake news reveals underlying trends in the production and consumption of news. While news literacy is a lifelong skill, the logical time to start teaching such literacy is in K-12 educational settings, so that all people have the opportunity to learn and practice news literacy. School librarians can play a critical role in helping students gain news literacy competence. This study investigated the needs for K-12 students to be news literate and their current level of skills as perceived by in-service teachers and school librarians in California. Respondents thought that their students were most competent at …

Teaching Adolescents To Communicate (Better) Online: Best Practices From A Middle School Classroom, Michelle Ciccone

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Digital conversation spaces have the potential to generate powerful collective intelligence, but only when users are thoughtful, reflective, and have experience interacting with diverse ideas. To be able to engage in online conversational spaces in this way, though, is not inherent or natural: it must be practiced. This article will argue that it is essential to have adolescents practice engaging in challenging and professional conversations online with peers in classroom settings. Utilizing a New Media Literacy framework, this article will share impactful classroom practices that help adolescents develop effective online conversation skills. Essential to this pedagogy is a cycle of …

Measuring Media Literacy Inquiry In Higher Education: Innovation In Assessment, Evelien Schilder, Theresa Redmond

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The ability to critically access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages is crucial in the process of becoming an informed and engaged citizen throughout life. Asking critical questions is not only a valuable dimension of media literacy, but also an indispensable aspect of participating in a democracy. Yet, measuring the effectiveness of media literacy is still a major challenge for the field. It is unclear to what extent people of all ages may engage in critical questioning habits with regards to media. To address this gap, we studied the changes in critical questioning habits for college-aged students enrolled in media …

Story Sharing In A Digital Space To Counter Othering And Foster Belonging And Curiosity Among College Students, Gina Baleria

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how a single, relational intervention in a digital space focused on civil, respectful conversation across difference might influence digital media literacy (DML) among college students, with the goal of increasing college students’ sense of belonging and level of curiosity. The researcher used a phenomenological approach, exploring and describing the lived experiences of students who participated in a micro-engagement with an other through interviews (Creswell, 2014). This study investigated the main question: (a) How does a semi-structured, relational micro-intervention focused on civil, respectful conversation across difference influence college students’ sense of …

Media Literacy Education In The Age Of Machine Learning, Teemu Valtonen, Matti Tedre, Kati Mäkitalo, Henriikka Vartiainen

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The media environment has radically changed over the past few decades. Transition and transformation of media platforms has enabled algorithms and automation to take over media processes such as production, content generation, curation, delivery, recommendation, and filtering of information. It has also enabled tracking of users’ actions, data mining, profiling, and the use of computational and machine learning techniques for purposes like behavior engineering, targeted advertisement, spread of mis- and disinformation, swaying political moods, and many others. In the field of media literacy education, the need to understand algorithm-driven media requires educators to re-think the connections between media literacy education …

Media Literacy Education For All Ages, Päivi Rasi, Hanna Vuojärvi, Heli Ruokamo

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This special issue of the Journal of Media Literacy Education explores the role of media literacy across the lifespan. Media literacy education interventions must be designed to meet the needs of individuals of different ages by understanding the life roles and goals that they have across the lifespan. Different pedagogical strategies are required to effectively address the media literacy competencies of young children, teens, adults, parents, and older adults. In old age, media literacy education may support cognitive functioning and social relationships and help people critically assess health-related information and services. Adopting a life course perspective enables the examination of …

Review: Crash Course In Media Literacy, Faith Rogow

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Forced by its format to distill a subject area’s central tenets into just a few sessions, a “crash course” should be an excellent place to uncover the essential elements of a topic or field. Viewed through that lens, Complexly’s YouTube offering, “Crash Course in Media Literacy,” provides an illuminating, if sometimes confounding opportunity for reflection.

A Case For The Common Good: How Training In Faith-Based Media Literacy Helped Teachers Address Social Justice Issues In The Classroom, Maria Rosalia Tenorio De Azevedo

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This case study reveals how a faith-based initiative offering structured teacher training in media literacy. The program is centered in Catholic Social Teaching, encouraging the use of critical media literacy in the classroom to aid the learning of social justice issues. The critical literacy of Paulo Freire serves as theoretical framework to help answer the research question: How has a teacher training program in faith-based media literacy influenced teachers’ practice when addressing social justice issues in the classroom? This case study relates the accounts of a middle school teacher, a high school teacher, and a college professor, graduates of the …

Developing Student Critical Consciousness: Twitter As A Tool To Apply Critical Literacy In The English Classroom, Joshua P. Kunnath, Arika Jackson

Journal of Media Literacy Education

As young people today are flooded with information from a multitude of sources, they must be prepared to perceive the potentially oppressive and nefarious nature of many texts. Critical literacy is a theory and strategy that allows young people, along with people of all ages, to achieve just this; however, teachers often experience difficulties implementing and guiding students in taking crucial action steps in the classroom. This exploratory action research case study was conducted to address these concerns, as a teacher utilized Twitter to implement critical literacy and guide 32 ethnically diverse eleventh grade students in applying critical literacy in …

Critical Awareness Of Media And Teacher Education: An Experience With Colombian Elt Pre-Service Teachers, Camilo Dominguez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media texts are exponentially displayed in physical and virtual public spaces and their impact on humanity is unimaginable. Teachers of all fields face the challenge and the responsibility to educate sensitive humans able to critically consume or produce media messages. English language teachers are no exception. In this paper, the author describes a qualitative research study exploring how a group of Colombian pre-service English teachers developed critical awareness of media as they deconstructed advertisements displayed in the public spaces of their rather rural communities. Findings, conclusions, implications for teacher education, and new questions for further research are presented.

Preparing Pre-Service Teachers To Teach Media Literacy: A Response To “Fake News”, Todd S. Cherner, Kristal Curry

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The call to integrate media literacy into public education is not new. However, with the rise of “fake news” and sensationalism along with technology’s ever-growing role in society, media literacy offers teachers and students a set of skills to analyze, critique, and respond to the information that appears before them in the digital texts they read, the television shows they watch, and their social media feeds. As multiple case studies have identified ways teachers are already blending media literacy into their instruction, this case study used a lesson plan assignment coupled with a survey to analyze how pre-service teachers enrolled …

Using Virtual Exchange To Advance Media Literacy Competencies Through Analysis Of Contemporary Propaganda, Renee Hobbs, Christian Seyferth-Zapf, Silke Grafe

Journal of Media Literacy Education

With the rise of so-called fake news as a global phenomenon, interest in propaganda analysis has advanced along with the recognition of the fundamentally social process of interpretation. In this essay, we explore the use of cross-national dialogue among German and American undergraduate students who are seeking to better understand how media messages are interpreted and how they inform and guide the civic actions of citizens. We describe and analyze five lessons that used a virtual exchange using a variety of digital media platforms, texts and technologies to support the cross-national study of contemporary propaganda. We observed that cross-national dialogue …

Exploring Echo-Systems: How Algorithms Shape Immersive Media Environments, James N. Cohen

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In the lead up to the 2016 election, fake news often “outperformed” actual news in users’ social media feeds (Silverman, 2016). This paper attempts to analyze the process in which fake news proliferates social networking sites and presents a method of understanding and articulating ways in which personalized feeds are shaped by algorithm-based user feedback. The algorithm systems are embedded programs that analyze past user data and search history in combination with other users’ searches and history to calculate digital outcomes, anticipate possible recommendations, and present consumers with feeds that represent their own unique immersive media environments.

As of August …

Both Facts And Feelings: Emotion And News Literacy, Susan Currie Sivek

Journal of Media Literacy Education

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences’ emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption. This essay explores the role of emotion in the “fake news” phenomenon and the implementation of emotion analytics tools in news distribution. I examine the function of emotion in news consumption and the current status of emotion within existing news literacy training programs. Finally, I offer suggestions for …

Fake Or Visual Trickery? Understanding The Quantitative Visual Rhetoric In The News, Rohit Mehta, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In online and video/television spaces, news media discourses incorporate multimodal design as a discursive move capable of steering meaning toward desirable implications. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, while polarized news outlets made their positionality on the candidates obvious, more neutral or central news outlets revealed their preferences through subtle multimodal design choices. One of these design choices is using a quantitative visual rhetoric: persuasive multimodal moves that draw on quantification through visual, spatial, and textual manipulation—involving the choice of data representation, visual images, and illustrations, (im)balance between numeric and alphabetic texts, and general quantitative narrative. This quantitative visual rhetoric …

Winning The War On State-Sponsored Propaganda: Results From An Impact Study Of A Ukrainian News Media And Information Literacy Program, Erin Murrock, Joy Amulya, Mehri Druckman, Tetiana Liubyva

Journal of Media Literacy Education

From 2015-2016, IREX implemented a media literacy training program called Learn to Discern (L2D) that trained Ukrainian citizens to critically analyze news media messages and identify misinformation. In 2017, IREX conducted a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of news literacy skills, knowledge, and behavior using a stratified random sample of L2D participants and non-participants (n=412). The groups were matched for gender, age, region and education levels. A news literacy assessment was administered to both groups via an online survey. The assessment required participants to analyze an objective news article and a disinformation-based news article; demonstrate knowledge of the news media environment; and …

Civic Media Literacy In A Transmedia World: Balancing Personal Experience, Factual Accuracy And Emotional Appeal As Media Consumers And Circulators, Ellen Middaugh

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Amid growing concerns over the role of “fake news” in civic and political life, efforts to understand how to best prepare youth to evaluate and reason about online sources have gained a sense of urgency. However, less attention has been paid to how such skills are used in the context of the broader array of information behavior that is typical of civic and political participation today—particularly in the circulation of information. Through thematic analysis of interviews and think aloud tasks with n=24 urban high school students reasoning through the processes of search, credibility analysis and circulating information for the purposes …

Media Literacy And Climate Change In A Post-Truth Society, James S. Damico, Mark Baildon, Alexandra Panos

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this article we draw from ecolingusitics (Stibbe, 2015) and a civic media literacy framework (Author, in press; Masyada & Washington, 2016) to consider what happened when three pairs of preservice teachers with different academic backgrounds and climate change beliefs jointly evaluated the reliability of two media sources that make opposing arguments about climate change. An ecolinguistics perspective attends to the environmental impact of the “stories-we-live-by” (Stibbe, 2015) and a civic media literacy lens highlights the centrality of dialogue and deliberation along with critical reading when evaluating the reliability of information sources about complex socioscientific topics like climate change. Our …

Media Literacy, Democracy, And The Challenge Of Fake News, Lance E. Mason, Dan Krutka, Jeremy Stoddard

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this essay, the authors offer a context for discussions about fake news, democracy, and considerations for media literacy education. Drawing on media ecology and critical media studies, they highlight the longer history of fake news and how this concept cannot be separated from the media technologies in which cultures grow. They discuss current iterations of this phenomenon alongside the effects of social media and offer a preview of the special issue.

Book Review: Exploring Critical Digital Literacy Practices: Everyday Video In A Dual Language Context, Lucie Roemer

Journal of Media Literacy Education

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Teaching Climate Change To Adolescents: Reading, Writing, And Making A Difference, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference, is a book for English language arts and media literacy teachers that provides abundant resources for educators wanting to incorporate climate change instruction into their classrooms. This review explores the usefulness of the book and discusses more broadly the barriers and opportunities for incorporating environmental issues into media literacy education.

Mediating Religious Literacy Among Primary School Children In Gujarat: Classroom As A Liminal Space, Kiran Vinod Bhatia

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Articulation of religious guidelines in the political milieu never takes place in a disembodied form; rather politically inscribed religious discourses are embedded within and conveyed through specific institutional channels, including media organizations and education institutions. My experiences of working as a media educator in villages in Gujarat have helped me understand how the learning of such discriminatory practices begin early as students use various linguistic and socio-cultural cues in order to make sense of the society. A classroom, however, provides the required space to entertain differences such that we can delimit the social hierarchies that are naturalized in the minds …