October 26–30, 2020, is Annual Media Literacy Week in the United States. The mission of this week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.
This year, the theme for US Media Literacy Week will celebrate one of the five components of media literacy’s definition each day of Media Literacy Week: Access, Analyze, Evaluate, Create, and Act.
The following resources from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org support media literacy:
In today’s media-rich society, where students are exposed to an ever-increasing variety of traditional and nonprint texts, media literacy skills have become critical to the academic development of our students. Read more in Lesson Plans for Creating Media-Rich Classrooms. Visit this additional collection of lesson plans from ReadWriteThink.org on media literacy.
“Social Critique and Pleasure: Critical Media Literacy with Popular Culture Texts” shows how popular music, for example, can offer powerful opportunities for dialogically teachable moments and engagement in literacy learning that is critical but that does not come at the expense of children’s pleasure in such texts.
“Media at the Core: How Media Literacy Strategies Strengthen Teaching” includes an expansion of teachers’ conception of texts to include understanding and creation in a variety of media forms; integrating media and technology across school subjects; modeling strong research practices in an increasingly information-rich environment; analyzing and creating various genres of nonfiction texts; and engaging students in civic participation.
A popular one-semester elective class relies on student knowledge of and interest in sports to teach critical media literacy and rhetorical analysis as described in “Sports Stories and Critical Media Literacy.”
“Today’s teachers and communication majors need to know there is no longer a strict dividing line between mass media and social media.” Learn more in this blog post from members of the NCTE Assembly on Computers in English (ACE.)
Did you know that there’s an NCTE Media Literacy Award?
If you are interested in learning more, join us on Tuesday, October 27, 2020, at 4:00 p.m. ET for a Media Literacy Week Author Talk with Renee Hobbs.
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.