Media literacy: Soft focus on the intellectual opportunities afforded students

Since the 1980s, there has been a national educational movement to include media literacy courses into United States grade and high schools. The media literacy campaign is spearheaded by several media literacy organizations that publish journals and newsletters. This study applies elements of social structuralism to discover the historical educational antecedents and to examine the contemporary political context of the media literacy movement and performs an ideological analysis of media literacy discourse. Three hundred twenty-two media literacy articles from three primary journals, Telemedium, Media & Values and The State of Media Education. were examined to discover what curriculum and pedagogical issues are included or excluded from the media literacy movement to ascertain how this educational initiative might affect the cognitive and intellectual opportunities afforded students. The media literacy rhetoric was than analyzed in three different. paradigms (media education, literacy, and teaching/learning) to discover any significant or unconsidered trajectories within media literacy discourse and to identify the power interests served by the inclusion or exclusion of certain pedagogical debates. The major finding is the rhetoric circulated by media literacy journals systematically: (1) Ex-nominates the epistemologies presented by previous educators who were concerned with the mass media. (2) Ignores discussing the various cognitive attributes associated with encoding and decoding messages in various communication technologies. (3) Co-opts the term "literacy" to strategically aligning the media literacy curriculum with the positive social attributes that are attributed to the traditional notion literacy, such as, the reduction of crime and violence. (4) Frames democracy as a subject of study, rather than as a process that encourages students to articulate their educational and political thoughts through communication technologies. (5) Emphasizes contemporary social aspects over a student's intellectual interests concerning the media.