This document discusses current challenges in media literacy education. It covers topics such as how learning is changing due to increased mediation; the history of media education concerns around commercialization of children's media and impacts on learning; evolving conceptions of literacy to include multimodal meanings; key concepts for analyzing media like production, texts, reception; characteristics of new media environments; and changes to young people's media experiences and culture. It concludes with seven challenges facing media education around issues like participation versus protection, linking literacies, connecting to human rights, and realizing democratic goals.

1. CURRENT
CHALLENGES IN
MEDIA LITERACY

2. The media education project
 How is the project of learning (or bildung, meaning
growth), particularly for children and youth, understood
in relation to media?
 How should young people’s development and education
be conceptualized given that this takes place under
profound conditions of mediation today?

3. Why media education now?
Why this matters today?
 Significant learning is taking place outside formal
education settings
 This is, in turn, is reshaping learning inside schools
 The role of multimodal texts in our lives is
undermining a key axiom of modernist education –
that is, that real learning or literacy is a function of the
written or spoken word.

4. Short history of media
education
 1920s/1930s – commercialization of children’s culture (via
movies, advertising, comic books). Leads to worries about the
decline of organic children’s cultures and thus to develop
discriminating tastes (F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson) –
related to the Frankfurt School’s worries about an evolving mass
culture.
 1950s/1960s/70s – debate over the positive and negative forms
of socialization associated with mass media took a different
shape, I.E.
 A sense of optimism that TV could be the great educational equalizer
 Yet at the same time, there are growing worries that TV undermined older
forms of learning (McLuhan) or shifted influence on children’s lives to the
boardrooms of Madison AV and Hollywood
 This worry would become acute as advertising and the children’s toy and
media industries learned to target young people as specific audience
segments (1960s/70s)

5. Changing meaning of literacy
 Historic conceptions of literacy - literacy is fundamentally
understood to be about reading and writing. It is a set of skills
that the individual mind possesses.
 To be literate is thus to be capable in a certain form of
knowledge production – print and the written word. Schools are
in turn understood as the modernist institution charged with
producing these skills among youth
 Problem with this conception:
 Ignores the role of images and other forms of meaning making (and
participation), in children’s lives.
 Ignores the experience of public pedagogy produced by an increasingly
ubiquitous popular media culture
 Ignores the role of class and other social relationships in shaping the
what counts as legitimate knowledge in schools.

6. Changing meaning of literacy
Challenge to modernist notions of literacy taken up on four fronts:
1. Within media education – Raymond Williams, teacher-educators
and pop culture in the classroom
2. Cultural studies and a new attention to the images in relation to
identity, politics, gender, race, and class.
3. From within literacy circles, the influence of education theorist and
social revolutionary, Paulo Freire, changes how people understand
what it means to be literate. Literacy is not just about job skills, it is
about developing an ability to read the word and the world – to
navigate and understand key relationships that structure people’s
lives.
4. Growing influence of socio-cultural perspectives on literacy –
Literacy is a matter of social practices bound up with social,
institutional, and cultural relationships

7. A social conception of literacy
 Literacy involves competencies with reading and writing, and
increasingly writing via new technologies including video, sound,
hyperlinked texts.
 Literacy is also about a social relationship with the world. The
meanings and symbols we work with are always located in an
environment and a history (this is, a Discourse frame established in
relation to class, gender, or institutions like schools and religious
settings, etc.) that extends well beyond the individual learner.
 This means to be literate is to be able to use the ‘right’ language in the
‘right’ ways within a Discourse. One is able to command the
“operational” or “cultural” dimensions of literacy.
 The symbols and tools of communication have an institutional, social,
economic and political context.

8. Key concepts in media literacy
 To undertake this work means developing a conceptual map that
makes sense of how media operates. One such map (heuristic)
focuses our attention on mapping cultural flows:
Cultural Life – Refers to issues of cultural ethos, ideological background
and historical legacies that stand behind and situate how a cultural
form/text comes into the world.
Production – Refers to issues of authorship but because contemporary
media are highly industrial, often globalized practices, authorship can’t be
adequately understood in terms of a single voice or artist. So we also
need to take into consideration the political economy of production, the
role of technology, and the burdens of culture.
Texts – The way multiple forms of representation convey meaning
Reception/Audience – How audiences use and make sense of media texts
and practices given their particular contexts of reception.
Cultural Life – How a media form settles into cultural experience and
becomes part of the broader context from which new media
representations and practices are born.

9. Key Concepts in Media Literacy
Production
1. Ownership structures within and across
media industries
2. Technologies of production
3. Cultural and cultural traditions
(including stereotypes, but also the
burden of cultural representation)
4. Access and participation (who has
access, whose stories get told, whose
get excluded from mainstream media)
5. Regulatory environment
6. Circulation and distribution and
connections between media
7. Labour professional Professional codes
of practice
Text
1. Stylization
2. Codes – the signs used to tell a story,
portray an event, etc.
3. Conventions – the ways codes are used
in particular cultural settings to convey
an experience of reality. These include
the particular combination and
sequencing of images, sounds, and
words that are specific to certain
genres of storytelling, news reporting,
etc.
4. Normative values/ideologies in texts
5. Ways of examining texts
 Content analysis and Cultivation
analysis
 Semiotics
 Sign – signifier/signified
 The role of difference in
representation
 Discourses
 Denotation/Connotation
 Myths (Barthes)
 Intertextuality

10. Design elements
Linguistic Design - delivery, vocabulary, modality,
transitivity, information structures, local/global coherence
Visual - images and shot selection, page layout, screen
formats, colours, editing practices
Audio - music, sound effects
Spatial - environmental, geographical and architectonic
meanings
Gestural - behaviour, bodily physicality, gesture,
sensuality, feelings and affect
Multimodal - all elements related in a dynamic process of
meaning production - hybridy and intertextuality

11. Key concepts in media literacy
Reception
1. Targeting and address
2. Making sense and decoding
meaning – how different
audiences read texts
 Dominant reading
 Negotiated reading
 Alternative/oppositional
reading
3. Uses
4. Pleasures
5. Social differences
Cultural Life
1. Influences on the media and
the media influences on lived
culture
2. How does a media text,
institution, set of media
practices (i.e., branding and
children) resonate throughout
culture and impact other
cultural expressions today?

12. New literacies and new
competencies
 The field of new literacies is focused on understanding
how digitization has revolutionized the learning process,
transforming relationships between educators and
learners, while offering new relationships with civic
participation and activism
 New literacies focuses attention on the development of a
new set of learning competencies that add to and extend
the learning concerns involved in the key concepts in
media education.

13. Network society and new times
What does it mean to suggest that we are living in new
times?
What resources might we call upon to understand the
rise of the network society?
 Post-industrialism and the information society
 Post-Fordism
 Postmodernism
 Globalization thesis

14. Primary characteristics of a network society
1. Economically, the network society is an informational – as opposed to
a strictly industrial – economy
2. The economy is organized globally, on a network model
3. Human experience of time and space are changing, so that the
mechanical, sequential clock of the industrial period is giving way to
“timeless time,” and the space of bounded nations, communities, and
even imaginations, are giving way to a “space of flows.”
4. All media are rendered in data – so that the database becomes a
cultural form
5. New conditions of power are at work – crucially in a network society,
power and powerlessness are a function of access to networks and
control over the flows that happen between and within networks
6. Central source of tension today – the contradiction between “the
placeless character of networks” and “the rootlessness of human
meaning.”

15. A new economic and technological media
environment
Consolidation/concentration of power in smaller group of corporate hands
Convergent media companies
Uniqueness of media conglomerates
 Horizontal and vertical integration
 Major players include partnerships, joint ventures in distribution and production
 Increased business, and in some instances, a merger between media companies
and computer companies in part through production of new revenue models
(Google)
 Media networks are increasingly linked with financial, political and technological
networks.
Time Warner
NBC Universal
Viacom
News Corporation
Google
Microsoft
Disney
Bertelsmann AG
CBS (TV, Films, Interactive)
Apple
Yahoo

16. Changes in young people’s media culture –
moving from mass media to interactive media
 Media time increased significantly - across classes, genders, and
ethnicities in 1990s/2000s - from 25-28 hrs/week in Britain, the US and
Canada in the 1980s, to more than 50 hrs per week with all digital
media today.
 Convergence and the expansion of media channels – produces more
fragmented audiences
 On the one hand, these audiences are susceptible to target marketing
and the branding of everyday experience in new ways, I.E.,
 Development of new youth markets (tweens, etc.)
 Development of new marketing practices - cross marketing; use of new
spaces (schools); viral marketing; and, immersive, data-driven advertising.
 On the other hand, the possibility of finding, negotiating new resources
(animé/video games) as resources for identity formation blurs
boundaries between adulthood/childhood; changes the nature of
friendships, raising questions of depth in the context of hypersociality

17. Social, cultural and economic changes in the
relation to childhood
 Extended youth – i.e., the markers of adulthood are being
delayed, extending the years of education and pushing back the
start of employment, of financial independence, and when youth
leave the parental home
 In addition, the age of sexual knowledge and consent has
changed, as has the availability of information about drugs and
alcohol, and the range of lifestyle choices available to young
people.
 Young people’s consumer power has dramatically increased. By
the late 2010 or so, US teens had an estimated spending power
of $155 billion.

18. Social, cultural and economic changes in the
relation to childhood
De-traditionalization of the family and the democratization
of the private sphere (Giddens)
 New family hierarchies
 New role of trust, authenticity and reciprocity
 Creates new space for “project of the self”
Challenge is children still subject to intense social
contradictions
 Between respect for childhood and ongoing systemic disavowal
of children’s rights
 Between respect for kids’ ideas and ongoing exclusion from
public life
Leads to intensive regulation and surveillance of children/youth +
new public policy developments (i.e., No Child Left Behind, and
new “good citizen” policies for youth across the western world).

19. Changes in young people’s media culture –
moving from mass media to interactive media
 Through instant messaging, email and chat, young people’s
connectivity has changed. They can form relationships with people
they have never met face to face, thus creating new and unmonitored
environments away from parents or teachers.
 This is part of an intensification of kids’ social relationships (the phone
always has to be on). Through the development of social networking
sites that combine blogs, home pages, and message boards, this
intensification creates a sense of living in a state of constant media
flow.
 Expansion of outlets for young people to access media, (i.e., digital
cameras, music mixing software, and online and console-based
gaming) creates new forms of interactivity. Produces new
relationships between young people as media consumers and
producers, given the fact that there are significantly more opportunities
for young people to use media resources for their own social
interaction.

20. Key changes in young people’s mediated
experience
 Kids’ time is more privatized and commercialized – more time is spent
in home and in supervised activities
 Cultural/media goods require more money, so family expenditure on
entertainment media has grown dramatically in two decades
 Children’s public spaces have declined, while children’s online spaces
have increased, producing new public/private relationships
 Reconfiguring identity development relationships
 Producing new and heightened forms of individuation that can be
characterized by new conditions of alienation
 Producing a participation paradox
 New kind of digital divide – not about access but the social networks
that enable young people to develop computer skills

21. New ontology of cultural experience
The upshot is:
1. Young people are increasingly using new “stuff,” new
technologies (materialities) of communication that
are mediated by ‘post-typographic’ forms of texts,
which require new competencies.
2. This involves young people in new forms of being in
the world. Think, for instance of changes in:
 The experience of space
 The kinds of artifacts that occupy young people’s time
 The new relationship to value
 The role of collective intelligence

22. Thinking about ‘new mindsets’
The world is best interpreted, understood and
responded to in broadly physical-industrial
terms
Value is a function of scarcity
An industrial view of production:
products as material artifacts
a focus on infrastructure and production
units
tools for producing
Focus on individual intelligence
Expertise and authority is located in individuals
and institutions
Space is enclosed and purpose-specific
Social relations of the book dominate
alongside a stable ‘textual order’
The world cannot adequately be
interpreted, understood and responded
to in physical-industrial terms
Value is a function of dispersion
A post-industrial view of production
products enable services
a focus on leverage and non-finite
participation
tools for mediating and relating
Focus on collective intelligence
Expertise and authority are distributed and
collective; hybrid experts
Space is open, continuous and fluid
Social relations of emerging ‘digital media
space’; texts in change
- from Lankshear and Knobel, New
Literacies (2006)
Mindset 1 Mindset 2

23. Literacy for a digital age
 With digital technologies, the social dimensions of
literacy, or meaningful knowledge production change.
 At root, there is a more concerted focus on:
 Literacy as multimodal
 Involving various forms of production
 Characterized by role of collective intelligence and
collaboration in the production of knowledge
 Involving a new understanding of creativity in an open-source
culture.
 Creativity and intelligence are thought less in terms of
individual expression, and more in terms of practices
involving cultural sampling, and the transformation and
building knowledge within networks.

24. Challenges of media
education
Rethinking Renee Hobbs (1998)….
1. Protecting youth people vs enabling critical and
complex forms of participation in media culture
 False binary
 Participation in and of itself is layered with dangerous
contradictions
 Must retain the critical and moral agenda that has long
circumscribed the field of media education

25. Challenges of media education
2. Linking media literacy/production to information
literacies
 Media production is a necessary part of media literacy
 Guarding against a technological bias in information literacies
 Understanding the role of the internet as “Risk Accelerator”
3. Extending the production of symbolic code to the
critical production of programming code

26. Challenges of media education
4. Connecting media literacies and the UN (1989)
Convention on the Rights of the Child
5. Developing greater connections between school-
based media literacy and community-based
youth media production programs

27. Challenges of Media Education
6. Understanding the impact of media education on
the life biographies of young people
 Tensions and contradictions produced by discourse of
‘creative economies’ and the ideologies of new working
lives
 Community youth media and a politics of articulation with
media reform

28. Challenges of Media Education
7. Redeeming the democratic goals of media
education
 Teaching for worldliness and ‘preserving newness’
 Thinking, Judging and teaching a hospitality toward
strangers

29. Media education and ‘preserving
newness’
• Thinking - the habit of examining routine and belated
behaviours and circumstances, so that the ‘constructedness’ of
everyday life is brought into view. This means:
 Learning to de-naturalize images & mediated experiences by reading
texts as nodal points in a relational ecology
 Questioning bias
 Understanding how authority is enabled through media
 Learning to leverage the network form and capabilities of the internet via
network thinking and collective intelligence
 Judging – something we do with and through our encounters
with others. Leads to an ‘enlarged mentality’ as we learn to
take on and mix the perspectives of others with our own. Done
by:
 Learning to talk back to various publics
 Leveraging the production possibilities of old and new media
 Provoking and challenging students to examine how media cultures
operate across our lives

30. Media education and ‘preserving
newness’
• Hospitality towards the World – fostering a duty of
care, a sense of responsiveness, or ‘responsibility ‘ to
the world by:
 Ensuring the digital spectrum is available to all
 By helping young people to confront “fundamental and
structuring wrongs, a miscount, a radical and unjust
exclusion” of people, ideas or media
 By helping young people experiment with new forms of
association (i.e., crowd sourcing, online community forums)