| Media literacy education (MLE) teaches youth to question, communicate, and ultimately make sense of the media messages they are frequently exposed to. States across the US have recognized the importance of building students' media literacy skills by incorporating MLE within standards across K-12 curricula. Yet, little is known about integration efforts and the best literacy practices that could support building students' media literacy skills in the specific content areas. This dissertation investigates how a hybrid (i.e., literature and history) content area (i.e., American Studies) course can support the sophisticated literacy practices that are required for reading media messages in elaborated ways. High school students individually read news media articles before and after their exposure to American Studies. Evidence showed that students increased their attention to critical text features such as source and phrase constructions when reading news media articles after taking American Studies. Classroom observations revealed that teachers attended to overlapping text features (i.e., contextual information) when reading media texts, but displayed a division of labor associated with each teacher's expertise (i.e., English---text structure; history---source) when reading traditional content area texts. Finally, unfolding classroom conversations showed that students learned to attend to text features with increasing complexity, though teachers often facilitated student learning through narrations (particularly of contextual information) more so when reading media messages than traditional texts. These findings are discussed with respect to the benefits and limitations to integrating MLE in a hybrid classroom setting. |
