Seeking Justice in Your Own Backyard

This chapter analyzes a summer workshop that invited middle and high school students to create digital public service announcements (PSAs) about a social justice topic of their choice. In this chapter, the author investigates the concepts of media literacy, critical literacy, and critical media literacy, then describes in detail the two-week workshop, ending with examples of student work as well as student reflections and instructor recommendations for future workshops. Detailed lesson plans are included to encourage teachers to replicate this workshop in their own classrooms as part of a unit on critical media literacy.

Critical media literacy to improve students' competencies

Media literacy training is an urgent need of our time. Educational institutions must stand as fundamental domains to collectively address reflection on digital and media environments and prepare school-age citizens to constructively deal with the impact of the media. To do so, a paradigm shift to approach the issue is required: a critical awareness of the new scenarios created by the media and a broad reflection on their characteristics. A new framework where the spotlight is on the media, the surrounding environment is an essential reference point and training proposals are based on results and evidence. This study is part of a Design-Based Research, aimed at the creation, implementation and evaluation of a Critical Media Literacy program for high school students at the Escuela Normal Superior del Putumayo (Colombia). In this paper we present the results obtained by applying the Alfamed media competence "pre" and "post" questionnaire to the students participating in the program. The results obtained show a significant improvement both in the overall level of students' media competence and in four of the six dimensions that make up the theoretical reference model ("Technology", "Language", "Ideology and Values" and "Production and Dissemination"). La formación en las competencias mediáticas constituye una necesidad urgente en nuestra época. La escuela debe posicionarse como un entorno fundamental donde abordar de manera colectiva la reflexión sobre los entornos digitales y mediáticos y la preparación de los ciudadanos en edad escolar para afrontar de forma constructiva el impacto de los medios. Para ello, se impone un cambio de paradigma en el abordaje de la cuestión: una conciencia crítica ante los nuevos escenarios que crean los medios y una reflexión amplia sobre sus características. Un nuevo marco en el que lo mediático se torne central, el entorno próximo sea un referente imprescindible y las propuestas formativas se apoyen en resultados y evidencias. El trabajo que se presenta es una parte de una Investigación Basada en Diseño, orientada a la creación, implementación y evaluación de un programa de Alfabetización Mediática Crítica para el alumnado de bachillerato de la Escuela Normal Superior del Putumayo (Colombia). Se presentan los resultados obtenidos mediante la aplicación “pre” y “post” del cuestionario de competencias mediáticas Alfamed al alumnado participante en el programa. Los resultados obtenidos muestran una mejora significativa tanto en el nivel global de competencia mediática del alumnado, como en cuatro de las seis dimensiones que configuran el modelo teórico de referencia en el que se apoya el estudio (“Tecnología”, “Lenguaje”, “Ideología y Valores” y “Producción y difusión”).

Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era

Critical media literacy (CML) education is an approach to teaching about power, ideology, and hegemony through media. As a critical intervention in mainstream media literacy education, CML education integrates a cultural studies lens with a critical pedagogy orientation. In this article, we use critical auto-ethnography and personal reflective narratives or “anti-biography” to explore the dynamics and tensions of teaching CML in the posttruth era. We locate the shift to posttruth in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump, which produced a resurgence in far-right discourses promoting distrust of media and state institutions. We show how this shift created openings to criticality that made teaching CML easier in some ways; however, as we look deeper, what appears as an opening may in fact be an impasse. Through personal narratives, we illustrate what these openings and impasses looked like, how they felt and how they played out, to theorize about the possibilities and tensions of teaching CML in the current political moment. We argue the posttruth era necessitates a change in how we teach CML but not, as commonly argued, by teaching students how to fact-check or identify reliable sources. Instead, we must learn and teach about how the right uses media in transgressive ways to promote and normalize a racist, sexist, and authoritarian political agenda. We must also work to better understand students’ experiences of economic precarity and the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Behavioral contagion on social media: Effects of social norms, design interventions, and critical media literacy on self-disclosure

Social norms are powerful determinants of human behaviors in offline and online social worlds. While previous research established a correlational link between norm perceptions and self-reported disclosure on social network sites (SNS), questions remain about downstream effects of prevalent behaviors on perceived norms and actual disclosure on SNS. We conducted two preregistered studies using a realistic social media simulation. We further analyzed buffering effects of critical media literacy and privacy nudging. The results demonstrate a disclosure behavior contagion, whereby a critical mass of posts with visual disclosures shifted norm perceptions, which, in turn, affected perceivers’ own visual disclosure behavior. Critical media literacy was negatively related and moderated the effect of norms on visual disclosure behavioral intentions. Neither critical media literacy nor privacy nudge affected actual disclosure behaviors, however. These results provide insights into how behaviors may spread on SNS through triggering changes in perceived social norms and subsequent disclosure behaviors.