Media Literacy—Part of the Curriculum?

Nobody denies that young people spend an incredible number of hours glued to a small screen, be it one belonging to a television or a computer. The U.S. Department of Education says that most children watch television three to five hours every day. The U.S. Department of Commerce says that more than 60 percent of families with children have Internet access at home. In other words, children see hundreds of advertisements, images, and messages daily. Yet few young people receive training in media literacy—in how to evaluate what they're looking at for bias and accuracy.

Educating young people to be media savvy isn't a new idea. However, few educators know how to integrate media literacy into the curriculum. Information literacy has made headway in many schools—because it can be tied to academics. But media literacy has been accepted more slowly, at least in the U.S.

In Canada, however, it's a different story. "Media literacy is now part of the core curriculum here," says Bill Allen, a spokesperson for the Media Awareness Network (MAN), a Canadian nonprofit organization that provides educators with training and lesson plans (www.media-awareness.ca). In the early '90s, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)—the equivalent of our Federal Communications Commission—met with Canadian media companies and producers to establish a media literacy program to educate young viewers, parents, and teachers. Now every province has established media education programs, funded by the Canadian networks and cable providers.

Anne Taylor, MAN's co-director, says that media education can tie directly into teaching young people about the meaning of intellectual property and plagiarism. "Teachers need to know that the old tried-and-true Shakespeare essays won't work—those essays are now all on the Internet to copy." Taylor says that teachers need to focus on the creative process behind the essay—"that's what media education is all about." When students learn about the creative process, she says, they'll be more likely to respect the work of others, and plagiarize less. "[Media literacy has] finally found its time," Taylor says. "It's all about critical thinking. It's not about answers, it's about asking the right questions."

Although the U.S. lags far behind its Canadian cousins, there are several U.S. organizations that think media literacy should be included in the school curriculum. One of the most notable is the Center for Media Literacy (CML), based in California. Its Web site (www.medialit.org) includes lesson plans and professional development opportunities. Tessa Jolls, CML's president and CEO, says that information literacy and media literacy are similar, but that media literacy features multimedia instead of simply a "message." Information literacy tends to focus on the messages you find in text. "Librarians," Jolls says, "come to the topic from print; media educators through non-print, film, and TV. But the media inform us all the time in many different ways. Each person receives messages differently—by gender, age, culture, or economic background."

While Canada has been able to adopt formal media education programs more quickly because Canadian education is more centralized—"what Ottawa says, goes," Jolls says—decentralized U.S. educational institutions are beginning to accept media literacy's importance. Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), the nonprofit organization that has been instrumental in setting educational standards nationwide, has now included two media education "strands"—"viewing" and "media"—into its four existing language arts strands of "reading," "writing," "speaking," and "listening." These six strands have been incorporated into standards in Texas, Maryland, and other states. "The movement is growing," Jolls says. But media education, she cautions, "is not a new subject—it's a new way to teach all subjects."