Renee Hobbs, in the video on the right sidebar, provides an excellent overview of the importance, focus, and foundations for media literacy. 

 

What distinguishes media literacy from other types of literacy? 

 

In answering that, the field of media literacy generally divides into two separate camps. One position sees media literacy as preventative in nature, while the other views media literacy as fundamentally empowering.

 

To learn more about the preventative position, please click here.

 

To learn more about the empowerment position, please click here.  

 

Despite tension between the “protectionist” and “empowerment” camps, media literacy in schools will ultimately manifest itself as a combination of both. The Common Core Learning Standards require that students have the ability to “gather, comprehend, evaluate, synthesize, and report on information and ideas, to conduct original research in order to answer questions or solve problems, and to analyze and create a high volume and extensive range of print and nonprint texts in media forms old and new.” (Common Core Learning Standards, 2014) Teachers and librarians must be improvisers as well as planners, and they must teach their students both how to critically evaluate media as well as immerse their students in the creative process. Renee Hobbs pointedly says: “pedagogical practices must be emphatically student-centered and inquiry-oriented, helping students interrogate the process of making meaning through critical investigation using strategies of both close reading (also called deconstruction or decoding) and media production…” (Hobbs, 2011). Students must be able to react critically to messages that may be manipulative or misleading, but they would be missing out on the vastness of media literacy if they were not taught how to produce their own media.