Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Media literacy and student/teacher engagement.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Media literacy education aims to enable students to critically and analytically engage with media. Teacher/Student engagement in the classroom enables students to enhance their learning experiences by providing them the atmosphere and interaction they need to be actively involved in their learning process. The tenets of teacher/student engagement and mutuality, when applied to the concept of media literacy education, reveal how media literacy education can be enhanced in the classroom.

Introduction

Most of all, bringing media culture into the learning environment--from kindergarten to graduate school--guarantees a high level of engagement by students. And engagement, as every teacher knows, is the key to learning success. (Thoman & Jolls, 2004, 20)

Media literacy education aims to develop a skill set encompassing the abilities to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media (Rogow, 2004). How teachers teach about media and how students engage with media become the base upon which these skills can be effectively realized. The hope is that these skills will lead to students becoming more knowledgeable, aware and active participants in a democratic society. Canadian educator Chris Worsnop (Seeman, 2004, 19) writes of the need for media educators to focus on mutual respect and engagement:

Good media education courses do not focus on propagandizing students into a single way of thinking. They provide students with a broad range of critical and analytical skills to help them make their own choices and decisions about the ideological and political messages surrounding them in 21st century culture ... Media education teachers focus on respecting students' choices and decisions regardless of their orientation, provided those choices and decisions are well formed and properly supported.

The main question this analytic essay will address is: how can we enhance media literacy education through teacher/student mutual engagement in the classroom? The aim is to explore how the tenets of teacher/student engagement can be applied to media literacy education. This essay will reveal how such mutual engagement can lead to more critical and analytical reflection of media messages from a young age. The hope in addressing such an inquiry is that better insight can be attained as to how teacher/student engagement can enhance media literacy education for a more aware and participative future citizenry.

Critical, student-centered education

Thoman and Jolls (2004, 27) envision media literacy as a tool for empowering citizens: "The vision of media literacy is to put all individuals, ultimately, in charge of their own learning, empowering them to take an active rather than a passive...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!