| Recently, schools have been making efforts to incorporate media literacy into the curriculum. However, their practices have often failed to equally embrace all aspects of media literacy in all levels of schooling and in all classrooms. As a result, media analysis has become synonymous with the term media literacy, and it has been perceived as a mechanism to filter the ideological content, and sometimes to protect children from what is called cultural decay.; Based on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Peter McLaren, this study is an attempt to understand how media literacy practices in New Mexico address four aspects of media literacy (access, analysis, evaluation, and production) to form a pedagogical praxis, which leads to an action-based media literacy. In order to achieve this goal, a mixed qualitative/descriptive/inferential study was conducted to examine the different dynamics that influence the teachings of media literacy. Ten participants were interviewed. Followed up by the interviews, a questionnaire was constructed and distributed to 250 teachers to further explore how media literacy teachers address media literacy and what other background forces influence their practice.; The findings overall indicate that: (1) access was not taught as a part of media literacy units, but as a part of integrated units, (2) analysis, albeit skill-and-drill based, has been the dominant practice, (3) evaluation has been the discomfort zone in the most practices of media literacy, and (4) production has been perceived in three different ways. The researcher concluded that "protectionism" in the sense that it existed in the past does not have currency among educators. However, the results revealed a new form of protectionism, or what is formulated as the "filter-model" of media literacy, when some educators attempted to secure their position by embracing a "feel-good" type of media production or by inhibiting the genuine voice of students that castigates the controlling logic.; The study points out that the underpinnings of action-based media literacy are the organization of pedagogical practices, educators' perception of media production, educators' view of community as a field of democratic participation, educators' positioning students as thinking subjects, educators' teaching subject and teaching level, as well as educators' experiences with media and media literacy. |
