Watch it, Make it, Analyze it: Building Media Literacy Skills in Young People
(Frank Baker’s prepared remarks at the 2009 "Celebration of Teaching &
Learning")
This is an exciting and challenging time to be in education. Exciting because
new media and technology have entered our classrooms and many teachers
are pushing the envelope to help their students use these new media tools
effectively. Exciting because many of our students have become expert
producers of their own media, without any formal education or guidance.
Exciting
because laptops and cell phones incorporate still & video cameras..
and the cost of a stand-alone video camera is now less than $200 dollars…unheard
of just 10 years ago. Exciting because many teachers have discovered social
networking
as a way of reaching their students using Web 2.0—the tools many young people
gravitate to.
Many teachers are also discovering that they can use those same tools to connect
with
a colleague around the corner or around the world. Virtual meetings and field
trips
offer many of us an opportunity to further our own knowledge and understanding,
without actually being there. But there are also challenges: one of the largest
is that today’s
education system remains PRINT CENTRIC…yet the world in which our students
reside is VISUAL…
Challenging because many teachers are not comfortable with the media and culture
of
their students and have no training in how to link popular culture to the
curriculum..
Challenging because education is trying to figure out how to teach and
what to teach
to prepare students for an evolving 21st century world.
Today, reading and writing are simply not enough. How many of our
schools
are adequately teaching students how to read the language of the moving image,
for example? This is part of the “NEW LITERACIES” movement.
I have come to media literacy education from broadcast journalism (first)…and
(second) public education…and lastly public television. It was my 11 years as an
administrator with the Orlando Florida Public Schools system in the early 90s
that
I discovered the power of media literacy. One of the first workshops I conducted
centered around holiday toy commercials and how they influence kids…later, in a
collaboration with The Orlando Sentinel newspaper and the Newspapers in
Education
organization, social studies teachers learned the history and techniques of
political campaign advertising from a long time Democratic political consultant.
Today, as a media literacy education consultant, I conduct workshops with
schools
around those standards defined as “media literacy,” and help teachers feel more
comfortable teaching with and about media texts.
10 years ago, I conducted a national survey of teaching standards…With my
colleague,
Rutgers University media professor Bob Kubey, we searched for evidence of
media literacy in state’s academic teaching standards. To our surprise, and to
many in the
field of media education, we found elements of media literacy in almost every
state’s
standards for ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS, SOCIAL STUDIES and HEALTH.
AND it IS in the English Language Arts where media literacy education is
strongest.
As English teachers, you already know that your standards offer you many
opportunities to
engage students in media texts…whether that is a study of advertising
persuasion---
looking at features of informational texts--- or teaching the languages of film,
just to name a few.
The growth of media education in the United States has certainly been helped by
annual
resolutions emanating from the National Council of Teachers of English. In
1970, for example
NCTE recommended that all teachers include non-print texts in their classrooms.
Now 39 years ago, that meant using film and television and radio. Today
it means
much more: NCTE just made note of the new media tools in two new reports:
Literacy Learning in
the 21st Century AND WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY.
Today’s digital natives already know how to use many of these new media and
technologies-
and where have they learned to use them?…certainly not in school.
Playback of the 30 second Microsoft
commercial “I’m A Four Year Old”.
School is the last place Web 2.0 is allowed, because MOST schools filter
out…effectively slamming the
door to innovative, creative and imaginative teacher and student uses of these
and other
new and emerging technologies. Last month’s DIGITAL MEDIA PROJECT study,
released by the MacArthur Foundation, effectively said: erecting barriers to new
media
deprives students of these new forms of learning. If you are nodding your head
in agreement here
perhaps YOU AND I need to do more to educate our superintendents, school boards,
principals,
and technology specialists, about the value of Web 2.0 in instruction.
Last summer, Grunwald Associates released a major study
(called CREATING AND CONNECTING-Research
and Guidelines on Online Social
and Educational Networking)
for the National School
Boards Association.
The study examined young people’s use of social networking and its implications
for the
classroom. The study said: “With words, music, photos and
videos, students are expressing themselves by creating, manipulating and
sharing content
online .” The report concludes:
“ In light of the study findings, school districts may want to consider
reexamining their
policies and practices and explore ways in which they could use social
networking for
educational purposes.” How many of your schools have updated their media and
technology
policies? Now is not a bad time to get involved in re-writing some of those
archaic district rules.
To bolster the School Boards study’s recommendations, University of Minnesota
researchers reported last summer that: "Students (who use) social
networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we
want them to
develop to be successful today,"
In my travels around the US, teachers all echo the same refrain: their students
believe,
everything they see, read or hear. We are certainly in a lot of trouble if our
young
people are not applying some skepticism to what the media tells them..
I asked myself, why are they so trusting and believing.? Is it because they are
lazy, or is it
because we aren’t teaching students how to think critically…
or if we ARE teaching it, perhaps we aren’t properly applying critical thinking
to media messages.
If you’ve followed developments in the future of learning—then you may already
know about the
21st century skills movement. “Today’s students (says the Pres of
the Partnership for 21st C
Skills) need to be critical thinkers, problem solvers and effective
communicators
– and ( he adds) we need to equip their teachers
with the 21st century training, professional development and assessment tools
they need to
lead this effort,”
Last month, a survey entitled “ Emerging Media: Prevalence and Impact in the
Workplace”
noted that human resource managers are willing to pay top dollar to attract new
workers
who have these emerging media skills. Emerging media skills were defined as
email,
mobile computing, podcasts, digital audio/media players, mobile communication
devices,
instant messaging, interactive Web Pages and blogs.
The other side of the coin is that too much immersion in “screen time” MAY come
at the
expense of critical thinking and reasoning. UCLA professor Patricia Greenfield
first
reported on this in her classic 1984 text: MIND AND MEDIA. In January of this
year, she
updated her research in Science Magazine…she reviewed previous studies…coming to
the
conclusion that the growth of visual
media while producing a generation that has greater visual reasoning skills MAY
ALSO
be creating a new generation: one that has a reduced ability to stop and engage
in critical
reasoning. In an email to me, Dr. Greenfield suggests that media literacy
education is one
of the
promising practices that all educators should consider.
Why?.. because media literacy ENCOURAGES reflection and critical inquiry. It
also
creates active, critical and ENGAGED users of media rather than passive
and inactive students.
Today’s young people know ONLY what they see on the screens—they don’t have a
clue how the production made its way onto the screen..the PROCESS. Media
literacy,
among other things, is about pulling back the curtain, to how media are created
and
produced. When we provide students with the knowledge and skills
to create podcasts, or digital stories, we empower them….
and at the same time, they begin to appreciate the steps…the sometimes
painstakingly
long process it takes to make media.
In work that I am doing with teachers and students, we are taking passages from
popular novels and working in groups to create the film “screenplays” and
“storyboards”
of the scenes they’ve read. As I move around the room, I listen to groups of
teachers and
students argue, collaborate, come to a consensus, --about how their “scene”
should be shot.
This is powerful and engaging learning. Yet most of today’s
English language arts textbooks include not one reference to scripting or
storyboarding…both
important steps in writing a film, or a video game, a graphic novel or a
commercial. To
paraphrase my colleague Heidi Hayes Jacobs: if students are so enamored of TV
and film,
shouldn’t we (educators) be harnessing their fascination with these media by
teaching
them how they were made? Film maker George Lucas agrees… If people aren’t
taught the
language of sounds and image, HE SAYS.. shouldn’t they be considered
as illiterate as if they left college without being able to read and write?
Today, literacy means more than just the words on a page: Educators must
consider how a film, a commercial, a photograph---all have a language of their
own.
My colleague Renee Hobbs has already documented in her new book
“Teaching the Media: Media Literacy in High School English”
…what happens when teachers
have been taught how to teach media literacy to their students ….their knowledge
of
comprehension, analysis, listening and viewing transfers from non-print to
print.
Renee says, I quote: “over all, students had a more sophisticated
understanding of how
authors compose messages to convey meaning through their use of language, image
and sound and how readers respond with their own meaning making processes as
they
interpret messages”
I am frequently presenting “media literacy” in school library media centers…and
I always take the time to scan the book shelves--- I am looking for evidence
that the school’s student collection includes books about the media. Yet, what
I am finding
is shocking. There are few if any texts on how to create blogs, films,
animation, graphic novels,
digital stories. And this is appalling to me: here, today, students are
enamored of media,
yet, the schools have virtually left media off the shelves. That is one reason
that
I authored two texts (one for elementary and the other for secondary) That’s
also
the
reason that I have posted hundreds of recommended books (and DVDs and
streaming video clips) on my website.
Finally, Id like to take a few minutes to talk about the use of news in the
English
language arts classroom…There is a general consensus that young people don’t
follow the news, (unless you count Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as news)
and it goes without saying, if they aren’t following what’s happening
how can they possibly speak intelligently about their world or be active
participants
in democracy. That general consensus is wrong. In a study to be released next
month
at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention, we learn that
young people do want to be knowledgeable about their world….in fact the
survey
indicates a pretty consistent desire on their part to have the news explained
to them in
more plain language. Part of this research will result in a redesign of how
news is presented on line by newspapers and how it can better appeal to
young news consumers.
Related to all of this is something called NEWS LITERACY and it is designed to
engage
young people in understanding the process of news gathering and reporting, .
There are 2 separate but distinct news literacy projects underway..the first is
at nearby Stony
Brook University on Long Island, where thousands of students have already taken
the course.
The university has also recruited some high school teachers to field test a
version of
the
college course with their students. The second news literacy project involves
high schools. The pilot phase of the project got underway in February in the
Washington
DC metropolitan area. This project recruits former journalists who partner with
teachers
to develop meaningful and engaging activities for their students. This second
project
is called The News Literacy Project. I have written about both of these on my
website,
The Media Literacy Clearinghouse. And next November both projects will be
represented during a panel discussion at the National Council of Teachers of
English
annual
meeting in Philadelphia—I hope that many of you might join us.
I leave you with these questions:
_how
comfortable are you teaching media literacy?
_how comfortable are you with the incorporating the tools and media of Web 2.0
_ Is your school or district providing professional development in the effective
use of these tools?
_how many of you have already chosen to use blogs, wikis, flickr, twitter or
other
Social
networking tools to help your students learn?
_ finally, what will happen if you do NOT?
Thank you very much.