“It can be quite difficult to teach about media literacy simply because of the type of information it exposes our children to.”
“In my district, I am not allowed to read the newspaper or even have it out in my room during the day. The principal does not want students or teachers looking at it during the school day because it will take away from the learning time…”
“Maybe [our teachers] felt that if we began to question the news we would begin to question their ways as well.” – quotes by educators interviewed for Political Conscientization and Media (Il)literacy (Carr, 2008).
As I began reading this article, I wondered if it would prove relevant to me as a foreign language educator. I recognize the importance of media literacy, critical thinking, and the questioning of power structures, but I wasn’t sure if an article on the teaching of these concepts would really affect me – isn’t this more for social studies or ELA teachers? However, I finished the article with a much different opinion.As I’ve mentioned before, I attended a very liberal Quaker secondary school. We were afforded many freedoms, not least of which were the freedom to organization and information. If we asked a question, we got an answer. If we had an opinion, there was a public forum for it. Somehow this mentality pervaded in the school. Our teachers were critical thinkers and encouraged us to build that skill.
When I read one teacher’s statement that they are not permitted to display a newspaper in their classroom, I was shocked. Apart from the fact that this teacher implies they have time in their school day to read the paper (a luxurious weekend activity, in my mind), I was surprised that information – especially a primary media source that shapes the world as it informs it – would be forbidden in an academic environment. I chose the other two quotes because they also speak to the restrictive concept of the silencing of information. “The kind of information [the news] exposes our children to”? Please! Children, especially tweens and adolescents, need a broad range of input to even begin to hone critical skill. So maybe don’t put on the local news for them every night – it’s perfectly right to want to avoid overexposure to violence, terror and possibly desensitize kids to these things. But that by no means is to say that children should be kept from current events and how they are portrayed – and by whom. So what if students start questioning teachers? They do anyway! Why not give them the critical tools to do so in an educated manner? A good teacher shouldn’t afraid of a student being right or asking them a question they don’t know the answer to.
Teachers cited in this article generally agreed that media literacy is not taught or well-taught, that there is too much pressure to fulfill standards to prepare for standardized tests, and that they themselves may not have been fully media-literate before taking this course. With their newfound knowledge, they felt a greater incentive to pass it on to their students.
How does this translate to pedagogy outside of a social studies curriculum? I think of the constant emphasis on interculturality/multiculturality in language teaching. Many times we are stuck trying to force culture into simple grammar or vocab activities. Why not integrate more target-language news sources, op-eds, etc. as the basis for study? This shouldn’t be reserved for solely the upper-level students or classes. Spanish- (or French, or Mandarin) speaking peoples deserve media representation in scholastic environments, and we can’t rely on one department to be students’ main source of media input. I came away from this article with this strong feeling: raise standards in language classrooms and ask your students to engage socially as well as linguistically.