Are You Five Years Out?
by Cindy Pulley
The other day while I “multi-tasked,”
the Final Four NCAA Basketball Tournament was airing, and I would look up from
time to time to see the score, until an ad for Arrow, a young networking
company aired. “Are you five years out? Most people live in the
present. You know, the world of now. But a handful of us work in a unique world
that doesn't quite exist yet”. My thought was how parallel that is to educators
as we hope to prepare our students and ourselves for a future at least five
years out. That caught my attention as
the ad promoted the company’s ability to help its various clients across
disciplines prepare for a future shaped by technology and how we use it. For me, personally, five years has changed my
life… a lot. And I wouldn’t doubt that the same goes for most everyone else.
From one perspective, the period of five years has changed my role in education
because of my involvement in Media Literacy. It has helped me in my online and
face-to-face classroom settings as I have moved from teacher to facilitator. And
as a doctoral student, school program coordinator and health policy specialist,
it has introduced me to the use of media education curriculum to engage
teachers across disciplines and turn youth and adults into voices for addressing
disparities or other issues in their own communities. This field of study is
not just the encoding or decoding of words and symbols associated with reading.
It isn’t even the “schoolish” idea of
the conventional classrooms, although its principles are easily adapted to
experiential learning. Media literacy is
a useful term for giving critical thought and reflection to anything attached
to print, image or sound. Versions of its definition have been applied to the
public arena in the areas of policy, cultural, parenting, gender studies, pedagogy
or from the pen of well-known media analysts like Marshall McLuhan. It is well-known that media
technology drives our culture and we are shaped by our use of it, and likewise,
that we humans re-shape its purpose and importance in our culture at warp
speed. Its ever increasing inventions
dictate the need for the core principles of Media Literacy that blend well into
the new Common Core standards and across disciplines regardless of the
technology platform used.
Media technology used to change every
30 years. Now it changes every few months as companies roll
out new generations of e-readers, tablets and smart phones to a gadget-hungry
public. Most often that public includes
the youth and their families, those whose brains are wired to adapt quickly to
new digital conventions. And in terms of how communication media will evolve,
there is no real way to predict the exact developments in the next five years. Historically, changes in technology have often
been met with ambivalence. But we have long
moved past the point where educators decried the priority to stay relevant and digitally
literate. With new crops of “mobile-me” teachers and with the experienced
faculty committed to learning the latest applications, schools at all levels are
embracing the very technologies that in the past had subverted teaching and
learning routines. Media is now used in such a way that students partake in
digital connectivity as part of their newly-tooled classroom experience. Professional
development typically includes a lesson on incorporating technology. The field
of education is also keeping pace through teacher association sites like the “Digital
Is” page of the National Writing Project. This particular blog
keeps teachers abreast of how to guide students to create meaningful
multi-modal text. They become coaches of student media producers who not only
understand how to read the combined texts, but they also know how to use media
to apply knowledge from diverse subject matter to solve problems or engage
their communities as productive citizens.
Despite these enthusiastic efforts to
keep pace, the nature of technological advances continue to ensure there will
be lag time between broad consumer use of new technology and education’s eventual…and
effective…adoption. Recent history tells us the semi-annual innovations are
here to stay, so what might be the answer for coping with change while catching
up to the more mobile rhetorical spaces of students and their families? How do
we transcend the unearned fanfare of some new digital toy that doesn’t always
promote its responsible use? How do we bridge that gap? How do we get students
to move past the “alone together” hours they spend or make them savvy to the
intent and technique behind the message?
How do we teach them to use the technology and their time to become
whole individuals who are collaboratively connected online and off to improve brick
and mortar neighborhoods or physical and virtual communities? These questions
are important to address. While there is probably no way to fully anticipate
what learning and communication will look like in five years, the critical
analysis inherent in media literacy’s core principles can help students analyze,
adapt and create their own meaningful texts against the backdrop of their own personal or family values. Most groups
promoting the various genres of literacy--family, financial, science and
health, and digital--recognize that we have evolved beyond the definition of
literacy that a little more than a decade ago merely included the ability to
decode or encode meaningful texts. Now literacy, as it is presented in the
Common Core Standards, includes decoding multi-media text beyond its physical
traits. It requires an understanding of where the content originated, by what
means, by whom and for what purpose. In terms of thinking about media
applications, one might ask how students of all ages can keep pace with the
information and come away with a basic understanding of audience and
authorship, representation and reality, and meanings and messages. Admittedly, media literacy may not be the only
method for critical analysis, but certainly it offers a simple and effective means
for analysis. Its core principles can guide a media consumer or student on how
to frame the layers of information in a multi-modal text against five questions.
These following five questions appear in various forms on websites and
publications of various media literacy associations, and they can be used in
any value system, in any discipline or with any technology:
Who created this message?
What techniques are used to attract my
attention?
How might different people understand
this message differently
from me?
What lifestyles, values and points of
view are represented in, or
omitted from this message?
Why was this message sent?
These questions reinforce the idea that
media literacy isn’t just about the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and
communicate messages in a variety of forms. One must also be able to know the
context of the message as well and develop the skills to
engage the medium of the message in meaningful ways.
Media literacy may be considered a new
field of study, but its origins, the application of analysis to media, dates
back nearly 40 years, and its historical underpinnings are linked to principles
of classical rhetoric that could be traced to ancient Greece. The philosophical
framework for media analysis changes, depending on scholarly presentation. One
author, James Potter, said after conducting an analysis of various research
regarding the topic said media literacy
is really the convergence of three huge bodies of knowledge: media studies (the
industries, content, and effects), human thinking (how people attend to
messages and construct meaning), and becoming educated. In the technology-driven
society we live in, these bodies intersect in the rhetorical online spaces of
students. Their activities of literacy are spent outside classroom contexts as
they engage online and mix and re-mix a variety of text, technology, art and
sound into new conventions of communication. To the credit of the National
Council of Teachers of English, the National Writing Project and the parallel
professional associations of other disciplines including STEM and the arts,
threads of media literacy core principles are already in place, they are just have
different names.
My purpose in writing this short blog
is to ask those who have integrated media literacy (whether they call it that
or something else) is to teach some of the core principles in their subject
matter, How is that working for you? and do you think it will make a difference
five years out? For more information about media literacy’s questions and its
core principles, I have included the following links. Many others exist and I
invite you to respond and add others you something about.
Gateway Media Literacy Partners-St
Louis (Local- Register for the mini conference, Pedagogy to Production, June 7)
Site
has some great essays to share with your friends and students.
National
Association for Media Literacy Education
Look
for the Core Principles of Media Literacy on this site.
Take a trip to LA this summer.
National Conference is $365. There are discount offerings and CEUs for K-12 teachers
and one-day attendees.
Media
Literacy Clearinghouse
Frank is often the go-to-media
literacy expert for the National Council for Teachers of English
Common
Sense Media
Great
Media Literacy Curriculum Resources
Center
for Media Literacy
One of the original Media Literacy sites that contains a lot of the
intellectual history of Media Literacy
USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab
Lab
is directed by media innovation expert Henry Jenkins
