Library Programs
Investigating Media
Programs that allow students to analyze and assess mass communications are essential to developing media-literate students. School libraries are in a prime position to facilitate programs investigating various forms of media, particularly due to access to print, online, audio, and visual resources that they provide students. Film criticism programs can expose students to different types of media, such as international films, and teach them how to interrogate the media they experience on a day-to-day basis. Carolyn Fortuna (2010), who coordinated a Film Grammar course through her school library, explains that teaching students how to analyze film can teach media literacy skills by revealing the “codes of the dominant culture of our contemporary society” (p. 12). This can extend throughout a student's K-12 schooling; while elementary students can compare a film adaptation with the original work, high school students can explore films through the lenses of gender, culture, and economics.
News-Know-How, a partnership with between the American Library Association and the News Literacy Project, is an afterschool program that allows youth participants to assess how factual the news from media outlets and blogs are (Koray, 2013). In 2013, participating teens were divided into groups and assigned different topics, including politics, health care, and gun violence, in order to explore how different media outlets delivered news about these issues. Thus, school libraries can and should craft programs that engage students in relevant critical analysis of media.
Resources
Fortuna, C. (2010). Lights! Camera! Action! A Grammar of Film for Media Literacy. Knowledge Quest, 38(4), 10-23.
Koray, D. (2013). Program empowers teens to discern fact from fiction and become savvy information consumers. American Libraries. Retrieved from http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/article/navigating-news
Producing Media
An important way to make students savvy-media consumers is to see the process that goes behind media production. In addition to teaching students real-world skills, digital media production, including documentary and narrative filmmaking, news production, podcasting, and producing radio programs, empowers students to be the creators, as opposed to passive consumers, of media. School libraries, which can provide students with access to the space and tools needed, can be utilized to provide media literacy programs for students, both during and after school. The following are specific examples of student-targeted media production programs and suggestions on how to maximize these to teach students media literacy skills.
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library
Chicago Public Library
Denver Public Library
Levin (2010) explains that in her experience as a school librarian, film production allows students to attain deeper levels of interpretation and critical analysis. At the Urban School of San Francisco, students find video clips and create their own documentaries because “film analyses, interpretation, and creation move learners from the lowest to the highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy” (p. 55). Digital media production allows students to understand how sounds, images, particularly film shots and angles, dialogue, editing, props, and costuming all create media messages and how these influence consumers.
School librarians can follow the example set by public libraries and allow their multimedia equipment to be used for media production during students’ free time. For example, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s “Turn it Up: Teen Radio” program gives students broadcasting training, exposes them to the people who work in the field, and transforms participants into creators of mass-communication content. Similarly, the Chicago Public Library’s YOUMedia program and the Denver Public Library’s IDEALab allow students to explore their creativity and produce their own games, videos, music, and more. The school library can serve as a digital media hub for students to analyze, decipher, and produce content.
Resources
Levin, S. (2010). Student Created Videos: Teaching Copyright and Media Literacy through Student-Produced Documentaries. Knowledge Quest, 38(4), 52-55.
Users discuss the Chicago Public Library's YOUMedia Lab
An Interactive Pathfinder
for School Librarians and Education Professionals