A Framework for Learning and Teaching in a Media Age
“...A marvelous piece of work – clear, concise, the distillation of the most available research and practice. ...As a framework for taking teachers through all of the necessary stages, components, ideas and assumptions about media literacy, it could scarcely be bettered. I hope it reaches every school and college in the land.” Len Masterman, author, Teaching the Media
Media Literacy: Theory to Practice to Implementation Like a map for a journey, the CML MediaLit Kit™ provides both a vision and an evolving guide for navigating today’s global media culture.
With the growth of the Internet and its web of interconnections with television, videos and DVDs, advertising, music, newspapers, magazines, books – and even personal communication through e-mail, cell phones and instant messaging – knowledge and information has changed in major ways. For one, it is increasingly visual. The world is pictured in front of us 24/7 and even printed words are arranged to be skimmed. Secondly, especially with the Internet, information content is practically infinite. So the need of the educated citizen of tomorrow is not to acquire yet more content but to develop and internalize a coherent and consistent process for analyzing content and managing information. This not only benefits individuals in making their personal decisions, but also benefits society, since having such a framework allows citizens to have discussions and debates based on common vocabularies and approaches. Resting on a foundation of the Center for Media Literacy’s 25 years of experience in the field plus the thinking of leading practitioners around the world, the CML MediaLit Kit™ was created to help establish common ground on which to build curriculum programs, teaching materials and training services in an increasingly mediated world. We believe that the CML MediaLit Kit™ provides, for the first time, an accessible, integrated outline of the established foundational concepts and implementation models needed to organize and structure teaching activities using a media literacy lens. As a vision of media literacy, the MediaLit Kit™ title is simply a metaphor for a collection of the core ideas that are fundamental to media literacy’s inquirybased pedagogy. As a collection of practical tools, the CML MediaLit Kit™ consists of the following documents and resources articulating the theory, practice and implementation of media literacy in the US educational system. And yet we have only begun – because theory, practice and implementation inform each other and change each other over time. As research and new insights lead to new understandings and specialized applications we will make them available through the CML website: www.medialit.org
© 2005 Center for Media Literacy / www.medialit.org
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