Media Literacy - Education

Education

Media Education is the process of teaching and learning about media. It is about developing young people's critical and creative abilities when it comes to the media. Media education should not be confused with educational technology or with educational media. Surveys repeatedly show that, in most industrialized countries, children now spend more time watching television than they do in school, or also on any other activity apart from sleeping Media Education has no fixed location, no clear ideology and no definitive recipients; it is subject to whims of a financial market bigger than itself. Being able to understand the media enables people to analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a wide variety of mediums, genres, and forms. A person who is media literate is informed. There are many reasons why media studies are absent from the primary and secondary school curricula, including cuts in budgets and social services as well as over-packed schedules and expectations.

Education for media literacy often uses an inquiry-based pedagogic model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, hear, and read. Media literacy education provides tools to help people critically analyze messages, offers opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and helps them develop creative skills in making their own media messages. Critical analysis can include identifying author, purpose and point of view, examining construction techniques and genres, examining patterns of media representation, and detecting propaganda, censorship, and bias in news and public affairs programming (and the reasons for these). Media literacy education may explore how structural features—such as media ownership, or its funding model -- affect the information presented.

Media literate people should be able to skillfully create and produce media messages, both to show understanding of the specific qualities of each medium, as well as to create independent media and participate as active citizens. Media literacy can be seen as contributing to an expanded conceptualization of literacy, treating mass media, popular culture and digital media as new types of 'texts' that require analysis and evaluation. By transforming the process of media consumption into an active and critical process, people gain greater awareness of the potential for misrepresentation and manipulation (especially through commercials and public relations techniques), and understand the role of mass media and participatory media in constructing views of reality.

Media literacy education is sometimes conceptualized as a way to address the negative dimensions of mass media, popular culture and digital media, including media violence, gender and racial stereotypes, the sexualization of children, and concerns about loss of privacy, cyberbullying and Internet predators. By building knowledge and competencies in using media and technology, media literacy education may provide a type of protection to children and young people by helping them make good choices in their media consumption habits, and patterns of usage.