Week 2 – Blog Posting #3 – Media Literacy

What is it, and who should teach it? How are you going to fit it into your already too-full curriculum?

Media Literacy requires active student participation and critical thinking about messages received and created; and the development of informed, reflective students who use their own skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct meaning and solve problems dealing with important issues in their lives and communities.

As educators we must find creative ways to incorporate media literacy into literature, science, history, math, fine and performing arts classes, and even physical education. Students can explore, create, and share and perform dramatic texts using online media. Science teachers may use media literacy to provide students with more realistic educational experiences. Simulations and games allow students to assume roles of scientists in labs, in the field, and in real time. They can collect and interpret data, make decisions that affect communities, and experiment to solve problems. Math students are exposed to numbers and statistics every day in the media. Are the numbers accurate? How can statistics be misrepresented? Looking at numbers and statistics in sports and the news is a great way to get students to think about and question where numbers come from.

The Media Education Lab at Temple University has a resource that should be required reading for every teacher. The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Media Literacy Education is located at http://mediaeducationlab.com/code-best-practices-fair-use-media-literacy-education. In addition there is an extensive collection of lesson plans and other free resources.

Play is where children make sense of their world. They discover ideas, experience and practice new knowledge, are bound to fail (angst-free) and retry because they are intrinsically motivated. If we would transfer this play-world into the classroom, we would have an ideal educational setting.

UC-Irvine has established a center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds. The mission of the center is to “expand campus-wide research activities that draw upon UCI’s strengths spanning the social and technological aspects of games and virtual worlds.” According to senior research scientist Walt Scacchi, “We now realize that scientific and cultural achievements go beyond the current concepts of what games and virtual worlds are good for, or how they may be developed or applied. The centre will support our research in demonstrating the sustained ability to invent and reinvent the future of computer games and virtual worlds.” http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/09/uc-irvine-establishes-games-research-center/ accessed September 14, 2009.

Creative play experiences like My Pop Studio http://mypopstudio.com provide students with an engaging means of developing media literacy skills. Even though the site is meant for girls, boys would also benefit from it. Teachers could challenge boys to design similar activities that would interest them.