essay on media education

• ⋮⋮⋮ ×

Why Use Media to Enhance Teaching and Learning

The Advantages of Using Media:

• Many media sources (feature films, music videos, visualizations, news stories) have very high production quality capable of showcasing complex ideas in a short period of time. This helps develop quantitative reasoning. Learn more about this technique using the Teaching Quantitative Reasoning with the News module.
• Media offers both cognitive and affective experiences. It can provoke discussion, an assessment of one's values, and an assessment of self if the scenes have strong emotional content.
• The use of media sources help connect learners with events that are culturally relevant . As a result, a positive consequence of utilizing media is that instructors must keep their materials and examples up-to-date.
• News stories can be used to connect theories taught in the classroom with real world events and policies .

The Advantages of Media for Students:

• Popular media (films, music, YouTube) are a familiar medium to students that helps gain attention and maintain student interest in the theories and concepts under discussion. Students can see the theories and concepts in action. In more than a figurative sense, theories and concepts leap from the screen.
• Students can hone their analytical skills by analyzing media using the theories and concepts they are studying.
• The use of media in the classroom enables students to see concepts and new examples when they are watching television, listening to music, or are at the movies with friends.
• Students can experience worlds beyond their own , especially if the media is sharply different from their local environment.

« Previous Page       Next Page »

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Original Language Spotlight
• Alternative and Non-formal Education 
• Cognition, Emotion, and Learning
• Curriculum and Pedagogy
• Education and Society
• Education, Change, and Development
• Education, Cultures, and Ethnicities
• Education, Gender, and Sexualities
• Education, Health, and Social Services
• Educational Administration and Leadership
• Educational History
• Educational Politics and Policy
• Educational Purposes and Ideals
• Educational Systems
• Educational Theories and Philosophies
• Globalization, Economics, and Education
• Languages and Literacies
• Professional Learning and Development
• Research and Assessment Methods
• Technology and Education
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Critical media literacy in teacher education, theory, and practice.

• Jeff Share , Jeff Share University of California Los Angeles
• Tatevik Mamikonyan Tatevik Mamikonyan School of Education, University of California Los Angeles
•  and  Eduardo Lopez Eduardo Lopez University of California Los Angeles
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1404
• Published online: 30 September 2019
• This version: 20 September 2023
• Previous version

Democracy in the digital networked age of “fake news” and “alternative facts” requires new literacy skills and critical awareness to read, write, and use media and technology to empower civic participation and social transformation. Unfortunately, not many educators have been prepared to teach students how to think critically with and about the media and technology that engulf us. Across the globe there is a growing movement to develop media and information literacy curriculum (UNESCO) and train teachers in media education (e-Media Education Lab), but these attempts are limited and in danger of co-optation by the faster growing, better financed, and less critical education and information technology corporations. It is essential to develop a critical response to the new information communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithms that are embedded in all aspects of society. The possibilities and limitations are vast for teaching educators to enter K-12 classrooms and teach their students to use various media, critically question all types of texts, challenge problematic representations, and create alternative messages. Through applying a critical media literacy framework that has evolved from cultural studies and critical pedagogy, students at all grade levels can learn to critically analyze the messages and create their own alternative media. The voices of teachers engaging in this work can provide pragmatic insight into the potential and challenges of putting the theory into practice in K-12 public schools.

• critical literacy
• critical pedagogy
• media education
• media literacy
• critical media literacy
• social justice
• politics of representation
• cultural studies
• teacher education

Updated in this version

The authors made minor revisions to this text to reflect more recent scholarship. The reference list and further readings have similarly been updated.

Introduction

It is a formidable challenge to prepare critical educators to work inside a system in which every brick in the wall has been laid to transmit the information, skills, and ideas necessary to reproduce the social norms, inequities, ideologies, and alienation that are undermining the quality and sustainability of life on this planet. However, education can be a powerful tool to challenge these problems and create opportunities for students to work in solidarity with others to create a more socially and environmentally just world. To support these changes, we need teachers ready to engage students in critical inquiry by posing questions about systemic and structural issues of power, hierarchies of oppression, and social injustice. In the current media and information age, information communication technologies (ICTs) are available to either continue the control and degradation or to deconstruct the systems of oppression and reconstruct a more just and sustainable society.

Digital technology is opening opportunities for individual participation and alternative points of view, while at the same time a handful of enormous media and technology corporations have become the dominant storytellers, often repeating the same story at the expense of countless different perspectives and creative ways of thinking. Many of these storytellers are actually story-sellers, more interested in peddling ideas and products than informing, enlightening, inspiring, or challenging. While young people are using more media, they are also being used more by media companies. Giant transnational corporations are targeting youth as one of the most valuable markets for building brand loyalty and selling to advertisers. Researchers found 8- to 18-year-olds in the United States spend well over 10 hours a day interacting with various forms of media, such as music, computers, video games, television, film, and print ( Rideout et al., 2011 ). Another investigation discovered that 95% of American 13- to 17-year-olds have access to a smartphone and 97% say they are online daily and 46% use it constantly ( Vogels et al., 2022 ).

Not only is the amount of time with media increasing but the quality of that engagement is also changing by becoming more commercial and rarely critical. Researchers at Stanford University administered six tasks to 3,466 high schools across 14 states in the US to judge their ability to assess online information. In one task, students were asked to evaluate the credibility of a website that claimed to “disseminate factual reports” and 96% failed to learn about the site’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a different task, over half of students believed an anonymously posted video purporting to show voter fraud in the US was real, even though it was filmed in Russia ( Breakstone et al., 2021 ). In another study, Vosoughi et al. (2018) examined approximately 126,000 stories tweeted over 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017 . The researchers were interested in understanding what accounted for the differential diffusion of verified true and false news stories. They found that false news stories spread “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it” (p. 5). In analyzing the tweets, the authors concluded, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted because people found them not only more novel but the stories also inspired emotional responses of fear, disgust, or surprise.

The concern about “fake news” has encouraged many people to recognize the need for critical readers and writers of media. Some have suggested that we simply need better cognitive skills to determine truth from lies. However, making sense of the media and our information society is far more complicated than a reductionist idea of simply finding the truth. Rather than judging information as either true or false, students need to learn to search for multiple sources, different perspectives, and various types of evidence to triangulate and evaluate findings. In order to best evaluate and understand the information, they also need to question the influence of media in shaping the message and positioning the audience. Since all knowledge is an interpretation ( Kincheloe, 2007 ), interpreting the meaning of a message is a complex process that requires skills to probe empirical evidence, evaluate subjective biases, analyze the medium and construction of the text, and explore the social contexts.

This is an opportunity for educators to guide their students to think critically with and about the ICTs and media that surround them. Morrell et al. (2013) argue that the technology itself will not bring about transformative educational change. “That change will only come through teachers who draw on critical frameworks to create learning communities where the use of these tools becomes an empowering enterprise” (p. 14). Therefore, the changes in media, technology, and society require critical media literacy (CML) that can support teachers and students to question and create with and about the very tools that can empower or oppress, entertain or distract, inform or mislead, and buy or sell everything from lifestyles to politicians. Now more than ever, teachers should encourage students to be reading, viewing, listening to, interacting with, and creating a multitude of texts, from digital podcasts to multimedia productions.

Teacher Education

Even though youth are immersed in a world in which media and technology have entered all aspects of their lives and society, few teacher education programs are preparing teachers to help their students to critically understand the potential and limitations of these changes. It is crucial that new teachers learn how to teach their K-12 students to critically read and write everything, from academic texts to social media.

This means that schools of education responsible for training the new wave of teachers must be up to date, not just with the latest technology, but more importantly, with critical media literacy (CML) theory and pedagogy in order to prepare teachers and students to think and act critically with and about media and technology. In Canada, where media literacy is mandatory in every grade from 1 to 12, most new teachers are not receiving media literacy training in their preservice programs ( Wilson & Duncan, 2009 ). Researchers investigating media education in the United Kingdom and the US have found that many teachers are unprepared to teach media education and that professional learning opportunities are limited ( Butler, 2020 ; Kirwan et al., 2003 ). The progress has been slow, especially considering that inclusion of media literacy in formal public education has a history dating back to the 1980s in Australia, Britain, and Canada. However, nonformal media education has been occurring in many parts of the world for decades ( Hart, 1998 ; Kaplún, 1998 ; Kubey, 1997 ; Pegurer Caprino & Martínez-Cerdá, 2016 ; Prinsloo & Criticos, 1991 ).

While it is difficult to know for sure who is and who is not teaching critically about media and technology ( Mihailidis, 2008 ), there seems to be an increased interest in media literacy in the United States. In 2022 , the National Council of Teachers of English published a position statement recommending implementation of media education in English Language Arts along with two special issue journal publications ( Lynch, 2021 ; Kist & Christel, 2022 ) devoted to critical media literacy, arguing that “media education must be an essential component of the professional identity of teachers” ( National Council of Teachers of English, 2022 ).

As technology and media continue to evolve and increasingly enter public and private spaces, more educators are recognizing the need for training new teachers about media literacy ( Domine, 2011 ; Goetze et al., 2005 ; Hobbs, 2007a ) and some are even addressing the need to teach about CML ( Flores-Koulish et al., 2011 ; Funk et al., 2016 ; Robertson & Hughes, 2011 ; Trust et al., 2022 ). Researchers Tiede et al. (2015) studied 64 universities or colleges of teacher education in Germany and 316 U.S. public educational institutions that provide teacher training and graduate studies, concluding that very few offer more than media didactics (basic educational technology that teaches with media, not about media). From their data in the United States, they report, “media education, with emphasis on the instructional practices associated with the critical evaluation of media, culture, and society, were scarce, representing only 2% of all study programs in teacher training programs” (pp. 540−541). In Germany, the percentage increases to 25%, but “media didactics tends to be emphasized to the disadvantage of media education in both countries” (p. 542).

In 2011 , the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a curriculum guide online in 11 languages for training teachers in media education ( Grizzle & Wilson, 2011 ), declaring that “teacher training in media and information literacy will be a major challenge for the global education system at least for the next decade” ( Pérez-Tornero & Tayie, 2012 , p. 11). 1 In Europe, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) analyzed the successes and challenges of training preservice and in-service teachers about media and digital literacy. An initiative called e-Media Educational Lab, funded by the European Commission, provided blended training to 279 preservice teachers and 81 in-service teachers in six countries. Based on surveys and fieldnotes, Ranieri and Bruni (2018) reported that the preservice and in-service teachers found critical media analysis and media production to be very important; they described their intent to transfer their media competency to their classrooms and expressed a desire to learn more practical ways to help their students develop media competencies.

UNESCO’s approach to media education combines media and information literacy (MIL) to include many competencies, from learning about and using information communication technologies to thinking critically about ethics and democracy. Carolyn Wilson (2012) explains, “MIL is both a content area and way of teaching and learning; it is not only about the acquisition of technical skills, but the development of a critical framework and approaches” (p. 16).

Combining information technology with media-cultural studies is essential, but still infrequent. Within the current wave of educational reform that prioritizes the newest technology and career readiness over civic engagement and critical inquiry, schools are more likely to adopt only information technology or information literacy and not critical media education. In the United States, few universities offer more than a single course in media literacy and most do not even offer that ( Goetze et al., 2005 ; Meehan et al., 2015 ).

Schwarz (2001) asserts that because of the power of emerging literacies, “teacher education needs media literacy as an essential tool and an essential topic in the new millennium” (pp. 111−112). She calls for integrating media literacy across all subject areas of teacher education, “from methods courses and educational psychology to foundational courses and student teaching” (p. 118). This interdisciplinary approach for media education could be easier now for K-12 teachers in the United States since the Common Core State Standards require literacy to be taught and technology to be used across the curriculum ( California Common Core State Standards, 2013 ; Moore & Bonilla, 2014 ; Trust et al., 2022 ).

Two studies with a total of 31 preservice teachers found a discrepancy between their positive attitudes for teaching media literacy and the lack of attention and support in their teacher education programs to prepare them to teach MIL ( Gretter & Yadav, 2018 ). Based on interviews with these preservice teachers, Gretter and Yadav (2018) report that they associated MIL with critical thinking skills and expressed concerns about not knowing how to teach MIL because their teacher preparation program encouraged “teaching with technology and not necessarily about technology” (p. 115). These preservice teachers complained about “a lack of preparation to help them transfer their knowledge of digital media to MIL pedagogies that would benefit students” (p. 111). This highlights the importance of preparing educators with the theory and conceptual understandings as well as the pedagogy and practical applications for how to teach their students to critically analyze and create media.

Teaching Teachers Critical Media Literacy

Transforming education to critically use media, technology, and popular culture for social and environmental justice is the overarching goal of a critical media literacy (CML) course in the teacher education program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The authors of this article have been involved in designing and teaching this course to in-service and preservice teachers. Through combining theory from cultural studies and critical pedagogy with practical classroom applications of digital media and technology, this course prepares K-12 educators to teach their students how to critically analyze and create all types of media. In 2011 , this four-unit course on CML was officially approved and became a required class for all students working on their teaching credential at UCLA.

The teacher education program at UCLA is primarily a two-year master’s and credential program that accepts about 130 candidates annually. The program is committed to developing social justice educators to work with and improve the schooling conditions of California’s ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse children. While most of the students go through the two-year program, additional pathways for earning a teaching credential and master’s degree have been offered, such as a master’s-only program for in-service teachers with two years or more of full-time teaching experience.

The CML class is taught in separate sections, usually divided by subjects, with 25−50 students per section. Most of the candidates taking the class are student teaching at the same time, except for the master’s-only candidates, who were teaching full-time while attending the class once a week in the evening. The class includes lectures, discussions, and activities interwoven into each session during the 10-week quarter.

Beginning with a theoretical overview, the course explores the development of media education that is defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills and more as a framework of conceptual understandings ( Buckingham, 2003 ). Much of the theory behind CML has evolved from cultural studies, a field of critical inquiry that began in the 20th century in Europe and continues to grow with new critiques of media and society. From the 1930s through the 1960s, researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research used critical social theory to analyze how media culture and the new tools of communication technology induce ideology and social control. In the 1960s, researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham added to the earlier concerns of ideology with a more sophisticated understanding of the audience as active constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of an external reality. Kellner (1995) explains that cultural studies has continued to grow and incorporate concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. Incorporating a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis, and audience theory, cultural studies critiques media culture as dynamic discourses that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer the possibilities for counter-hegemonic alternatives ( Hammer & Kellner, 2009 ).

Critical media literacy includes three dimensions ( Share & Gambino, 2022 ). The first involves the content students learn about systems, structures, and ideologies that reproduce hierarchies of power and knowledge concerning race, gender, class, sexuality and other forms of identity and environmental justice, as well as general understandings about how media and communication function. The second dimension engages the skills to critically think and question media representations and biases, to deconstruct and reconstruct media texts, and use a variety of media to access, analyze, evaluate, and create. The third involves developing a disposition for empathy, critical consciousness, and empowerment to take action to challenge and transform society to be more socially and environmentally just. This third dimension is based on Freire’s (2010) notion of conscientização , a revolutionary critical consciousness that involves perception as well as action against oppression. These three dimensions of critical media literacy pedagogy are supported through an inquiry-based democratic approach that follows ideas of transformative educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire. We incorporate feminist theory and critical pedagogy to analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power ( Carlson et al., 2013 ; Garcia et al., 2013 ). When we first began teaching the course, we used a simple framework with five core concepts and key questions from the Center for Media Literacy. 2 To emphasize the critical potential of these ideas, while providing an accessible tool for teachers to use in the classroom, the following critical media literacy framework was developed, with six conceptual understandings and questions, as shown in Table 1 ( Kellner & Share, 2019 ).

These six conceptual understandings and questions are referred to regularly and are addressed in all lesson plans. It is important for teachers to understand the concepts and questions because theory should inform practice for all three dimensions. However, it is better for K-12 students to learn to ask the questions rather than memorize the concepts, since the questions, with appropriate guidance, can lead students on a path of inquiry where they are more likely to make meaning themselves, related to the conceptual understandings.

The CML framework is designed to help teachers and their students question the role of power and ideology that socialize and control society through making some people and ideas seem “normal” and “natural” while the rest are “othered” and “marginalized” ( Hall, 2003 ). This critical framing supports teachers and students to deepen their explorations of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, overconsumption, environmental exploitation, and other problematic representations in media. Candidates analyze and discuss current media examples, while also learning how to use various ICTs to create their own media with alternative counter-hegemonic representations. Using an inquiry process and democratic pedagogy, problems are posed to the students to collaboratively wrestle with, unpack, and respond to through media production.

Critical media literacy promotes an expansion of our understanding of literacy to include many types of texts, such as images, sounds, music, video games, social media, advertising, popular culture, and print, as well as a deepening of critical analysis to explore the connections between information and power. In our digital networked media age, it is not enough to teach students how to read and write just with print while their world has moved far beyond letters on a page. Literacy education in the 21st century requires breaking from traditional practices to include all the varied ways people communicate with media, technology, and any tool that facilitates the transfer of information or connects people. This calls for new skills and understandings to decode and analyze as well as to create and produce all types of texts. The California Teaching Performance Expectations also require teacher education programs to expand this view of literacy and integrate media and technology into coursework in order to “deepen teaching and learning to provide students with opportunities to participate in a digital society and economy” ( California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2016 , p. 9).

Each class starts by reviewing and applying the conceptual understandings and questions. Since one goal of the course is for candidates to understand that literacy includes reading and writing all types of texts, we encourage students to analyze as well as produce media. A series of assignments requires candidates to work together to create various types of media projects such as visual posters, photographs, podcasts, memes, digital stories, and social media. The candidates are also expected to work collaboratively on a CML lesson plan and learning segment that they write up, present a summary of to the whole class, and when possible, also teach it. For a detailed description of this course, see Share (2015) and visit the UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide for links to articles, videos, and websites used in the course. 3

Table 1. Critical Media Literacy Framework

From a desire to explore if and how former students are applying the skills and knowledge gained from the critical media literacy (CML) course into their teaching practice, we created an online survey for students who had taken the course. Through purposeful sampling, we sent out the survey to the 738 students who had taken the CML course and ended up with 185 usable responses (25% response rate), 153 preservice and 32 in-service teachers. Of the 185 respondents, 53 taught elementary school and 132 were secondary-level teachers. The breakdown of the middle school and high school teachers was: 38 science, 34 math, 33 social sciences, 28 English, and several reported teaching a combination of subjects as well as some who taught other areas such as music, visual arts, Spanish, English language development, or adult education. The span of experience was wide; some just started teaching and some had been teaching over seven years, yet most of the teachers (52%) had been teaching between two and three years.

The mixed method survey included 20 questions. The first eight sought to identify participants’ teaching background. The remaining 12 questions inquired about their experiences teaching CML skills and concepts to their K-12 students. Ten quantitative questions used a Likert scale with a choice of responses, including very frequently, frequently, occasionally, rarely, and never, as well as an option to choose not applicable. The final two qualitative questions were open-ended in which respondents could type their thoughts about any “memorable moment(s) teaching critical media literacy” and “any additional comments.” During the analysis phase, we found it helpful to combine the categories very frequently and frequently and refer to them as VF/F.

Voices From the Field

Using mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative data, we analyzed the survey responses to explore teachers’ ideas about what they had been doing with their students. The overall feedback suggested that the majority of the respondents had brought aspects of media literacy education into their K-12 classrooms, and sometimes even incorporated CML. One of the most recurring patterns we noticed was that these teachers had been expanding the traditional concept of literacy by engaging their students with various types of media.

Teaching With Media

In reply to the first question, most of the respondents reported having integrated media into their class activities: 64% VF/F, 30% occasionally, 6% rarely, and no one responded never ( N = 185). The responses to Question 1 were very similar for elementary and secondary teachers, with only a 1% to 5% difference. Where we saw greater variation was when comparing the subject matter of secondary teachers. The English and science teachers had the highest percentages (75% and 76%) of VF/F responses to Question 1 about integrating media into class activities. Math teachers, by contrast, reported the lowest percentage, with 44% reporting VF/F and 15% rarely integrating media into the curriculum (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1. Responses from secondary teachers to Question 1 about how often they integrated media into class activities.

While these responses demonstrated an overall high amount of media integration, it was not clear how the teachers integrated media and what students were doing with the media. The responses from Question 5 (“my students have created the following media”) provided more information about the students’ interactions with media, showing that the vast majority of respondents (92%) had their students create some type of media (see Figure 2 for a list of the various media students created).

Since the question only asked teachers to check the box for the type of media their students created, we did not know how often this occurred or with what degree of analysis. Questions 1 and 5 indicated that teaching with media occurred with over 90% of the respondents.

Figure 2. Responses to Question 5 about the different types of media that all 185 respondents report their students have created. They were asked to choose all that apply.

Teaching About Media

The second question tried to find out more about those interactions with media by asking respondents to rate how often they had given their “students opportunities to engage in media analysis.” For Question 2, about one-third of all 185 respondents, 32%, reported VF/F, 43% occasionally, 21% rarely, and 4% never. When comparing responses from Questions 1 and 2, the respondents seemed to have been doing more teaching with media (Question 1) than teaching about media (Question 2) (see Figure 3 ). A similar finding was mentioned in the research conducted in Germany and the United States by Tiede et al. (2015) .

Figure 3. Comparing all responses from Question 1 about integrating media into class activities (teaching with media) with Question 2 about engaging in media analysis (teaching about media).

A more nuanced perspective of Question 2 is possible when comparing the responses about media analysis from different content area secondary teachers. In response to Question 2, the teachers who reported VF/F were the following: 63% of English teachers reported giving the most opportunities for their students to engage in media analysis, as compared to almost half as often by 32% of science teachers and about five times less often by 12% of math teachers (see Figure 4 ). Since literacy is a primary goal of English instruction, it is not surprising that English teachers reported the highest levels of media analysis ( Hobbs, 2007b ).

It is important to recognize that teaching about media can be a highly complex and multifaceted undertaking, especially when done through a CML lens. For example, the second conceptual understanding encourages students to analyze the codes and conventions of the media text and the medium through which they travel by asking how the text was constructed and delivered or accessed. This, in itself, can have many layers and yet is just one of six questions intended to help students think critically about media. Livingstone (2018) asserts, “media literacy is needed not only to engage with the media but to engage with society through the media .” As Luke and Freebody (1997) argue, it is not enough to only have a psychological approach to literacy, as if reading and writing is just an individual cognitive process. We need to also bring a sociological lens into the process of questioning the contexts, the dominant ideologies, and the systems that make some things seem “natural” or “normal.” The CML framework is a holistic tool for thinking about and questioning the dynamic role media play in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and society. Responses and comments to other questions in the survey provide more insight into how some teachers have engaged their students in various types of media analysis.

Figure 4. Comparing responses from different content areas about Question 2 regarding how often secondary teachers gave their students opportunities to engage in media analysis.

Evaluating Information and Advertising

In the qualitative responses to Questions 11 and 12, teachers mentioned embracing basic media literacy principles in the ways students were evaluating the credibility of information and advertising as well as creating different types of media. The popularity of the term “fake news” and the growing amount of disinformation have increased the challenge to distinguish misinformation and propaganda from journalism and scientifically researched facts ( Rogow, 2018 ). An elementary teacher who reported “frequently” integrating media into the classroom, asserted:

Though my students are younger and some of these concepts are more difficult to teach than others, I find it important to bring up especially in terms of making sure they don’t believe every YouYube video they watch. We’ve had many meaningful discussions about what can be created for a video shouldn’t just be accepted as the truth. For example, the ‘mermaid’ documentary that came out a few years ago had all of my students convinced that they had found a mermaid. It led to an interesting discussion on hoaxes and further reading about Bigfoo[t] and other such stories.

Since all media contain bias because they are created by subjective humans, it is important for teachers to help their students to recognize the bias and also be able to judge the credibility of information. A high school math teacher wrote:

It has not happened until this school year, when I began teaching Statistics. I introduced some pictographs for students to analyze and an article for students to read about how a website stated that if polls were unskewed, Trump would be leading the polls for election. I had students read and discuss about the validity and why/why not it is trustable.

Several respondents mentioned having their students study political advertising, and since all U.S. elections are now multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns (e.g., Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign won the top prizes at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards), there is little distinction between selling products, ideas, and political candidates.

Analyzing advertising is an important aspect of media education because advertising is the motor that drives commercial media and has become so common in our lives that there are few spaces that are completely ad-free ( Jhally, 2003 ). Several respondents reported about their students investigating advertisements for false health messages, misleading packaging, political campaigns, tobacco, alcohol, and different perspectives. One secondary English teacher wrote, “My students took pictures of advertisements that surrounded their neighborhood and we analyzed them for patterns, themes, and purposes.” A high school science teacher reported, “I had many times this past year where students were able to reflect on marketing strategies and how they affect the viewer’s perspective of their life and themselves. Students made great connections.”

During the critical media literacy (CML) class, students scrutinize consumer culture and the role advertising plays in creating anxieties, shaping desires, and normalizing representations about all things, from consumption to gender, race, and class. Candidates in the CML class learn about these ideas through readings, by analyzing advertisements, and also by creating ads for different target audiences. When asked about the media their students had created, one third reported their students created advertisements.

Creating Different Types of Media

When students are taught print literacy, they are instructed how to decode letters on a page and how to write with those letters to construct words, sentences, and paragraphs. The same process of teaching reading and writing should be applied to visual images, movies, songs, video games, social media, and all the various multimedia texts that students are encountering daily. In responses from the survey, teachers reported about having their students write and create many different types of texts beyond print (see Figure 2 ).

One English teacher wrote that having students create media was “very successful. They loved being able to create memes, posters, Prezis, etc. to present their work.” An elementary teacher shared about students “creating podcasts/npr style news stories regarding UN sustainability goals.” Several respondents commented on their students designing commercials or challenging ads by producing spoofs that parody the ads. One middle school teacher shared, “students analyzed ads for nicotine and alcohol products, then used the practice with critical media skills to create ‘anti-ads’ with Google drawings.”

During the first year of teaching, a high school science teacher reported about a memorable moment when “creating a multi-lingual, easy-to-understand and scientifically supported pamphlet on the hazards in LA’s environment.” A high school Spanish teacher wrote about his students creating critical memes in Spanish, like the ones they created in the critical media literacy (CML) class. During the session exploring racism and media, candidates challenge racist representations through creating racial myth-busting memes. As a strategy to demonstrate the value of media production, the CML class has students create various media in almost every session, and these activities are often the favorite lessons mentioned in the end of course evaluations.

Increasing Engagement

While engagement is not a learning objective, all teaching benefits from students being engaged in their learning. One of the patterns that emerged from the responses was teachers’ observations that student engagement increased. An eighth-grade English teacher wrote that after incorporating media literacy, the students’ “entire attitude toward learning shifted. Especially the hard to reach students.” An elementary teacher reported, “Media literacy has made great contributions in my class with science research in the past. The simple act of using google images, google maps and finding credible sources has sparked learning and interest in my class.” Another elementary teacher shared about using critical media literacy (CML) to analyze food justice issues: “They were instantly engaged and students who had a difficult time writing and with critical thinking then did not.”

A secondary science teacher reported, “Students spent the entire class engaged in discussion when I intended for it to only be an introduction to the unit.” Another high school science teacher wrote, “When I did teach a class specifically geared towards media literacy, it was great because students were engaged. They were quick at analyzing images and creating their own.” A third science teacher wrote, “using critical media literacy made engaging my students in abstract chemistry concepts more meaningful and engaging.” Engagement tends to increase when students are genuinely interested and intrinsically motivated, something that often comes out of personal connection, a sense of meaningfulness, and an authentic belief in the value of the learning ( Dewey, 1963 ). These are all elements of good CML pedagogy. A high school science teacher described the feelings of students and their parents as they responded to their CML work: “My favorite moments are students exuding pride and passion over the work they are creating that speaks to their perspectives and experiences; parents proud of their students’ media creations.” Feelings of pride and passion are important for all students to experience; they help lower students’ affective filters for learning ( Krashen, 1995 ) and increase intrinsic motivation to want to learn.

Critical Media Literacy

As we analyzed teachers’ written responses, we saw a number of comments in which they were taking basic media literacy concepts to deeper levels of criticality. Several mentioned how useful the class was to understanding critical theory and be able to see how it can be enacted in their K-12 classroom. Similar findings were mentioned after Joanou (2017) analyzed data about a critical media literacy (CML) class taught to master’s-level practicing K-12 educators. Joanou (2017) reported, “critical media literacy helps bridge the gap between theory and practice” (p. 40). The use of media texts and popular culture can provide relevant examples for entry into abstract concepts that are often politically and emotionally charged, and sometimes too sensitive or too distant to begin discussing on a personal level.

Teaching about the connections between information and power reflects a key goal of CML ( Kellner & Share, 2007 ) and our respondents demonstrated this through their qualitative comments about recreating counter-narratives, analyzing the politics of representation, making critical connections between history and current events with media texts, and engaging in political, social, and environmental media activism. Questions 3 and 4 attempted to assess the frequency in which teachers were bringing critical aspects of media education to their students.

Question 3 asks teachers to rate how often: “My students have engaged in media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.” Elementary and secondary teachers reported almost identical frequencies in response to Question 3: 22% in both groups reported VF/F while 42% (elementary) and 45% (secondary) stated occasionally. When asked Question 4 about making connections between information and power, the differences increased: 39% of the secondary teachers responded doing this VF/F while just 23% of the elementary teachers reported doing this VF/F.

In-service teachers reported higher frequencies for Question 3: 54% of in-service teachers reported VF/F while preservice teachers reported 14% VF/F. For Question 4: 56% of in-service teachers reported VF/F compared with 30% of preservice teachers who reported VF/F.

When comparing responses separated by subject matter with secondary teachers, 33% of English teachers and 30% of social science teachers reported VF/F for engaging in critical media analysis, as seen in Question 3 about exploring media representations. This is considerably higher than the 16% of science teachers and 9% of math teachers reporting VF/F. The math and science teachers reported the highest percentages for rarely or never having their students explore media representations of social justice issues (see Figure 5 ). The literature supports similar findings. Garii and Rule (2009) reported that student teachers had a difficult time integrating social justice into math and science content due to several factors. In their research with novice elementary teachers, Garii and Rule discovered that the candidates were not confident in their ability to teach math and science and had limited and unsophisticated knowledge of the content. They also viewed math and science “to be a set of routinized, algorithmic practices that lead to a single, correct answer and neither science nor mathematics are assumed to be closely connected to real-world issues and concerns” (p. 491). Given that they are struggling to learn and understand the content, math and science candidates turned to classroom textbooks to guide instructional practices. Incorporating nontraditional practices or making connections to students’ lives becomes a challenge because they disconnect social justice from their teaching and focus on teaching to the content ( Garii & Rule, 2009 ).

Figure 5. Responses to Question 3 from secondary teachers about how often they engaged their students in critical “media analysis by exploring media representations of ideology, race, class, gender, sexuality, environmentalism, and/or other social justice issues.”

One of the more significant findings of the study is the number of respondents reporting they “noticed that using critical media literacy encourages critical thinking among students” (Question 9). Of the preservice respondents, 61% reported VF/F, and for the in-service teachers, the percentages jump to 81% who reported VF/F. In both cases, the majority of respondents expressed their feelings that CML promotes critical thinking most of the time (see Figure 6 ). A middle school social science teacher wrote that after teaching CML, “students were deeper thinkers and our discussions were so much richer. Students were highly engaged and more invested in the classroom.” When comparing grade levels for Question 9, we see 78% of elementary teachers reported that using CML VF/F encourages critical thinking, and 61% of secondary teachers reported VF/F. This large percentage of elementary teachers reporting about CML encouraging critical thinking shows great promise for the potential of CML in the early grades.

Figure 6. Comparison of preservice and in-service teachers’ responses to Question 9 about how often they have noticed CML encourages critical thinking among their students.

Creating Counter Narratives and Supporting Students’ Voices

Many of the responses regarding transformative education centered on guiding students to create counternarratives and supporting student ideas and voices. Respondents mentioned activities that enabled their students to recreate media texts with a critical lens. These counternarratives included recreating superhero comic books, news, advertisements, digital storytelling, national holiday observances, and poems. A high school English teacher noted, “after analyzing recent and popular superhero comic books, my students used the comic medium to tell an autobiographical story wherein they exhibited power in the face of oppression.” A middle school English teacher reported:

The most memorable lesson I’ve taught involving critical media literacy was a unit based on perseverance and the power of the human spirit in regards to power structures and oppression. After analyzing multiple types of media, students created their own VoiceThread using spoken word in order to share their own messages of perseverance. It was incredibly powerful to hear their messages.

For most respondents, the notion of enabling their students to share personal stories using multimedia tools meant that they were integrating critical media pedagogy into their teaching practice. Traditionally, personal and experiential knowledge as a form of literacy is not often valued; thus, it is a critical pedagogical orientation to encourage students to recreate media texts that reflect their intersecting realities and challenge the pervasive dominant ideologies. Students’ personal histories become scholarly pursuits when digital storytelling encompasses media production skills taught through a critical media literacy (CML) framework. Vasquez (2017) asserts, “students learn best when what they are learning has importance in their lives, using the topics, issues, and questions that they raise should therefore be an important part of creating the classroom curriculum” (p. 8). A middle school math and technology teacher commented about incorporating CML into her master’s inquiry project:

The project we ultimately created was a digital storytelling project, in which students interviewed their parents or someone they admire and created some sort of media project around that story to tell counter-narratives to the dominant story told in media about people of color.

Guiding students to create counternarratives can be an empowering instructional strategy that nurtures their personal realities and supports their voice. Considering the context of urban education, it becomes particularly important for low-income students and students of color, who have been historically denied the power to be heard, to engage in their learning as empowered subjects through creating digital counter-narratives.

Politics of Representation

A major difference between critical media literacy (CML) and the more common media literacy practiced in the United States is the rigorous examination of the politics of representation; an analysis of how historically disenfranchised social groups are represented in media ( Funk et al., 2016 ). Many of the respondents discussed analyzing issues related to representations of different identities with their students. A high school visual arts teacher reported that through “using current events in the media, students created headline news with people of color perspective.” The majority of the responses highlighted engaging in discussions related to gender and a few responses about race. One elementary teacher noted:

My grade level did a Critical Media Literacy unit and after it was over, a week later, a student showed me a box of Chips Ahoy cookies and said that it was made to be sold to boys and girls. She compared it to a rainbow pop tarts box made for girls and a basketball cereal box made for boys that we had discussed during the CML unit.

A high school social science teacher reported:

My 11th and 12th grade Sociology class created representation boards. Each group was assigned an identity (‘white male,’ ‘Asian male,’ ‘black female,’ etc.). When each group was done, we compared the images and discussed the similarities between representations of race and gender. It really opened their eyes.

The politics of representation explores the complexities and intersections of identity markers, such as ethnicity, culture, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, and ableism. Several candidates alluded to the intersectionality between race and gender in their responses, mostly engaging their students in discussions related to the unequal representation and socialization of gender roles. They also noted that discussing stereotypical gender roles challenged their students’ internalized notions of gender. Responses such as the following highlight the shift in their students’ perspectives about gender: An elementary teacher wrote, “We’ve had some successful discussions around gender stereotypes and I’ve heard the language change in the classroom and students be more thoughtful about others’ choices.” Another elementary teacher reported, “My students showed greater acceptance. After teaching a lesson invoking gender all my male students felt accepted to choose any color paper—the favorite was pink for the rest of the year.”

Making Critical Connections

In response to the open-ended questions, an array of items was mentioned that demonstrate critical engagement, from teaching about racism and whitewashing, to numerous examples of analyzing gender and sexism, as well as projects on environmental justice and climate change at all grade levels. Some respondents discussed their transformative practice through the way their students analyzed and created media to make critical connections between historical and current events.

A high school social science teacher stated, “I had students create videos explaining the situation in Ukraine and relating it to the Cold War. In United States history, I often had students look at political cartoons and think about current examples of imperialism and how they’re represented in media.” Similarly, another social science teacher described a memorable moment of teaching critical media literacy (CML) as: “When students could make the connection between yellow journalism in Spanish-American War and media sensationalism during the War on Terror.” An elementary school teacher wrote:

My students began to think critically about history after showing them the spoken word poem ‘History Textbooks,’ which talked about world history being American Propaganda. Through this poem, they began questioning: who gets to write history and whose stories are told? It was a really powerful lesson we returned to over and over again throughout my course.

Analyzing media texts by acknowledging their historical continuity is vital because marginalization and exploitation are historically bound. Discovering these historical connections helps teachers and students learn how dominance and ideology are perpetuated, transcending time and space. Bridging the gap between the past and the present enables students to identify the common thread of hegemony across various spheres of social life. This instructional approach of CML promotes critical thinking with a social justice emphasis.

Another topic on which respondents commented was using CML to teach about environmental issues, especially the climate crisis. This is an important area for CML, since so many media messages about climate change distort the scientific evidence and mislead the public ( Beach et al., 2017 ; Share & Beach, 2022 ). A high school science teacher reported, “My class analyzed the politics behind climate change denial and how climate change is represented in the media. It was very easy for my students to see the connection between the message and its creators.” Exploring the connection between media ownership and media messages, another high school science teacher commented that a memorable moment was having a “discussion with students about where they were getting their information about environmental issues, and talking about who owns and controls Univision.”

In addition to becoming more aware, being engaged in critical analysis and creating counternarratives, some respondents noted that their students had engaged in political, environmental, and social media activism. A high school science teacher mentioned:

My class was looking at environmental justice and one student took that information and used it for an English project she was working on and that project transformed into a petition to the city council to plant more trees as her contribution to offsetting pollution in the inner city.

Another science teacher reported about how his “students created social media campaigns to raise awareness about animals affected by climate change. Different groups created the ‘Puffin Dance’ and #peekatmypika to help their campaigns get going.” A kindergarten teacher wrote about her students creating a video with opinion posters for change they shared with their school community.

Activism can be enacted in multiple ways; some efforts are more explicit, like petitions and protests, while others are more subtle, such as creating alternative media. Teacher responses reflect their students’ activism related to social, environmental, and political issues materialized through local and issue-specific efforts.

In analyzing the responses, we found many encouraging and hopeful comments about how critical media literacy (CML) has helped teachers rethink their pedagogy and increase student engagement. However, the responses also highlight challenges for implementing CML, such as limited resources, support, and clarity about how to integrate it into the curriculum. An elementary teacher wrote about the scarcity of technology at the school and how that “makes it difficult to do anything around critical media.” From the answers to Question 7 (incorporating CML into my teaching is difficult), secondary teachers reported more difficulty teaching CML (35% VF/F) than elementary teachers (26% VF/F). This is another place where the potential for CML in the lower grades surfaced, since they seem to have less difficulty incorporating it than secondary teachers. The design of most elementary classrooms, which requires the same teacher to cover all subject matter to the same group of students throughout the day, opens the potential for integrating CML pedagogy through thematic teaching, project-based learning, or problem-posing pedagogy.

A first-year middle school social science teacher shared wanting to use more CML, but had little departmental and administrative support. An elementary teacher shared about an administrator who “is reluctant to have me teach how to be critical of all media.” Three responses focused on wanting more resources, instructional strategies, and school-appropriate material in order to be able to implement CML in their classrooms. These qualitative statements of lack of support can be seen in the quantitative responses to Question 10 in which respondents rated the statement: “I feel supported by people at my school when teaching critical media literacy”: 36% VF/F, 24% occasionally, 18% rarely, 6% never felt supported, and 17% not applicable.

The group that shared the most challenges for implementing CML consisted of five teachers who taught secondary math and science. Their qualitative responses broadly discussed the difficulty of integrating CML into their content and finding only limited application. One of these responses from a high school math teacher mentioned:

I remember how when I was in the [CML] class, it seemed all over the place. I was unable to fully find the purpose of the class and how we can use it in a math class. In a traditional math class, such as Pre-Calculus or Calculus, it was rather difficult to find ways to incorporate the idea of CML.

This same person also commented that once he began teaching statistics, he was able to find ways to integrate CML. Of the 34 math teachers who answered Question 7, 59% of them reported that incorporating CML into their teaching was difficult VF/F. This is about double the VF/F responses from the other subjects.

A high school math teacher saw the value in teaching students CML but limited its application to challenging students’ misinformation about math and who is or is not a mathematician:

Critical Media Literacy is pretty important for students, especially in an age where they’re exposed to various forms of media, a lot of which is very skewed in one way or the other, and usually takes a reductionist viewpoint of the issues it addresses. I try to use CML to help students understand the misinformation about mathematics, the nature of mathematics, and challenge stereotypes of who is or isn’t a mathematician (examples: Not all mathematicians are white or Asian, there are Latino and African/African American mathematicians, there are mathematicians from faith backgrounds, mathematics isn’t just about calculations, etc.).

Two additional respondents also acknowledged the benefits of CML but felt challenged by the additional work needed to integrate it into the curriculum. A high school science teacher shared:

When I took the Critical Media Literacy class, it felt like it was more geared towards the humanities and not necessarily for the sciences. While it would be great to come up with lessons that connect chemistry and critical media literacy, it is immensely time-consuming when I can’t find other people to brainstorm with.

Another secondary science teacher also felt CML was important but struggled to find ways to integrate it into the classroom:

It was a great shared learning space and I got a ton of inspiration from taking the class; however, it has been difficult to use CML when direct instruction does focus on the explanation of scientific concepts. That’s not to say it is impossible, it just does take one more step of planning and student buy in.

Researchers in Canada found that after teaching CML concepts and skills in a Language Arts methods course, their preservice teachers felt enthusiastic about teaching media literacy, but challenged when designing CML lessons ( Robertson & Hughes, 2011 , p. 51). Robertson and Hughes (2011) list five reasons why teaching CML was so challenging for their students: (1) when these preservice teachers were K-12 students, most did not experience CML lessons; (2) the majority of their mentor teachers did not teach CML or know much about it; (3) critical analysis practices are not easy; (4) few resources are available; and (5) some schools have little technology and technical support. These are many of the same challenges that our teachers reported.

Intent and Importance of Incorporating Critical Media Literacy

Numerous teachers wrote about how meaningful, vital, transformative, and important this class was for them. A high school science teacher shared that the critical media literacy (CML) class, “was transformative! I’m still working on ways to fully integrate what I learned, but I have had my students creating media ever since.” A middle school English teacher commented about how the CML class “gave us techniques, projects, lessons that we can incorporate in our classrooms. Teaching students how to be critical of information related through the media is highly important because student[s] gain that critical awareness necessary for a technology-based society!”

A desire to bring more CML into the classroom surfaced throughout many of the qualitative responses. When asked to indicate any additional comments, 16 out of 64 respondents (25%) expressed their intention to integrate concepts related to media literacy or CML. A high school math teacher who wrote about having students create ads to represent data in graphs stated, “I wish I could incorporate more. I’ll keep trying.” A kindergarten teacher commented, “I wish I had more time to engage my students in this topic. As I grow in experience and expertise, I incorporate it more and more. Teaching in urban areas is a challenge but I do find the ideas of the course to be valuable in the classroom.”

The data and voices of these teachers raise practical, theoretical, and policy implications for future work in supporting teachers in adopting a pedagogical approach that can ignite engagement, make learning relevant, and deepen critical thinking with media, technology, and all information. In order for this to happen, teacher education programs need to address some of the challenges and limitations highlighted in the study.

The teachers surveyed reported challenges for implementing critical media literacy (CML) such as limited access to resources, lack of support, and a struggle to understand how to integrate it into the curriculum. This was especially evident for the math and science teachers. CML courses need to help teachers in all content areas rethink the silo approach to separate subject matter instruction and recognize the ways literacy is used in all areas and how information is connected to students’ lives through issues of power, privilege, and pleasure. To help teachers integrate CML into the curriculum, it is important for them to see content and grade-level examples while also receiving ongoing support and resources.

One way to support teachers in various subject matter is to create groups or projects modeled after the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) or the Center X professional development projects. 4 The SHEG is a research and development group that provides free online resources and lesson plans for history teachers to support students in developing historical thinking skills. In a similar way, the Center X projects provide resources, lesson ideas, and professional development to support working teachers and administrators, while also creating curriculum, providing trainings, and engaging in research. The creation of a CML project or research and development group could provide ongoing professional development for new and experienced teachers in order to sustain CML implementation and support the growth of CML as an important field of investigation.

In-service teachers in our survey reported higher rates of integration of CML, perhaps because experienced teachers have figured out issues of classroom management, lesson planning, and how to balance work and life expectations. As a result, they are better situated to build and expand their curricula and teaching practices to bring CML into their classrooms. While creating a site modeled after the SHEG or Center X projects will require a significant investment of time and money, a more immediate and economical way to provide support for preservice teachers could be through integrating CML across various teacher preparation courses, especially in methods classes. This integration would require working with teacher educators to explore the CML theoretical framework and co-construct new practices and curricula for integrating these ideas throughout different content areas.

Despite the challenges reported by our teachers, the data also suggest promising possibilities for CML. While we do not claim causality between their teaching and the CML course, the data provide a window into how our preservice and in-service teachers have supported critical engagement with the information, entertainment, and social media embedded in the lives of students.

The similarities between elementary and secondary teachers suggest that CML can be just as appropriate for lower grades as it is commonly assumed to be for older students. The work in critical literacy by Comber (2013) and Vasquez (2014) offers support for the notion that young children can engage deeply in critical thinking and social justice education. The elementary teachers in our study demonstrate these ideas through the work they have done to engage their young students with media analysis and critical media production from kindergarten on up. While some teachers reported deep levels of critical analysis more often than others, many expressed their belief in the importance of CML and their desire to teach about social justice. Vasquez (2017) reminds us that critical literacy should not be a topic to teach: “Instead it should be looked on as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond. What this means is that critical literacy involves having a critical perspective or way of being” (p. 8). Developing social justice educators who internalize a critical way of looking at the world and questioning systems of power is the project for which CML provides a pragmatic framework and pedagogy.

It is impressive to see the majority of teachers reporting that using CML encourages critical thinking, something more important than ever in the age of fake news and alternative facts. There is hope in the teachers’ voices as they describe the activities they have been doing with their students, the successes they have encountered, and the challenges they have struggled to overcome. The comments about their intentions to teach CML and the importance they attribute to teaching these concepts provide encouragement for teacher educators to embrace CML. More than anything, the data demonstrate the potential for teaching CML in elementary and secondary settings with preservice and in-service teachers and in all content areas, even though some are more challenging than others. The use of media and technology offers opportunities for teachers to build on students’ prior knowledge, create a bridge to connect the outside world with school learning, and provide the raw material to examine everyday experiences of power, marginalization, and resistance.

Simply integrating media into the curriculum is not enough to develop critical literacies given the changing and multiple literacies associated with new digital information and communication technologies and practices. In the contemporary moment, there is a pressing pedagogical need to navigate the increasingly consequential artificial intelligence (AI) systems that collect, collate, process, predict and disseminate information determined by algorithms. Data from the survey suggest that our teachers are teaching more with media than critically analyzing it. Further studies are needed in order to better understand how to develop teachers’ CML frameworks and support more implementation.

Preparing educators to teach CML is not easy, and unfortunately, few institutes of higher education are attempting the challenge. However, it is possible, and in fact, it can be highly rewarding. By listening to the voices of teachers who have taken a CML course, we see the potential. As one high school science teacher commented, “CML changed me, changed my teaching, continues to change my students.”

While information communication technologies are integrating into all aspects of our lives, we are also witnessing increasing divisions between the haves and have nots, out-of-control climate change, and the weaponization of information and media. In order to create a socially just democratic society and sustainable planet, we must have people who can critically read and write the word and the world ( Freire & Macedo, 1987 ). The need for CML has never been greater. A high school English teacher wrote, “there is no literacy without media literacy. There is not critical pedagogy without critical media literacy.” It is our hope that this article serves as a resource to continue exploring the potential that CML offers to transform students, schools, and society.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following educators who helped us design and teach this critical media literacy course: Shani Byard, Peter Carlson, Steven Funk, Antero Garcia, Mark Gomez, Clifford Lee, Elexia Reyes-McGovern, and Martin Romero. We are grateful to Megan Franke for her guidance with the creation of the survey. We also appreciate the assistance of Jarod Kawasaki, Jose-Felipe Martinez, and Brandon McMillan with helping to organize the survey data.

Further Reading

• Funk, S. , Kellner, D. , & Share, J. (2016). Critical media literacy as transformative pedagogy. In M. N. Yildiz & J. Keengwe (Eds.), Handbook of research on media literacy in the digital age (pp. 1–30). IGI Global.
• Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching youth media: A critical guide to literacy, video production, and social change . Teachers College Press.
• Hammer, R. , & Kellner, D. (Eds.). (2009). Media/cultural studies: Critical approaches . Peter Lang.
• Kellner, D. , & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education . Brill/Sense Publishers.
• López, A. (2021). Ecomedia literacy: Integrating ecology into media education . Routledge.
• Luke, A. , & Freebody, P. (1997). Shaping the social practices of reading. In S. Muspratt , A. Luke , & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice (pp. 185–225). Allen & Unwin, Hampton Press.
• Morrell, E. , Dueñas, R. , Garcia, V. , & López, J. (2013). Critical media pedagogy: Teaching for achievement in city schools . Teachers College Press.
• Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression . New York University Press.
• O’Connor, A. (2006). Raymond Williams . Rowman & Littlefield.
• Share, J. (2015). Media literacy is elementary: Teaching youth to critically read and create media (2nd ed.). Peter Lang.
• Vasquez, V. (2014). Negotiating critical literacies with young children (10th anniversary ed.). Routledge.
• Beach, R. , Share, J. , & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching climate change to adolescents: Reading, writing, and making a difference . Routledge.
• Breakstone, J. , Smith, M. , Wineburg, S. , Rapaport, A. , Carle, J. , Garland, M. , & Saavedra, A. (2021). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait . Educational Researcher , 50 (8), 505–515.
• Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture . Polity Press.
• Butler, A. (2020). Educating media literacy: The need for teacher education in media literacy . Brill-Sense.
• California Commission on Teacher Credentialing . (2016). California teaching performance expectations .
• California Common Core State Standards . (2013). https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/finalelaccssstandards.pdf
• Carlson, P. , Share, J. , & Lee, C. (2013). Critical media literacy: Pedagogy for the digital age. Oregon English Journal , 35 (1), 50–55.
• Comber, B. (2013). Critical literacy in the early years: Emergence and sustenance in an age of accountability. In J. Larson & J. Marsh (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of early childhood literacy (pp. 587–601). SAGE.
• Dewey, J. (1963). Experience and education . Macmillan.
• Domine, V. (2011). Building 21st-century teachers: An intentional pedagogy of media literacy education. Action in Teacher Education , 33 (2), 194–205.
• Flores-Koulish, S. A. , Deal, D. , Losinger, J. , McCarthy, K. , & Rosebrugh, E. (2011). After the media literacy course: Three early childhood teachers look back. Action in Teacher Education , 33 , 127–143.
• Freire, P. (2010). Pedagogy of the oppressed ( M. B. Ramos, Trans.). The Continuum International Publishing Group.
• Freire, P. , & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world . Bergin & Garvey.
• Garcia, A. , Seglem, R. , & Share, J. (2013). Transforming teaching and learning through critical media literacy pedagogy. LEARNing Landscapes , 6 (2), 109–124.
• Garii, B. , & Rule, A. C. (2009). Integrating social justice with mathematics and science: An analysis of student teacher lessons. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies , 25 (3), 490–499.
• Gretter, S. , & Yadav, A. (2018). What do preservice teachers think about teaching media literacy? An exploratory study using the theory of planned behavior. Journal of Media Literacy Education , 10 (1), 104–123.
• Grizzle, A. , & Wilson, C. (Eds.). (2011). Media and information literacy: Curriculum for teachers . United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
• Hall, S. (2003). The whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In G. Dines & J. M. Humez (Eds.), Gender, race, and class in media: A text reader (2nd ed., pp. 89–93). SAGE.
• Hart, A. (Ed.). (1998). Teaching the media: International perspectives . Erlbaum.
• Hobbs, R. (2007a). Approaches to instruction and teacher education in media literacy (Research paper commissioned within the United Nations Literacy Decade). UNESCO Regional Conferences in Support of Global Literacy.
• Hobbs, R. (2007b). Reading the media: Media literacy in high school English . Teachers College Press.
• Hobbs, R. , Moen, M. , Tang, R. , & Steager, P. (2022). Measuring the implementation of media literacy instructional practices in schools: Community stakeholder perspectives . Learning, Media and Technology .
• Jhally, S. (2003). Image-based culture: Advertising and popular culture. In G. Dines & J. M. Humez (Eds.), Gender, race, and class in media: A text-reader (2nd ed.). SAGE.
• Joanou, J. P. (2017). Examining the world around us: Critical media literacy in teacher education. Multicultural Perspectives , 19 (1), 40–46.
• Kaplún, M. (1998). Una pedagogía de la comunicación . Ediciones de la Torre.
• Kellner, D. (1995). Media culture: Cultural studies, identity and politics between the modern and the postmodern . Routledge.
• Kellner, D. , & Share, J. (2007). Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education . In D. Macedo & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Media literacy: A reader (pp. 3–23). Peter Lang.
• Kincheloe, J. (2007). Critical pedagogy: Primer . Peter Lang.
• Kirwan, T. , Learmonth, J. , Sayer, M. , & Williams, R. (2003). Mapping media literacy: Media education 11–16 years in the United Kingdom . British Film Institute, Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission.
• Kist, W. , & Christel, M. T. (Eds.). (2022). Special issues: Critical media literacy: Bringing critical media literacy into ELA Classrooms, 2 . National Council of Teachers of English.
• Krashen, S. (1995). Bilingual education and second language acquisition theory. In D. Durkin (Ed.), Language issues: Readings for teachers (pp. 90–116). Longman.
• Kubey, R. (Ed.). (1997). Media literacy in the information age: Current perspectives . Transaction.
• Livingstone, S. (2018, May 8). Media literacy—everyone’s favourite solution to the problems of regulation [Web log post].
• Lynch, T. L. (2021). (Ed.). Special issues: Critical media literacy: Bringing lives to texts, 1 . National Council of Teachers of English.
• Meehan, J. , Ray, B. , Walker, A. , Wells, S. , & Schwarz, G. (2015). Media literacy in teacher education: A good fit across the curriculum. Journal of Media Literacy Education , 7 (2), 81–86.
• Mihailidis, P. (2008). Are we speaking the same language? Assessing the state of media literacy in U.S. higher education. Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education , 8 (4), 1–14.
• Moore, D. C. , & Bonilla, E. (2014). Media literacy education & the common core state standards: NAMLE an educator’s guide . National Association for Media Literacy Education.
• National Council of Teachers of English . (2022, April 9). Media Education in English Language Arts .
• Pegurer Caprino, M. , & Martínez-Cerdá, J. (2016). Media literacy in Brazil: Experiences and models of non-formal education. Comunicar , 24 (49), 39–48.
• Pérez-Tornero, J. M. , & Tayie, S. (2012). Introduction. Teacher training in media education: Curriculum and international experiences . Comunicar , 20 (39), 10–14.
• Prinsloo, J. , & Criticos, C. (Eds.). (1991). Media matters in South Africa . Media Resource Centre.
• Ranieri, M. , & Bruni, I. (2018). Promoting digital and media competencies of pre- and in-service teachers: Research findings of a project from six European countries. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society , 14 (2), 111–125.
• Rideout, V. , Lauricella, A. , & Wartella, E. (2011). Children, media, and race: Media use among white, black, hispanic, and Asian American children . Center on Media and Human Development School of Communication, Northwestern University.
• Robertson, L. , & Hughes, J. M. (2011). Investigating pre-service teachers’ understandings of critical media literacy. Language & Literacy , 13 (2), 37–53.
• Rogow, F. (2018, August 1). How to adjust your “brights” to see through the fog of “fake” news [Web log post]
• Schwarz, G. (2001). Literacy expanded: The role of media literacy in teacher education. Teacher Education Quarterly , 28 (2), 111–119.
• Share, J. , & Beach, R. (2022). Critical media literacy analysis and production for systems thinking about climate change . The Journal of Media Literacy: Research Symposium Issue.
• Share, J. , & Gambino, A. (2022). A framework, disposition, and pedagogy for teaching critical media literacy. In W. Kist & M. T. Christel (Eds.), special issues: Critical media literacy, volume 2 : Bringing critical media literacy into ELA classrooms (pp. 11–17). National Council of Teachers of English.
• Tiede, J. , Grafe, S. , & Hobbs, R. (2015). Pedagogical media competencies of preservice teachers in Germany and the United States: A comparative analysis of theory and practice. Peabody Journal of Education , 90 (4), 533–545.
• Trust, T. , Maloy, R. , Butler, A. & Goodman, L. (2022). Critical media literacy in teacher education: Discerning truth amidst a crisis of misinformation and disinformation. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education , 30 (2), 167–176.
• Vasquez, V. M. (2017). Curriculum and pedagogy, educational purposes and ideals, education theories and philosophies . In G. W. Noblit (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of education . Oxford University Press.
• Vogels, E. , Gelles-Watnick, R. , & Massarat, N. (2022). Teens, social media & technology 2018 . Pew Research Center.
• Vosoughi, S. , Roy, D. , & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science , 359 (6380), 1146–1151.
• Wilson, C. (2012). Media and information literacy: Pedagogy and possibilities . Comunicar , 20 (39), 15–22.
• Wilson, C. , & Duncan, B. (2009). Implementing mandates in media education: The Ontario experience. Comunicar , 32 (16), 127–140.

1. The UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Curriculum can be found at the following location.

2. These can be found at the Center for Media Literacy website .

3. See The UCLA Library Critical Media Literacy Research Guide .

4. The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and the Center X site is at UCLA CENTER X PREPARES & SUPPORTS EDUCATORS .

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Education. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 11 August 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.80.150.64]
• 185.80.150.64

Character limit 500 /500

• Career Center

Position Statements

• Submit a Resolution
• All Position Statements
• NCTE Process for Adopting Official Guidelines and Short Documents

Media Education in English Language Arts

Literacy is expanding, and English language arts (ELA) educators at all levels must help learners develop the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed for life in an increasingly digital and mediated world. Media education is defined as the study of the media with the aim of cultivating people’s media literacy competencies (Lee, 2010). For people of all ages, media function as a public pedagogy due to their influential role in “organizing, shaping, and disseminating information, ideas, and values” (Kellner & Share, 2007, p. 3). To address inequalities in digital technologies and competencies, continuing curricular innovation in the ELA curriculum at all levels of K–12 education is needed. In this position statement, we articulate three core themes that make media education fundamental to teaching and learning in ELA education:

• Exploring Representation and Power through Critical Reading, Listening, and Viewing. Educators value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.
• Empowering Voice with Writing, Speaking, and Self-Expression. All learners need to be able to express themselves using writing, speaking, and visual representation using varied modes, genres, and platforms of communication. These competencies are essential to work, life, and citizenship, impacting who has access to conversations, who can speak, and who is heard.
• Increasing Relevance by Critically Examining Digital Media and Popular Culture. Media education includes attention to teaching and learning practices that increase the relevance of school to society. Inquiry pedagogies can help all learners understand the strengths and limitations of different media forms through an examination of the texts and literacy practices of everyday life, including informative, entertaining, and persuasive genres.

Context: Why Now?

Today’s students live in highly mediated worlds where information, entertainment, and persuasion are delivered to them through the many screens of daily life. If it could ever be said that language is the carrier of all meaning, this is certainly no longer the case, as multimodality represents “the normal state of human communication” (Kress, 2010, p. 1). We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world. We experience this reality daily in the GIFs and selfies we share with one another, the memes and videos we circulate through our social media feeds, the news broadcasts we watch on demand, the podcasts we binge, and the films, TV series, and live events we stream through the ever-growing list of digital platforms. Yet all these modalities involve some element of written language.

Young people encounter many types of media texts and use many different literacy practices throughout a given day. Everyone in our society now needs the ability to assess the widely varying quality of the information, entertainment, and persuasion that surrounds them, to evaluate the veracity and validity of claims, and to debunk misinformation when necessary. The broadening of the communication landscape opens greater opportunities for student voice and agency as they move from users and consumers to participators and creators. Through media education, students begin to deepen sociopolitical consciousness as they recognize how power relationships structure the narratives that surround us (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1993).  

Around the world, educators have recognized that the many forms of media offer an expanded set of genres for reading and writing, and these practices have generally been identified as the practice of media education (Buckingham, 2003). ELA educators have long been well poised to support students’ identities as digital consumers, creators, distributors, and inventors through curriculum and pedagogy (Mirra et al., 2018). ELA educators are responsible for preparing students for a future with an evolving media landscape. As society and technology change, so too does literacy (NCTE, 2019b). While some instructional practices of media education can be generalized across disciplines, many areas are unique to disciplinary literacy within ELA education.

Because English teachers have a professional responsibility to prepare students for work, life, and citizenship, media education must be an essential component of the professional identity of teachers. We believe that ELA educators are creative individuals who are familiar with the power of digital media authorship in their own lives. They are

• active participants in contemporary culture and in their local communities, and they recognize how continually evolving media texts and platforms shape how stories and information are created, shared, and circulated (Weninger, 2018);
• professionals who take steps to actively understand, teach about, and compensate for media landscapes that are specifically designed to amplify narratives where some voices and points of view are emphasized and others are trivialized, demeaned, or ignored (Garcia et al., 2015);
• supportive of lifelong learners’ ability to understand, question, and analyze the many spaces of media and communication that are part of everyday life (Morrell et al., 2015).

Members of our discipline have long recognized how print literacies work in tandem with multiple modes of expression (Multimodal Literacies Issue Management Team, 2005). Students should examine how digital media and popular culture are completely intermingled with language, literature, and writing. The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education. Speaking and listening are increasingly valued as forms of expression that are vital to personal and professional success, and with the rise of digital media technologies, they now occur in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. The ability to represent one’s ideas using images and multimedia is now a valued competency in a wide variety of professional careers in the knowledge economy. It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master.

Research evidence amply shows the need to move beyond the exclusive focus on traditional reading and writing competencies. For example, secondary school students lack critical reading comprehension skills that require them to distinguish between journalism and sponsored content, and they routinely ignore the source of a message when judging its accuracy (Breakstone et al., 2019). But when students are empowered to critically examine popular culture texts in the classroom, the process can productively disrupt classroom hierarchies as learners exercise the right to freedom of expression on issues that are perceived to have meaningful relevance to their identity and values (Cannon et al., 2020).

The rapid changes in the information and communication ecosystem have had important implications for English teachers and others both in and outside of school. It is important for ELA educators to recognize the variety of approaches used in media education, which are each rooted in disciplinary contexts with distinctive lineages, keywords, and concepts.

Approaches to Media Education

The variety of approaches used in media education is a source of great strength for ELA educators, because it enables them to align instructional practices with the needs of their learners and their school and community context (NCTE, 2021). Considering the diverse learning needs of children, adolescents, young adults, preservice teachers, teachers, parents, and other adult learners, one or more of these media education approaches will be relevant to ELA educators:

• News literacy. Driven by rising interest in “fake news” and disinformation, students learn to understand, interpret, and evaluate different forms of news, analysis, and opinion.
• Information literacy. Students receive scaffolding and support for research processes as they access, locate, curate, and evaluate information content, using library databases and the open internet to appreciate how expertise and authority are constructed and contextual.
• Media literacy. Students examine authors, audiences, messages, meanings, representations, and social realities by accessing, analyzing, and creating media in a wide variety of forms, using language, images, sound, and interactivity. Through practices of reflection and action, they consider how information and communication make an impact in the world.
• Media production. Working individually or collaboratively, students compose media through a creative process, during which a completed work product is shared with an authentic audience. This work may occur in any classroom, or it may be offered as an elective in school journalism, video production, or in other activities where voice, agency, and civic engagement are cultivated.
• Critical literacy. Students examine the cultural, ideological, and sociolinguistic content of the curriculum and focus on the uses of literacy for social justice in marginalized and disenfranchised communities.
• Critical media literacy. Students examine mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies by analyzing relationships between media and audiences, information, and power, often with attention to media institutions and representations that address systemic inequalities and social justice.
• Digital literacy. Students develop competencies in using digital platforms for lifelong learning through activities that involve guided inquiry, creative production, and connected learning.
• Digital citizenship. Students learn about the rights and responsibilities of people in complex, diverse societies and reflect on their own ethical choices as they use digital platforms in the context of work, life, and citizenship.
• Newer terms including data literacy and algorithmi c literacy invite learners to understand the ethical, political, technological, and economic dimensions of digital platforms and how they structure and control people’s access to information, entertainment, and persuasion.

Although each of these terms reflects distinctive instructional practices of media education, there is substantial overlap between them, which we identify below as core themes. As an essential part of curriculum and instruction in English language arts, these core themes should be also addressed in preservice and inservice teacher education and professional development.

Core Theme 1: Exploring Representation and Po wer with Critical Reading, Listening, and Viewing

English language arts education has changed over time in response to changes in culture, technology, and society. Educators now include a range of forms and types of texts, tools, and technologies, which now include modes (including linguistic, visual, and auditory), industries (journalism, publishing, advertising, film and video games), and genres (fiction, nonfiction, opinion, romance, horror, memes, GIFs, etc.). Today, people generally experience many different forms of media through digital platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc.). The architecture of these platforms reflects the values and identities of their commercial creators, while simultaneously shaping how users interact with each other to express and share thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

Narrative, expository, and persuasive texts are complex representations of social reality. As such, they shape our understanding of the world. In both the elementary and secondary grades, teachers model what they want students to do with texts, guiding and providing time for practice, then sharing and reflecting as a class. The use of digital texts and technologies amplifies existing literacy practices. For young children, these practices build trust, ownership, and a feeling of belonging (Muhtaris & Ziemke, 2015). Active discussion of media texts also enables learners to exert a degree of deliberate control over the reading process that may be less possible with other types of literature (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1993). When the texts and learning activities in ELA classrooms are culturally responsive to the students we teach, education can function to reduce prejudice through developing critical questioning and cultural competence (Morrell et al., 2015). Student-initiated conversations that are responsive to the media texts of everyday life can generate critical thinking and rich inquiry on big topics like immigration, xenophobia, police brutality, racism, and environmental degradation, just to name a few.

Many teachers—whether consciously or unconsciously—tend to think of curriculum as a zero-sum game in which the study of literature competes with other activities, including the study of persuasive genres or popular culture. While updating our curricula beyond the canonical classics that have historically been taught may be necessary, media education need not displace the study of literature. A growing number of teachers value the opportunity to help students make connections between classic literature and contemporary media texts to advance multicultural understanding and address issues of equity. To this end, teachers benefit from developing confidence to implement instructional strategies that include

• Involving students as co-creators of the curriculum by acknowledging their unique lived experience, pleasures, and preferences in the selection of texts and learning activities (Dalton, 2020);
• Layering the reading of popular culture texts, multimodal texts, and classic literature together to showcase issues of representation in relation to the full scope of human creativity and imagination (Hall, 2016);
• Modeling how to use multiperspectival reasoning and critical evaluation strategies with digital texts and technologies (Hicks, 2021).

Core Theme 2: Empowering Voice with Writing, Speaking, and Self-Expression

Teachers of English language arts acknowledge that reading, writing, speaking, and writing should be central to the ELA curriculum, and they value the opportunity to help students become thoughtful and effective communicators. But some teachers feel pressure to prepare learners to succeed only on a few specific kinds of academic writing tasks, such as writing a five-paragraph essay, while others believe that speaking and multimodal composing activities take up too much classroom time.

Outside of the ELA classroom, the creative work of effective speakers and writers can be found in a wide array of media genres and forms, including journalism, blog posts, advertising, political campaigns, YouTube videos, social media, Buzzfeed-style listicles, photo essays, podcasts, infographics, and many other forms. Many students are more familiar with these forms than they are with traditional academic writing genres (Hobbs et al., 2019). When students can compose in a genre that they are familiar with and enjoy, they can explore ideas and issues in ways that academic writing alone cannot provide, often by deepening their emotional response to texts (Smith, 2018). Because not all students have the same access to compose and share digital media outside of the classroom, teachers can address issues of equity in media participation by providing students multiple opportunities to write and remix media genres within the classroom, as part of a media-rich academic writing curriculum. To this end, teachers benefit from developing confidence to implement instructional strategies that include

• Developing reading, listening, and viewing activities that use texts whose target audience crosses between age boundaries (Bintz & Ciecierski, 2021);
• Using multimodal composition practices to deepen critical engagement with academic content and present learners’ personal stances on contemporary social issues (Unsworth & Mills, 2020);
• Supporting learners as they compose messages to inform, persuade, and entertain, using language, music, and sound to advance critical listening and performance skills (Buckley-Marudas & Doerr-Stevens, 2019)

Core Theme 3: Increasing Relevance by Critically Examining Digital Media and Popular Culture

Outside the classroom, students’ engagement with digital media, popular culture, and multimodal texts is as high as it’s ever been and is ever increasing, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic (Eales et al., 2021). ELA classrooms that exclusively rely on the study of literature and academic writing are becoming increasingly disconnected and remote from students’ lived experiences. Educators are often pleasantly surprised to discover how much time and talent students invest in their work when we expand our notions of literacy to include the analysis and production of video, infographics, podcasts, graphic novels, fanfiction, and other diverse modes. When literature, language, and writing are connected to students’ experiences with contemporary media and popular culture, it can also help keep the curriculum fresh and joyful (French, 2021).

Persuasion and propaganda play a central role in consumer culture, democracy, and public life, and the field of English language arts has long recognized the need to call attention to the power of misleading language that distorts reality (NCTE, 2019a). Still, for a variety of reasons, narrative and expository forms receive the lion’s share of attention in ELA classrooms, and the study of persuasive genres is uncommon—even when nearly every message in the home, workplace, and community includes persuasion. While some educators position argumentation as superior to persuasion and propaganda, classic theories of rhetoric have always recognized the coequal status of ethos, pathos , and logos as they work in concert to influence audience attitudes, knowledge, values, and behaviors (Fleming, 2019). To this end, teachers benefit from developing confidence to implement instructional strategies that include

• Exploring the interconnections between children’s participation in popular culture and their composing practices as they use diverse symbolic tools, including drawing, writing, and talking (Dyson, 2018);
• Using curated multimedia and popular culture resources, including music and podcasting, that are linked to ELA topics, issues, and themes (Evans et al., 2021);
• Deepening critical examination of persuasive genres, including the study of contemporary propaganda, by providing opportunities for learners to “talk back” to advertisers, political leaders, corporations, celebrities, and other public agents of persuasion (Hobbs, 2020).

Now that we have introduced three core themes, we briefly consider the importance of access and equity as well as the ongoing challenge of assessing student learning, which are key dimensions of media education in English language arts.

Access and Equity

Some English teachers may value the three themes of media education but not feel personally responsible for helping to develop students’ digital technology skills. But in the world outside the classroom, a wide range of literacy practices now rely on access to and use of digital texts, platforms, and technologies. Although digital texts, platforms, and technologies are important resources for learning, access to them is unevenly available in homes, schools, and communities. For this reason, ELA teachers should participate as active stakeholders and advocates in helping to increase access to digital devices, digital content, bandwidth, digital readiness, and the political economy of computational languages.

Digital devices: In creating compositions of all kinds, tools always matter. Just as pens and paper were once essential for traditional forms of literacy, digital devices are necessary to participate in the literacy practices of work, life, and citizenship. Although many students have access to smartphones, not all devices are created equal, and both hardware and software can impact a student’s ability to use the device in English language arts contexts. For instance, the hardware a student uses can affect their composition options in creating multimodal texts. Tablets and mobile phones are application-based, and their design lends itself to documenting life around students by capturing video, visual, audio, and geolocation information. But tablets and Chromebooks often limit pedagogies to consumption-focused practices (Sahin et al., 2016). Students in robust ELA curricula need to be able to do far more. Students need access to digital devices that enable them to engage with and manipulate digital texts, and schools can either provide greater access to a wider range of more useful devices in the classroom or offer more flexibility in allowing students to use their own digital devices (Woodall, 2021).

Digital content : Not all digital content is created equal. Whereas traditional textbook content could often be traced through clearly visible publishers, editors, and advisory boards, digital content often appears before teachers without comparable transparency. Whether from small, start-up ed tech companies, or from well-meaning teachers, it can be frustratingly difficult for teachers to gauge the trustworthiness and quality of digital content. In addition, digital content is often inseparable from the digital devices and applications used to access it. Whereas traditional static print-based content appeared straightforward to teachers, digital content always includes dynamic elements that are both seen and unseen: buttons to click on, text boxes to type into, voice-recording options, and a constant flow of data generated that sometimes (though not always) informs a student’s learning. Teachers must increase their confidence in scrutinizing both the source of digital content itself and the ways dynamic digital elements influence what and how students learn.

Bandwidth: Access to the internet can vary widely based on socioeconomic and geographic factors. When students or families report that they have home access to the internet, that does not mean that the access they have is equitable. A student who has access to the internet via a cable modem will in many cases be able to work more quickly and multitask compared to a student who reported having home internet access but is sharing a single device with cellular phone service. This is especially relevant as more and more schools are turning to video conferencing applications to facilitate blended and online learning.

Digital readiness: Discussion about digital divides now includes increasing emphasis on the degree to which people succeed or struggle when they use technology to try to navigate their environments, solve problems, and make decisions (Horrigan, 2016). Both students and teachers benefit from digital literacy competencies that empower them to use internet-connected devices well. Just as writers gain fluency through opportunities to read and write daily, students gain competencies through regular invitations to compose, share, and revise digital media compositions. In constructing multiple opportunities for students to build digital competencies, we foster students’ capacity to speak and be heard in the larger social conversations happening outside of the classroom. Because confidence in using technologies is necessary for lifelong learning, teachers must be sensitive to how an individual student’s readiness to engage with digital technology may be specific to a particular task, device, or app. For this reason, teachers also benefit from diverse professional development opportunities that increase their own confidence in implementing instructional practices that make use of digital media tools, apps, and platforms. Professional development experiences need to offer educators the chance to practice technical skills as well as to learn to implement rich, nuanced pedagogical practices. This need not be time consuming. Educators who explore DIY and makerspace approaches to teaching and learning have found that having shorter timeframes to create work and setting limits on the materials to be utilized increase both creativity and learning (Lahana, 2021).

Computational languages and power: All of the digital tools, platforms, and applications used by students and teachers are themselves composed of computer code written (most often) by companies. It is important for English educators to advance in our own critical awareness of how issues of power and inequity operate in the greatly invisible computational languages that comprise digital tools, platforms, and applications, especially as a small number of companies dominate our online activities and profit from the data we produce through online interactions (Nichols et al., 2022). Because our access to digital media is mediated and shaped by profit-seeking firms, it is important to unmask and critique the less-visible dimensions of the digital platforms we use for school, work, and daily life (Lynch, 2015), which are comprised of computational languages written for commercial purposes. Educators also have the right to be critical of technology firms that push gadgets into school districts in the name of revolutionizing education.

The inequalities of access to digital technologies in education heighten larger social inequalities in society. For this reason, many students need explicit instruction, modeling, and time to become proficient readers who comprehend and use digital technologies as tools for thinking. Without ongoing opportunities to learn, practice, revise, and reflect upon the digital tools they are using, students with limited or low-tech instruction will be missing key building blocks to becoming lifelong learners. For these reasons, we recommend that ELA teachers participate as active stakeholders, advocates, and co-learners in helping to increase access to digital devices, bandwidth, and digital readiness, and to understand and challenge the political economy of digital platforms and computational languages.

Assessment of Student Learning

The assessment-centric culture of schools clearly affects how teachers, parents, administrators, and students perceive the value of media education pedagogies and practices. While high-stakes testing and interruptions to instruction place demands on time and space in the ELA curriculum, educators have the power to articulate priorities in the choices they make during the school day.

Although many ELA teachers are quite receptive to expanding the concept of literacy, they often acknowledge that assessments of student learning are poorly aligned with the many new instructional practices of media education that are implemented in elementary and secondary schools (Dalton, 2020). Educators may struggle to apply conventional assessment practices to students’ use of digital and media technologies. For example, when students create digital media using online platforms, some teachers are unaware of how templates and design format options have influenced the structure and shape of the work. For this reason, it is important to align medium- or genre-specific criteria for evaluation with foundational rhetorical concepts like audience, purpose, point of view, structure, sequence, and tone.

Teachers need to design learning experiences with clear criteria for evaluation, and then provide timely, specific, and goal-oriented feedback that helps them develop knowledge and skills. Projects that require students to create media to demonstrate their learning provide opportunities to evaluate students based on their labor, which can include free-writing, drafting, peer review, revision, and editing (Hicks, 2021). Using multiple strategies for assessment includes attention to both process and product, self-reflection on learning, and attention to the affordances of digital technology for using, remixing, manipulating, and creating multimodal texts (Tan et al., 2020).

Feedback is the most important driver of student learning, and ELA educators understand deeply that it should be a primary form of assessment. Digital annotation enables students and instructors to have significant flexibility in commenting on student-created work, providing personalized, detailed feedback by highlighting text, adding comments, drawing notes, or attaching additional images, videos, or other resources directly within the creative work. Video annotation tools permit instructors and peers to make comments on student videos by pinpointing their comment to a particular moment in time.

Another intervention that may assist the migration of media education into the mainstream of education practice would be a disciplinary acceptance or agreed-upon language and systems for assessing and evaluating the communicative qualities present in diverse, multimodal texts (McGrail et al., 2021). While the communicative qualities deemed rhetorically effective will shift in relation to genre, audience, purpose, usage, and platforms, some general criteria have emerged for creative digital media products produced by learners. For example, criteria such as appropriation and transformativeness (the appropriate use of copyrighted material in the creative process) may provide a means to assess some features of student-produced media, helping students to avoid the perils of plagiarism and engage in remix practices that are creatively generative.

A Call to Action

In summary, we offer these action steps to advance media education in English language arts:

• The time is now to bring media education into the mainstream of ELA education. NCTE members should take personal responsibility for this work, working individually and collaboratively at the local, regional, and national levels.
• There are many different instructional practices and approaches to media education because of the rapid changes that have occurred in the information and communication ecosystem. NCTE members should make strategic decisions about which approaches to implement with their learners, taking into consideration their needs and using practices that are most relevant to the context of their classroom, school, and community.
• explore questions of representation and power through critical reading, listening, and viewing;
• use their empowered voices through writing, speaking, and self-expression in multiple genres and formats;
• make relevant connections between school and society through the use of digital media and popular culture.
• As an essential part of curriculum and instruction in English language arts, these media education themes should be addressed in both preservice and inservice teacher education and professional development through hands-on, minds-on learning.
• ELA teachers should participate as active stakeholders, advocates, and co-learners in helping to increase access to digital devices, bandwidth, and digital readiness, and to understand (and challenge) the political economy of digital platforms and computational languages.
• In assessing student learning, students and teachers should make use of digital and video annotation tools to provide multidirectional feedback from teachers, learners, and public audiences. Research and policy leadership initiatives should be implemented to help NCTE articulate best practices in assessment for project-based media assignments, including frameworks that support both medium-specific and general criteria for evaluation.

For students to be prepared for success in college and careers, they need high levels of engagement in their own learning and a strong sense of confidence in their identity as learners. For this reason, media education pedagogies can be a key lever in education reform when educators wield influence in ways that support critical, flexible, responsive, and creative thinking.

Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2019). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher , https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211017495

Bintz, W. P., & Ciecierski, L. (2021). Using crossover literature in the ELA middle grades classroom. Voices from the Middle , 28 (3), 31–37.

Buckingham, D. (2003).  Media education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture . Polity.

Buckingham, D., & Sefton-Green, J. (1993). Making sense of the media: From reading to culture. In S. Brindley (Ed.),  Teaching English  (pp. 98–104). Routledge.

Buckley-Marudas, M., & Doerr-Stevens, C. (2019). Critical listening for social change: The possibility of “playback” in English language arts. Ubiquity: The Journal for Literature, Literacy, and the Arts , 6 (1). http://ed-ubiquity.gsu.edu/wordpress/buckley-marudas-and-doerr-stevens-full-text/

Cannon, M, Connolly, S., & Parry, R. (2020). Media literacy, curriculum and the rights of the child. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education , https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2020.1829551

Dalton, B. (2020). Bringing together multimodal composition and maker education in K–8 classrooms. Language Arts,   97 (3), 159–171.

Dyson, A. H. (2018). From Superman play to singing the blues: On the trail of child writing and popular culture. Language Arts , 96 (1), 37–46.

Eales, L., Gillespie, S., Alstat, R. A., Ferguson, G. M., & Carlson, S. M. (2021). Children’s screen and problematic media use in the United States before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Child Development , 92 (5), e866–e882. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13652

Evans, R. A., Goering, C. Z., & French, S. D. (2021). Soundtracks, songwriting, and soundscapes: Producing the podcast of our lives. English Journal , 110 (4), 69–76.

Fleming, D. (2019). Fear of persuasion in the English language arts.  College English ,  81 (6), 508–541.

French, S. D. (2021). Multimodality. In V. S. Collet (Ed.), The language of literacy education (p. 48). Brill.

Garcia, A., Mirra, N., Morrell, E., Martinez, A., & Scorza, D. (2015). The Council of Youth Research: Critical literacy and civic agency in the digital age. Reading & Writing Quarterly , 31 (2), 151–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2014.962203

Hall, L. A. (2016). Reconfiguring the reading experience: Using pop‐culture texts to shift reading narratives. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 60 (3), 341–344.

Hicks, T. (2021). Mindful teaching with technology: Digital diligence in the English language arts, grades 6 – 12 . Guilford.

Hobbs, R. (2020).  Mind over media: Propaganda education for a digital age . Norton.

Hobbs, R., Deslauriers, L., & Steager, P. (2019). The library screen scene: Film and media literacy in schools, colleges, and communities. Oxford University Press.

Horrigan, J. B. (2016). Digital readiness gaps.  Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/20/digital-readiness-gaps/

Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2007). Critical media literacy, democracy, and the reconstruction of education. In D. Macedo & S. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Media literacy: A reader (pp. 3–23). Peter Lang.

Kress, G. R. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Taylor & Francis.

Lahana, L. (2021). Integrating school makerspaces into the English language arts curriculum.  Middle Grades Review , 7 (2).

Lee, A. Y. (2010). Media education: Definitions, approaches, and development around the globe. New Horizons in Education , 58 (3), 1–13.

Lynch, T. L. (2015).  The hidden role of software in educational research: Policy to practice. Routledge.

McGrail, E., Turner, K. H., Piotrowski, A., Caprino, K., Zucker, L., & Greenwood, M. E. (2021). An interconnected framework for assessment of digital multimodal composition.  English Education ,  53 (4), 277–302.

Mirra, N, Morrell, E., & Filipiak, D. (2018). From digital consumption to digital invention: Toward a new critical theory and practice of multiliteracies. Theory Into Practice , 57, 12–19.

Morrell, E., Duenas, R., Garcia, V., & Lopez, J. (2015).  Critical media pedagogy: Teaching for achievement in city schools . Teachers College Press.

Muhtaris, K., & Ziemke, K. (2015).  Amplify: Digital teaching and learning in the K – 6 classroom. Heinemann.

Multimodal Literacies Issue Management Team of the NCTE Executive Committee (2005, November 17). Multimodal literacies. [Position statement]. National Council of Teachers of English.  https://ncte.org/statement/multimodalliteracies/

National Council of Teachers of English (2019a, March 6). Resolution on English education for critical literacy in politics and media. https://ncte.org/statement/resolution-english-education-critical-literacy-politics-media/

NCTE 21st Century Literacies Definition and Framework Revision Committee (2019b, November 7). Definition of literacy in a digital age. [Position statement]. National Council of Teachers of English. https://ncte.org/statement/nctes-definition-literacy-digital-age/

NCTE Task Force on Critical Media Literacy (2021). Report of the Task Force on Critical Media Literacy. National Council of Teachers of English. https://www.canva.com/design/DAERz0BpJyk/I4sPUxfrZlHLVys3QIVilQ/view?utm_content=DAERz0BpJyk&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=homepage_design_menu

Nichols, T. P., Smith, A., Bulfin, S., & Stornaiuolo, A. (2022). Critical literacy, digital platforms, and datafication. In J. Z. Pandya et al. (Eds.), The handbook of critical literacies  (pp. 345–353). Routledge.

Sahin, A., Top, N., & Delen, E. (2016). Teachers’ first-year experience with Chromebook laptops and their attitudes towards technology integration.  Technology, Knowledge and Learning ,  21 (3), 361–378.

Smith, B. E. (2018). Composing for affect, audience, and identity: Toward a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ multimodal composing goals and designs.  Written Communication ,  35 (2), 182–214.

Tan, L., Zammit, K., D’warte, J., & Gearside, A. (2020). Assessing multimodal literacies in practice: A critical review of its implementations in educational settings. Language and Education , 34 (2), 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1708926

Unsworth, L., & Mills, K. A. (2020). English language teaching of attitude and emotion in digital multimodal composition.  Journal of Second Language Writing ,  47 , 100712.

Weninger, C. (2018). From language skills to literacy: Broadening the scope of English language education through media literacy . Routledge.

Woodall, M. K. (2021). Beyond apps and activities: Intentional integration of technology in English language arts education. In C. M. Moran (Ed.),  Affordances and constraints of mobile phone use in English language arts classrooms  (pp. 29–40). IGI Global.

This statement is an update of the NCTE position statement on Multimodal Literacies (2005).

Statement Authors

• Renee Hobbs, chair, University of Rhode Island
• Denise Chapman, Monash University, Australia
• Candance M Doerr-Stevens, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Seth D. French, Bentonville High School, AR
• Tom Liam Lynch, The New School, New York, NY
• Cruz Medina, Santa Clara University, CA
• Ernest Morrell, University of Notre Dame, IN
• Chris Sloan, Judge Memorial Catholic High School, UT
• Lisa Stringfellow, The Winsor School, MA
• Kristin Ziemke, Big Shoulders Fund, Chicago, IL

Critical Friends

• Bill Bass, Parkway School District, St. Louis, MO
• Fred Haas, Hopkinton High School, MA
• Troy Hicks, Central Michigan University
• Sara Kajder, University of Georgia
• Katie Muhtaris, Barrington Community Unit School District 220, IL
• Csilla Weninger, National Institute of Education, Singapore

This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

Democracy and Education

Home > Journal > Vol. 22 > Iss. 1 (2014)

The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education

Jeremy Stoddard , College of William & Mary Follow

Despite the potential for media and technology to act as a democratizing force and the challenges to democracy posed by partisanship and the explosion of political media spending, media education and the preparation of active citizens in schools is virtually nonexistent. This essay presents the case for revitalizing media education for the age of digital media as a tenet of democratic education and outlines an agenda for teacher education, curriculum integration, student engagement, and research.

Response to this Article

Lance E. Mason, Media and Democracy Peter Levine, Media Literacy for the 21st Century

Recommended Citation

Stoddard, J. (2014). The Need for Media Education in Democratic Education. Democracy and Education , 22 (1), Article 4. Available at: https://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol22/iss1/4

Since April 14, 2014

Included in

Curriculum and Instruction Commons

• Journal Home
• About This Journal
• Aims & Scope
• Editorial Board
• Submit Article or Response
• Most Popular Papers
• Receive Email Notices or RSS

Advanced Search

Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Media: Short and Long Sample Essays

• Updated on  
• Dec 18, 2023

Media plays an important role in shaping our perceptions, influencing public opinion, and connecting individuals across the globe. The role of media in today’s modern world is not limited to just providing information. There are three basic purposes of media; inform, educate, and entertain. A society with free media allows it to have a social and cultural impact on it. Media offers us information about every activity going on in the world. Our smartphones, laptops, televisions, radios, and even public transportation have access to media, where we can watch news anytime and anywhere. Media not only influence our thoughts but can often manipulate our understanding of a particular topic. Continue reading essay on media to know more. Stay tuned!

Also Read: Social Media Bane or Boon

Also Read: Essay on Colonialism

Short Essay on Media

‘Media plays an important role in shaping our perceptions, influencing public opinion, and connecting individuals across the globe. Media includes different platforms such as television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. Media is considered a powerful tool to disseminate information and have social, cultural, and political influences on the masses.’

Some of the roles played by the media are:

• Informing the public through newspapers, news channels, and online portals.
• At the push of a button, media can provide us with a large source of information.
• Media has a significant impact on public opinion by framing issues, influencing perceptions, and shaping narratives.
• Some media platforms are considered political watchdogs, scrutinizing the actions of government officials and institutions. 
• Several media platforms rely on advertising revenue, and in turn, they provide a platform for businesses to promote their products and services.

Media can have both positive and negative impacts on an individual and society as a whole. Understanding the role of media and its limitations is important when watching or reading news. Media is meant for informational purposes. Its influence can vary from person to person. Media is a double-edged sword, which can have a negative or positive impact on our understanding, depending on how we perceive information.

Also Read: Essay on Social Issues

Long Essay on Media

‘Media is a great source of information. Some watch media for entertainment, while others for information or educational purposes. The way we perceive media can have a great impact on our understanding of a particular topic or information. In recent years, the influence of media has significantly increased. The role and influence of media is not limited and can take different forms. Newspapers and radio stations are some of the old and most preferred media sources as compared to television and internet media sources. The choices made by editors, the emphasis given to certain stories, and the narratives crafted can significantly impact how we perceive the world.

Types of Media

There are different types of media, which determine our choices.

News media comprises various platforms like SMS, blogs, email, internet, etc. These platforms are used to access and disseminate economic, social and political information. It offers new ways to develop business relationships with telecommunication companies that are capable of disseminating critical information that can change people’s lives.

Mass media includes print (newspapers, magazines), TV and radio. Due to the fast-paced TV and radio media platforms, there has been a significant decline in newspaper readership all over the world. However, there is a section of a group who still prefer newspapers as the best sources of information. On the other hand, TV and radio stations offer live information from different parts of the world.

Community Media

Community media focuses on the development and issues of a particular community. Some journalists work for community newspapers and radio stations within their community. They have their geographical limitations and sometimes are poorly resourced with immature journalists and editors.

What is the Role of Media?

‘Media plays multiple roles, educating and informing us about different fields. Media is not only there for news but also produces some amazing stories, documentaries, magazine programs and articles through its platforms.’

‘Media allows us to raise awareness and public voice against any unethical activity or decision of the government. Apart from sharing information, media has the power to be a catalyst for social change. It serves as a platform for advocacy, shedding light on injustices, and human rights violations, and inspiring collective action. 

We have witnessed how movements for equality and justice have gained momentum through the amplifying effect of media. As responsible citizens, we should support and engage with media that contributes to positive social change.

Different Roles of People in Media

Different people play different roles in the media and mass communication sector. 

• Board of Directors – Their job is to ensure that everyone within the organization fulfills their responsibilities within the given framework. They are the real policymakers within the organization. They are not responsible for day-to-day media programs. Their job is not to influence the work of editorial staff and junior journalists. 
• Media Manager – They are responsible for the formulation and implementation of policies for employees. They keep a check on what their media covers, how they have to do it, and what resources are required for everyday media coverage.
• Editors – There are different editorial teams, based on their roles and responsibilities. It includes editor-in-chief, special projects, financial, business, assignment, entertainment, etc. They are the gatekeepers because they are the final decision-makers on what will be published. They also guide journalists on the sources they would like to see in the story. 
• Sub-editors – They are an important part of a media house as they determine the ‘End product.’ Their role is to edit stories of structure, measure lengths of stories, check factual details, etc. They are responsible for writing news headlines and captions for photographs. These people have to work under strict deadlines. Because of this, their decision can be detrimental to the published stories.
• Reporter/ Journalist – They are the news hunters and gatherers. They make decisions on which stories to cover. It is critical to identify which journalists cover your type of issues and develop a relationship with them. 

Related Articles

Ans: Media plays an important role in shaping our perceptions, influencing public opinion, and connecting individuals across the globe. Media includes different platforms such as television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. 

Ans: There are three types of media: New media, Community media, and mass media.

Ans: Several people perform different roles in a media house, including reporters or journalists, sub-editors, editors, media managers, and the board of directors.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

How Social Media is Reshaping Today’s Education System

by Lori Wade

There’s no denying that, ever since social networks and social media made way into our lives, everything is different. Beginning with the way we socialize, interact, plan for parties or even how often we go out. We won’t go into a debate regarding the ethical aspects of the way Social Media is influencing our lives. Instead, this article proposes to focus on the numerous ways in which social media is changing the way the education system works. So, stay tuned to find out what effects does social networking have on the way our children are educated both at school and outside of it.

Empowering Effects Starting from elementary school up until university graduation, social media has the role to empower parents, students and teachers to use new ways of sharing information and build a community. Statistics show that 96% of the students that have internet access are using at least one social network . What’s even more extraordinary is that, even though some of the students use the social networks for entertaining and other purposes, there are a lot of them that actually use it to promote a lot of positive and useful activities. From finding a summer internship, promoting a success story about how to win the student-loan battle or collaborate on international projects, everything is made possible.

Implementation in Schools? When it comes to social media, schools tend to adopt different positions. It’s a general consensus that they’re useful when it comes to sharing information or organizing the school tasks. And at the same time, the social networking is blamed for the lack of attention in students during classes.

But an increasing trend of adopting social media in school is starting to show. And since students already devote a lot of time for social media and connecting with others outside school hours, why not do it during school as well?

It’s a matter of practicability, really, because it makes perfect sense to use the online universe to communicate with your students since they’re already there most of the time. There’s no need for another case study about the usage of social media in schools. You simply need to walk through the hallways of any school or colleague to see kids of all ages totally immersed in their smartphones. Browsing their news feed, sharing photos on Instagram of sending Snapchat messages has become a part of their daily routine.

How Can Teachers Penetrate the Online World? Moodle and Blackboard are just two examples of learning management system that involves online learning for more than 10 years now. Slowly but steady, such systems will lead to the actual implementation of social media within classrooms. And the best tool available for teachers is social media itself. Only by being open-minded and using the technology themselves will they be able to really reach out to students.

“ The best teachers I’ve ever had have used technology to enhance the learning process, including Facebook pages and events for upcoming projects” – Katie Benmar, Freshman

  As the above statement emphasizes, students also react very positively when a teacher is willing to use their methods and adapt them as part of the educational process. And it makes perfect sense since a homework has a certain strictness about it, but an online chat discussing a certain book gives students the ability to open up and share their opinions.

Daring Teachers Of course, the examples of teachers already implementing social media in classes are far numerous that we can know of, however, there are a few that did such a great job that their students almost made them viral. For example, a biology teacher from Bergen County proposed a challenge to his students. They had to debate over the subject of meiosis on Twitter by using a specific hashtag. This is a great opportunity for students to have fun and learn at the same time. As you need to know your meiosis in order to compress it into 140 characters.

“ We live in a digital ecosystem, and it is vital that educational institutions adapt ”

Carla Dawson – Digital Marketing Professor at the Catholic University of Cordoba

Professor Dawson really has a valid point there as history showed us all that, no matter how strong the resistance, technological progress and new trends will eventually become a standard. Of course, this applies to developed countries that already have a well-structured traditional educational system. It’s a totally different situation when it comes to developing countries that are still struggling to find their way.

A Stronger Community Through Social Media The benefits of social media in the education process doesn’t have to stop at the teacher-student relationship. There are a lot of other benefits that can be extracted from the use of social networking at higher levels as well. For example, principals or administrators can find a new way to integrate social media. Like sharing school news via social networks, holding online meeting with the parents or even starting fundraising for different projects.

And social media can quickly become the only channel of communication since we’re living fast-paced lives, parents are usually busy with work and cannot attend school meetings. But this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in touch with events or be able to check on their kids every once in awhile. Just like in every other field, communication is vital and if it can be done easily with the help of social media, why not go for it?

It may not be criteria just yet, but soon enough questions like ‘Does this school have a Facebook page?’ could become just as important as the things that parents are asking right now. Like, how well equipped the library is or what are the optional classes their child can be part of.

Conclusions The bottom line is that social media is a big part of our day to day life and there’s no point of keeping it away from the education process. School, college and university staff should be encouraged to make use of technology for student and parent communication. This could easily turn into an argumentative essay topic for college . But the benefits are obvious, starting with healthier parent-teacher relationships and all the way to permanently changing the way our children will learn.

• EssayBasics.com
• Pay For Essay
• Write My Essay
• Homework Writing Help
• Essay Editing Service
• Thesis Writing Help
• Write My College Essay
• Do My Essay
• Term Paper Writing Service
• Coursework Writing Service
• Write My Research Paper
• Assignment Writing Help
• Essay Writing Help
• Call Now! (USA) Login Order now
• EssayBasics.com Call Now! (USA) Order now
• Writing Guides

The Role Of Mass Media In Education (Essay Sample)

The role of mass media in education.

The study of societies would not be complete without realizing the significant contributions that the mass media have over the people that comprise these societies. If anything, the mass media is often regarded as an important contributor to social and political life for the very reason that it is capable of relaying information regardless of geographical positions and other factors. With its capacity to secure an unbridled culture of information sharing, the mass media is no doubt indispensable in terms of communicating values and other cultural concepts across generations.

It is then important to note that the mass media occupies an essential position in education since both involve the delivery of information and influencing decisions and opinions on various issues. It is still important, however, that the mass media and education operate on different levels.

Firstly, when one discusses the mass media, one would often focus on the technological tropes that essentially define it. We can then define the mass media as an aggregation of technological forces that make possible the transference of information. Hence, it is not enough to define the mass media as merely “news” or the entertainment industry. Instead, we should look only at the channels that comprise the whole.

Education, on the other hand, is one aspect of society that is as indispensable as material resources. Education after all is the transference of competencies, skills and talents to succeeding generations, thereby maintaining the transfer of essential knowledge which plays a significant role in societal progress. Progress is never possible if it were not for education.

The defining features of both the mass media and education is boiled down to the fact that both facilitate the exchange of ideas from past to the future, with the present being the conduit.

In this respect, we can begin to see the important relationship that education and the mass media both share. And considering the rate at which technology develops, we will also observe how dramatically the systems of education can evolve. Mass media in fact is not directly involved in shaping public consciousness; but it is largely involved in framing discourse and in providing the pathways which these discourses can take. The development of media tools has considerably impacted classroom instruction as educators are provided a plethora of materials which they can access through multiple channels.

In this sense, we could hardly ignore the fact that media technologies have impacted education to such an extent that governments have decided to adapt to these important technological changes in order not to be left out. Developing countries in Asia as well as South America have also integrated the use of media technology in academic research and have made significant investments that aim for greater technological importance.

It remains to be seen that mass media-integrated education is beneficial across the board. But several factors have pointed out the supposed weaknesses of the mass media within the realm of education.

The first of these weaknesses is validity. There has been a growing consensus that believes the mass media has “everything” we search for and that the answers are at our fingertips. The convenience that mass media promises does not entirely entail higher quality education since not all content from television, radio, newspapers and the so-called new media can be relied upon. Another weakness also takes the form of authority. The mass media which also operates under the influence of market forces only subscribe towards the transferring of the prevailing ideology. Any organization, no matter how dedicated towards the truth, is cast off since it lacks the needed authority in order for it to become credible. We can then say that education through the market-influenced mass media is only beneficial to the prevailing culture and thwarts any attempt to subdue the status quo.

• +91-8859500084
• [email protected]

Role of Social Media In Education

What is Social Media?

A set of websites & applications that enable users for making as well as sharing anything for participating in social networking is called Social Media.

It is not just only limited to posting vacation snaps online. It is an interactive computer-mediated technology for sharing of various ideas, information, career interests, and other forms of expression through apparent communities & worldwide network.

It has gained plausibility as a definitive source of information over several years. It is a platform where organizations can interact with their audiences.

Importance of Social Media for Students

Advantages of social media to students, reasons why social media is useful for students, impact of social media in education, how can social media be used in education, why do students use social media.

It has become an invaluable tool not only for communication & marketing but also in the field of education as well. Generally, students use social media to share & get instant quick information, reviews & solutions to their problems.

Quick Enquiry

Make A Call

Chat With Us

Social media plays a very vital role in every student’s life. With its help, providing & fetching a lot of information, communicating with friends, classmates, teachers & colleagues have become an easy-fit option.

Students & teachers now get connected while making better use of this platform for gaining & providing education, respectively.

However, social media has been criticized a lot because of the effect it has on the way to students gaining & retaining information. It offers plentiful opportunities for interaction as well as learning.

There are several reasons for using internet-based media as a positive tool for children.

1. Educational Benefits of Social Media

Over many years social media has gained superior credibility as a trusted source of information & a platform where organizations can interact with their global audiences. Using social media, teachers can improve technological ability & students’ involvement in studies.

It also provides a good sense of collaboration in the classroom while making better communication skills with students.

2. Easy sharing of Information

Sharing of info, links to other sites has now become super easy for students as they share pieces of information to their friends, classmates, and other connections.

Much of the time they are connected to the internet through mobile phones, laptops, PCs, tablets, etc. for transmitting views, opinions, tips, study materials, school projects & various other kinds of useful reading stuff to each other.

With this, they exchange helpful information about their exams & classes.

3. Social Credibility

Many schools, colleges & universities have begun the facility of interconnecting with a large no. of students through the means of social media networks, for example, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

These channels can be utilized to impart & to communicate school news, educational info, make declarations, and provide students with more valuable data.

This creates involvement between the school and students, which help handle several student-related issues through the group associations.

4. Cost-effective Communication

Social media is an excellent & free medium for the end-user! It can not only be used to communicate. It is also an outstanding device/ technology to promote things such as events, new courses, and various advanced research.

It is thus be used to enhance improvement in learning.

5. Any time Connectivity

There is often someone to reply from the international community as geographical factors do not restrict most of the social networking sites.  ATC (Any time connectivity) has become possible due to the arrival of various social media websites.

You can post your question and wait for few hours to get a solution to your queries.

6. Sharing Information & Knowledge

Social media provides a platform where one can share their knowledge and gain credibility in their chosen field(s) or specialization(s). They can also acquire information and insights from others within an online community.

There are lots of causes of why social media is useful for students that can be explained all at once.

1. Web-based social networks can provide relevant information, for example, examination and bits of knowledge on different themes or analytics and insights on various topics or issues for study purposes.

2. It is vital to be dynamic in different possible social platforms a s an educational institution. This help makes better student training methodologies while shaping the culture of students.

Social media is a new media technology in education that can expand your point of view on different subjects and gives a highlight to the original content. It gives you an opportunity of engaging with specialists to find solutions on topics that you may need assistance. 

Social media has gained plausibility as a definitive source of information. Hence, it is an excellent platform where organizations can interact with their audiences in large no’s.

The main thing about utilizing social media for learning is that you soon realize who the specialists are in various fields and subjects. When you begin following these experts, you find out more and additional help from them. This enables you to deliver incredible results.

Today, many schools in India & education institutions are adapting these developments into their frameworks and depending on group assets and systems to improve the life of students.

The utilization of social media in education helps students, teachers, and parents for getting more valuable information while connecting with learning groups and other educational systems.

Social network sites & websites provide with lots of chances to improve their techniques of learning & teaching to students and schools, respectively. Through these networks, you can join social media modules or plugins that empower sharing and collaboration.

Students can benefit themselves through online tutorial exercises through YouTube. Online courses are also offered by colleges abroad through Skype and a full cluster of assets that are shared through social communities.

All above mentioned points are the benefits of social media education in schools. Going through above advantages, one can understand the importance of social networking sites in the educational field in today’s world.

Also read, Positive & Negative Effect Of Social Media On Education

About the author

Related posts.

Importance Of Girl Child Education In Our Society

Importance of Science Education in Schools

10 Different Types of Learners

Select Class 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th

Day School Boarding School

Get In Touch With Us!

Essay on Television for Students and Children

500+ words essay on television.

Television is one of the most popular devices that are used for entertainment all over the world. It has become quite common nowadays and almost every household has one television set at their place. In the beginning, we see how it was referred to as the ‘idiot box.’ This was mostly so because back in those days, it was all about entertainment. It did not have that many informative channels as it does now.

Moreover, with this invention, the craze attracted many people to spend all their time watching TV. People started considering it harmful as it attracted the kids the most. In other words, kids spent most of their time watching television and not studying. However, as times passed, the channels of television changed. More and more channels were broadcasted with different specialties. Thus, it gave us knowledge too along with entertainment.

Benefits of Watching Television

The invention of television gave us various benefits. It was helpful in providing the common man with a cheap mode of entertainment. As they are very affordable, everyone can now own television and get access to entertainment.

In addition, it keeps us updated on the latest happenings of the world. It is now possible to get news from the other corner of the world. Similarly, television also offers educational programs that enhance our knowledge about science and wildlife and more.

Moreover, television also motivates individuals to develop skills. They also have various programs showing speeches of motivational speakers. This pushes people to do better. You can also say that television widens the exposure we get. It increases our knowledge about several sports, national events and more.

While television comes with a lot of benefits, it also has a negative side. Television is corrupting the mind of the youth and we will further discuss how.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How Television is    Harming the Youth

Additionally, it also makes people addict. People get addicted to their TV’s and avoid social interaction. This impacts their social life as they spend their time in their rooms all alone. This addiction also makes them vulnerable and they take their programs too seriously.

The most dangerous of all is the fake information that circulates on news channels and more. Many media channels are now only promoting the propaganda of the governments and misinforming citizens. This makes causes a lot of division within the otherwise peaceful community of our country.

Thus, it is extremely important to keep the TV watching in check. Parents must limit the time of their children watching TV and encouraging them to indulge in outdoor games. As for the parents, we should not believe everything on the TV to be true. We must be the better judge of the situation and act wisely without any influence.

{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “FAQPage”, “mainEntity”: [{ “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “How does television benefit people?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”: “Television offers people a cheap source of entertainment. It saves them from boredom and helps them get information and knowledge about worldly affairs.” } }, { “@type”: “Question”, “name”: “What is the negative side of television?”, “acceptedAnswer”: { “@type”: “Answer”, “text”:”Television has a negative side to it because it harms people’s health when watched in excess. Moreover, it is the easiest platform to spread fake news and create misunderstandings between communities and destroy the peace and harmony of the country.”} }] }

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics

Education is at the heart of this country’s many divisions..

Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004 .

John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. The latest New York Times /Siena poll of the 2022 midterms showed this pattern holding firm, with Democrats winning 55 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees but only 39 percent of those without.

A more educated Democratic coalition is, naturally, a more affluent one. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution were more Republican than those in the bottom 95 percent. Now, the opposite is true: Among America’s white majority, the rich voted to the left of the middle class and the poor in 2016 and 2020, while the poor voted to the right of the middle class and the rich.

In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.”

There are worse things for a political coalition to be than affluent or educated. Professionals vote and donate at higher rates than blue-collar workers. But college graduates also comprise a minority of the electorate — and an underrepresented minority at that. America’s electoral institutions all give disproportionate influence to parts of the country with low levels of educational attainment. And this is especially true of the Senate . Therefore, if the coalitional trends of the past half-century continue unabated — and Democrats keep gaining college-educated votes at the expense of working-class ones — the party will find itself locked out of federal power. Put differently, such a development would put an increasingly authoritarian GOP on the glide path to political dominance.

And unless education polarization is substantially reversed , progressives are likely to continue seeing their reform ambitions pared back sharply by Congress’s upper chamber, even when Democrats manage to control it.

These realities have generated a lively intra-Democratic debate over the causes and implications of class dealignment. To some pundits , consultants, and data journalists , the phenomenon’s fundamental cause is the cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class. In their telling, college graduates in general — and Democratic college graduates in particular — tend to have different social values, cultural sensibilities, and issue priorities than the median non-college-educated voter. As the New York Times ’s Nate Cohn puts the point, college graduates tend to be more cosmopolitan and culturally liberal, report higher levels of social trust, and are more likely to “attribute racial inequality, crime, and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems” rather than “individualist and parochial explanations.”

What’s more, since blue America’s journalists, politicians, and activists are overwhelmingly college graduates, highly educated liberals exert disproportionate influence over their party’s actions and identity. Therefore, as the Democrats’ well-credentialed wing has swelled, the party’s image and ideological positioning have grown more reflective of the professional class’s distinct tastes — and thus less appealing to the electorate’s working-class majority.

This theory does not sit well with all Democratic journalists, politicians, and activists. Some deny the existence of a diploma divide on cultural values, while others insist on its limited political salience. Many progressives attribute class dealignment to America’s pathological racial politics and/or the Democrats’ failures of economic governance . In this account, the New Deal coalition was unmade by a combination of a backlash to Black Americans’ growing prominence in Democratic politics and the Democratic Party’s failures to prevent its former working-class base from suffering decades of stagnant living standards and declining life expectancy .

An appreciation of these developments is surely indispensable for understanding class dealignment in the United States. But they don’t tell the whole story. Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every western democracy . It is therefore unlikely that our nation’s white-supremacist history can fully explain the development. And though center-left parties throughout the West have shared some common failings, these inadequacies cannot tell us why many working-class voters have not merely dropped out of politics but rather begun voting for parties even more indifferent to their material interests.

In my view, education polarization cannot be understood without a recognition of the values divide between educated professionals and working people in the aggregate. That divide is rooted in each class’s disparate ways of life, economic imperatives, socialization experiences, and levels of material security. By itself, the emergence of this gap might not have been sufficient to trigger class dealignment, but its adverse political implications have been greatly exacerbated by the past half-century of inequitable growth, civic decline, and media fragmentation.

The college-educated population has distinct ideological tendencies and psychological sensibilities.

Educated professionals tend to be more socially liberal than the general public. In fact, the correlation between high levels of educational attainment and social liberalism is among the most robust in political science. As early as the 1950s, researchers documented the tendency of college graduates to espouse more progressive views than the general public on civil liberties and gender roles. In the decades since, as the political scientist Elizabeth Simon writes , this correlation has held up with “remarkable geographical and temporal consistency.” Across national boundaries and generations, voters with college degrees have been more likely than those without to support legal abortion, LGBTQ+ causes, the rights of racial minorities, and expansive immigration. They are also more likely to hold “post-material” policy priorities — which is to say, to prioritize issues concerning individual autonomy, cultural values, and big-picture social goals above those concerning one’s immediate material and physical security. This penchant is perhaps best illustrated by the highly educated’s distinctively strong support for environmental causes, even in cases when ecological preservation comes at a cost to economic growth.

Underlying these disparate policy preferences are distinct psychological profiles. The college educated are more likely to espouse moral values and attitudes associated with the personality trait “ openness to experience .” High “openness” individuals are attracted to novelty, skeptical of traditional authority, and prize personal freedom and cultural diversity. “Closed” individuals, by contrast, have an aversion to the unfamiliar and are therefore attracted to moral principles that promote certainty, order, and security. Virtually all human beings fall somewhere between these two ideal types. But the college educated as a whole are closer to the “open” end of the continuum than the general public is.

All of these distinctions between more- and less-educated voters are probabilistic, not absolute. There are Catholic theocrats with Harvard Ph.D.’s and anarchists who dropped out of high school. A nation the size of the U.S. is surely home to many millions of working-class social liberals and well-educated reactionaries. Political attitudes do not proceed automatically from any demographic characteristic, class position, or psychological trait. At the individual level, ideology is shaped by myriad historical inheritances and social experiences.

And yet, if people can come by socially liberal, “high openness” politics from any walk of life, they are much more likely to do so if that walk cuts across a college campus. (And, of course, they are even more likely to harbor this distinct psychological and ideological profile if they graduate from college and then choose to become professionally involved in Democratic politics.)

The path to the professional class veers left.

There are a few theoretical explanations for this. One holds that spending your late adolescence on a college campus tends to socialize you into cultural liberalism: Through some combination of increased exposure to people from a variety of geographic backgrounds, or the iconoclastic ethos of a liberal-arts education, or the predominantly left-of-center university faculty , or the substantive content of curricula, people tend to leave college with a more cosmopolitan and “open” worldview than they had upon entering.

Proving this theory is difficult since doing so requires controlling for selection effects. Who goes to college is not determined by random chance. The subset of young people who have the interests, aptitudes, and opportunities necessary for pursuing higher education have distinct characteristics long before they show up on campus. Some social scientists contend that such “selection effects” entirely explain the distinct political tendencies of college graduates. After all, the “high openness” personality trait is associated with higher IQs and more interest in academics. So perhaps attending college doesn’t lead people to develop culturally liberal sensibilities so much as developing culturally liberal sensibilities leads people to go to college.

Some research has tried to account for this possibility. Political scientists in the United Kingdom have managed to control for the preadult views and backgrounds of college graduates by exploiting surveys that tracked the same respondents through adolescence and into adulthood. Two recent analyses of such data have found that the college experience does seem to directly increase a person’s likelihood of becoming more socially liberal in their 20s than they were in their teens.

A separate study from the U.S. sought to control for the effects of familial background and childhood experiences by examining the disparate “sociopolitical” attitudes of sibling pairs in which one went to college while the other did not. It found that attending college was associated with greater “support for civil liberties and egalitarian gender-role beliefs.”

Other recent research , however, suggests that even these study designs may fail to control for all of the background factors that bias college attendees toward liberal views before they arrive on campus. So we have some good evidence that attending college directly makes people more culturally liberal, but that evidence is not entirely conclusive.

Yet if one posits that higher education does not produce social liberals but merely attracts them, a big theoretical problem remains: Why has the population of social liberals increased in tandem with that of college graduates?

The proportion of millennials who endorse left-wing views on issues of race, gender, immigration , and the environment is higher than the proportion of boomers who do so. And such views are more prevalent within the baby-boom generation than they were among the Silent Generation. This cannot be explained merely as a consequence of America’s burgeoning racial diversity, since similar generational patterns have been observed in European nations with lower rates of ethnic change. But the trend is consistent with another component of demographic drift: Each successive generation has had a higher proportion of college graduates than its predecessor. Between 1950 and 2019, the percentage of U.S. adults with bachelor’s degrees increased from 4 percent to 33 percent.  

Perhaps rising college attendance did not directly cause the “high-openness,” post-material, culturally progressive proportion of the population to swell. But then, what did?

One possibility is that, even if mass college attendance does not directly promote the development of “high openness” values, the mass white-collar economy does. If socially liberal values are well suited to the demands and lifeways inherent to professional employment in a globally integrated economy, then, as such employment expands, we would expect a larger share of the population to adopt socially liberal values. And there is indeed reason to think the professional vocation lends itself to social liberalism.

Entering the professional class often requires not only a four-year degree, but also, a stint in graduate school or a protracted period of overwork and undercompensation at the lowest ranks of one’s field. This gives the class’s aspirants a greater incentive to postpone procreation until later in life than the median worker. That in turn may give them a heightened incentive to favor abortion rights and liberal sexual mores.

The demands of the professional career may influence value formation in other ways. As a team of political scientists from Harvard and the University of Bonn argued in a 2020 paper , underlying the ideological divide between social liberals and conservatives may be a divergence in degrees of “moral universalism,” i.e., “the extent to which people’s altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases.” Conservatives tend to feel stronger obligations than liberals to their own kin and neighbors and their religious, ethnic, and racial groups. Liberals, by contrast, tend to spread their altruism and trust thinner across a wider sphere of humanity; they are less compelled by the particularist obligations of inherited group loyalties and more apt to espouse a universalist ethos in which all individuals are of equal moral concern, irrespective of their group attachments.

Given that pursuing a professional career often requires leaving one’s native community and entering meritocratic institutions that are ideologically and legally committed to the principle that group identities matter less than individual aptitudes, the professional vocation may favor the development of a morally universalistic outlook — and thus more progressive views on questions of anti-discrimination and weaker identification with inherited group identities.

Further, in a globalized era, white-collar workers will often need to work with colleagues on other continents and contemplate social and economic developments in far-flung places. This may encourage both existing and aspiring professionals to develop more cosmopolitan outlooks.

Critically, parents who are themselves professionals — or who aspire for their children to secure a place in the educated, white-collar labor force — may seek to inculcate these values in their kids from a young age. For example, my own parents sent me to a magnet elementary school where students were taught Japanese starting in kindergarten. This curriculum was designed to appeal to parents concerned with their children’s capacity to thrive in the increasingly interconnected (and, in the early 1990s American imagination, increasingly Japanese-dominated) economy of tomorrow.

In this way, the expansion of the white-collar sector may increase the prevalence of “high-openness” cosmopolitan traits and values among rising generations long before they arrive on campus.

More material security, more social liberalism.

Ronald Inglehart’s theory of “ cultural evolution ” provides a third, complementary explanation for both the growing prevalence of social liberalism over the past half-century and for that ideology’s disproportionate popularity among the college educated.

In Inglehart’s account, people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not: If childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally progressive values and post-material policy priorities.

Inglehart first formulated this theory in 1971 to explain the emerging cultural gap between the baby boomers and their parents. He noted that among western generations born before World War II, very large percentages had known hunger at some point in their formative years. The Silent Generation, for its part, had come of age in an era of economic depression and world wars. Inglehart argued that such pervasive material and physical insecurity was unfavorable soil for social liberalism: Under conditions of scarcity, human beings have a strong inclination to defer to established authority and tradition, to distrust out-groups, and to prize order and material security above self-expression and individual autonomy.

But westerners born into the postwar boom encountered a very different world from the Depression-wracked, war-torn one of their parents, let alone the cruel and unforgiving one encountered by common agriculturalists since time immemorial. Their world was one of rapid and widespread income growth. And these unprecedentedly prosperous conditions engendered a shift in the postwar generation’s values: When the boomers reached maturity, an exceptionally large share of the cohort evinced post-material priorities and espoused tolerance for out-groups, support for gender equality, concern for the environment, and antipathy for social hierarchies.

Since this transformation in values wasn’t rooted merely in the passage of time — but rather in the experience of abundance — it did not impact all social classes equally. Educated professionals are disproportionately likely to have had stable, middle-class childhoods. Thus, across the West, the post-material minority was disproportionately composed of college graduates in general and elite ones in particular. As Inglehart reported in 1981 , “among those less than 35 years old with jobs that lead to top management and top civil-service posts, Post-Materialists outnumber Materialists decisively: their numerical preponderance here is even greater than it is among students.”  

As with most big-picture models of political development, Inglehart’s theory is reductive and vulnerable to myriad objections. But his core premise — that, all else being equal, material abundance favors social liberalism while scarcity favors the opposite — has much to recommend it. As the World Values Survey has demonstrated, a nation’s degree of social liberalism (a.k.a. “self-expression values”) tightly correlates with its per-capita income. Meanwhile, as nations become wealthier, each successive generation tends to become more socially liberal than the previous one.

Critically, the World Values Survey data does not show an ineluctable movement toward ever-greater levels of social liberalism. Rather, when nations backslide economically, their populations’ progressivism declines. In the West, recessions have tended to reduce the prevalence of post-material values and increase support for xenophobic parties. But the relationship between material security and cultural liberalism is demonstrated most starkly by the experience of ex-communist states, many of which suffered a devastating collapse in living standards following the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, popular support for culturally progressive values plummeted around 1990 and has remained depressed ever since.

Inglehart’s theory offers real insights. As an account of education polarization, however, it presents a bit of a puzzle: If material security is the key driver of social liberalism, why have culture wars bifurcated electorates along lines of education instead of income? Put differently: Despite the material security provided by a high salary, when one controls for educational attainment, having a high income remains strongly associated with voting for conservatives.

One way to resolve this tension is to stipulate that the first two theories of education polarization we examined are also right: While material security is conducive to social liberalism, the college experience and demands of professional-class vocations are perhaps even more so. Thus, high-income voters who did not go to college will tend to be less socially liberal than those who did.

Separately, earning a high income is strongly associated with holding conservative views on fiscal policy. Therefore, even if the experience of material security biases high-income voters toward left-of-center views on cultural issues, their interest in low taxes may nevertheless compel them to vote for right-wing parties.

Voters with high levels of education but low incomes, meanwhile, are very often children of the middle class who made dumb career choices like, say, going into journalism. Such voters’ class backgrounds would theoretically bias them toward a socially liberal orientation, while their meager earnings would give them little reason to value conservative fiscal policy. Perhaps for this reason, “ high-education low-income voters ” are among the most reliably left-wing throughout the western world.

In any case, whatever qualifications and revisions we would wish to make to Inglehart’s theory, one can’t deny its prescience. In 1971, Inglehart forecast that intergenerational value change would redraw the lines of political conflict throughout the West. In his telling, the emergence of a novel value orientation that was disproportionately popular with influential elites would naturally shift the terrain of political conflict. And it would do so in a manner that undermined materialist, class-based voting: If conventional debates over income distribution pulled at the affluent right and the working-class left, the emerging cultural disputes pulled each in the opposite direction.

This proved to be, in the words of Gabriel Almond, “one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”

When the culture wars moved to the center of politics, the college educated moved left.

Whether we attribute the social liberalism of college graduates to their experiences on campus, their class’s incentive structures, their relative material security, or a combination of all three, a common set of predictions about western political development follows.

First, we would expect to see the political salience of cultural conflicts start to increase in the 1960s and ’70s as educated professionals became a mass force in western politics. Second, relatedly, we would expect that the historic correlation between having a college degree and voting for the right would start gradually eroding around the same time, owing to the heightened prominence of social issues.

Finally, we would expect education polarization to be most pronounced in countries where (1) economic development is most advanced (and thus the professional sector is most expansive) and (2) left-wing and right-wing parties are most sharply divided on cultural questions.

In their paper “Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty confirm all of these expectations.

The paper analyzes nearly every manifesto (a.k.a. “platform”) put forward by left-wing and right-wing parties in the past 300 elections. As anticipated by Inglehart, the researchers found that right-wing and left-wing parties began to develop distinct positions on “sociocultural” issues in the 1970s and that these distinctions grew steadily more profound over the ensuing 50 years. Thus, the salience of cultural issues did indeed increase just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.

As cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing. Controlling for other variables, in the mid-20th century, having a college diploma made one more likely to vote for parties of the right. By 2020, in virtually all of the western democracies, this relationship had inverted.

Some popular narratives attribute this realignment to discrete historical events, such as the Cold War’s end, China’s entry into the WTO, or the 2008 crash. But the data show no sudden reversal in education’s political significance. Instead, the authors write, the West saw “a very progressive, continuous reversal of educational divides, which unfolded decades before any of these events took place and has carried on uninterruptedly until today.” This finding is consistent with the notion that class dealignment is driven by gradual changes in western societies’ demographic and economic characteristics, such as the steady expansion of the professional class.

The paper provides further support for the notion that education polarization is a by-product of economic development: The three democracies where college-educated voters have not moved sharply to the left in recent decades — Ireland, Portugal, and Spain — are all relative latecomers to industrialization.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the authors established a strong correlation between “sociocultural polarization” — the degree to which right-wing and left-wing parties emphasize sharply divergent cultural positions — and education polarization. In other words: Countries where parties are highly polarized on social issues tend to have electorates that are highly polarized along educational lines.

It seems reasonable then to conclude (1) that there really is a cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class in the aggregate and (2) that this gap has been a key driver of class dealignment. Indeed, if we accept the reality of the diploma divide, then an increase of education-based voting over the past 50 years would seem almost inevitable: If you have two social groups with distinct cultural values and one group goes from being 4 percent of the electorate to 35 percent of it, debates about those values will probably become more politically prominent.

And of course, mass higher education wasn’t the only force increasing the salience of social conflict in the West over the past half-century. If economic development increased the popularity of “post-material” values, it also made it easier for marginalized groups to contest traditional hierarchies. As job opportunities for women expanded, they became less dependent on the patriarchal family for material security and thus were more liable to challenge it. As racial minorities secured a foothold in the middle class, they had more resources with which to fight discrimination.

And yet, if an increase in sociocultural polarization — and thus in education polarization — is a foregone conclusion, the magnitude of these shifts can’t be attributed to the existence of cultural divides alone.

Rather, transformations in the economic, civic, and media landscapes of western society since the 1970s have increased the salience and severity of the diploma divide.

When the postwar bargain collapsed, the center-left failed to secure workers a new deal.

To polarize an electorate around cultural conflicts rooted in education, you don’t just need to increase the salience of social issues. You also need to reduce the salience of material disputes rooted in class. Alas, the economic developments of the past 50 years managed to do both.

The class-based alignment that defined western politics in the mid-20th century emerged from a particular set of economic conditions. In the early stages of industrialization, various factors had heightened the class consciousness of wage laborers. Such workers frequently lived in densely settled, class-segregated neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of large labor-intensive plants. This close proximity cultivated solidarity, as divisions between the laborer’s working and social worlds were few. And the vast scale of industrial enterprises abetted organizing drives, as trade unions could rapidly gain scale by winning over a single shop.

By encouraging their members to view politics through the lens of class and forcing political elites to reckon with workers’ demands, strong trade unions helped to keep questions of income distribution and workers’ rights at the center of political debate and the forefront of voters’ minds. In so doing, they also helped to win western workers in general — and white male ones in particular — unprecedented shares of national income.

But this bargain between business and labor had always been contingent on robust growth. In the postwar era of rising productivity, it was possible for profits and wages to increase in tandem. But in the 1970s, western economies came under stress. Rising energy costs and global competition thinned profit margins, rendering business owners more hostile to labor’s demands both within the shop and in politics. Stagflation — the simultaneous appearance of high unemployment and high inflation — gave an opening to right-wing critics of the postwar order, who argued that the welfare state and pro-labor macroeconomic policies had sapped productivity.

Meanwhile, various long-term economic trends began undermining industrial unionism. Automation inevitably reduced the labor intensity of factories in the West. The advent of the shipping container eased the logistical burdens of globalizing production, while the industrialization of low-wage developing countries increased the incentives for doing so. Separately, as western consumers grew more affluent, they began spending less of their income on durable goods and more on services like health care (one needs only so many toasters, but the human desire for greater longevity and physical well-being is nigh-insatiable). These developments reduced both the economic leverage and the political weight of industrial workers. And since western service sectors had lower rates of unionization, deindustrialization weakened organized labor.

All this presented center-left parties with a difficult challenge. In the face of deindustrialization, an increasingly anti-labor corporate sector, an increasingly conservative economic discourse, an embattled union movement, and a globalizing economy, such parties needed to formulate new models for achieving shared prosperity. And they had to do so while managing rising cultural tensions within their coalitions.

They largely failed.

Countering the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality would have required radical reforms. Absent policies promoting the unionization of the service sector, deindustrialization inevitably weakened labor. Absent drastic changes in the allocation of posttax income, automation and globalization redistributed economic gains away from “low skill” workers and toward the most productive — or well-situated — professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The United States had more power than any western nation to standardize such reforms and establish a relatively egalitarian postindustrial model. Yet the Democratic Party could muster neither the political will nor the imagination to do so. Instead, under Jimmy Carter, it acquiesced to various policies that reinforced the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality, while outsourcing key questions of economic management to financial markets and the Federal Reserve. The Reagan administration took this inegalitarian and depoliticized model of economic governance to new extremes. And to highly varying degrees, its inequitable and market-fundamentalist creed influenced the policies of future U.S. administrations and other western governments.

As a result, the past five decades witnessed a great divergence in the economic fortunes of workers with and without college diplomas, while the western working class (a.k.a. the “lower middle class”) became the primary “losers” of globalization .

The center-left parties’ failures to avert a decline in the economic security and status of ordinary workers discredited them with much of their traditional base. And their failure to reinvigorate organized labor undermined the primary institutions that politicize workers into a progressive worldview. These shortcomings, combined with the market’s increasingly dominant role in economic management, reduced the political salience of left-right divides on economic policy. This in turn gave socially conservative working-class voters fewer reasons to vote for center-left parties and gave affluent social liberals fewer reasons to oppose them. In western nations where organized labor remains relatively strong (such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland), education polarization has been relatively mild, while in those countries where it is exceptionally weak (such as the United States), the phenomenon has been especially pronounced.

Finally, the divergent economic fortunes of workers and professionals might have abetted education polarization in one other way: Given that experiencing abundance encourages social liberalism — while experiencing scarcity discourages it — the past half-century of inequitable growth might have deepened cultural divisions between workers with degrees and those without.

The professionalization of civil society estranged the left from its working-class base.

While the evolution of western economies increased the class distance between college graduates and other workers, the evolution of western civil societies increased the social distance between each group.

Back in the mid-20th century, the college educated still constituted a tiny minority of western populations, while mass-membership institutions — from trade unions to fraternal organizations to political parties — still dominated civic life. In that context, an educated professional who wished to exercise political influence often needed to join a local chapter of a cross-class civic association or political party and win election to a leadership position within that organization by securing the confidence of its membership.

That changed once educated professionals became a mass constituency in their own right. As the college-educated population ballooned and concentrated itself within urban centers, it became easier for interest groups to swing elections and pressure lawmakers without securing working-class support. At the same time, the proliferation of “knowledge workers” set off an arms race between interest and advocacy groups looking to influence national legislation and election outcomes. Job opportunities for civic-minded professionals in think tanks, nonprofits, and foundations proliferated. And thanks to growing pools of philanthropic money and the advent of direct-mail fundraising, these organizations could sustain themselves without recruiting an active mass membership.

Thus, the professional’s path to political influence dramatically changed. Instead of working one’s way up through close-knit local groups — and bending them toward one’s political goals through persuasion — professionals could join (or donate to) nationally oriented advocacy groups already aligned with their preferences, which could then advance their policy aims by providing legislators with expert guidance and influencing public opinion through media debates.

As the political scientist Theda Skocpol demonstrates in her book Diminished Democracy , college graduates began defecting from mass-membership civic organizations in the 1970s, in an exodus that helped precipitate their broader decline.

Combined with the descent of organized labor, the collapse of mass participation in civic groups and political parties untethered the broad left from working-class constituencies. As foundation-funded NGOs displaced trade unions in the progressive firmament, left-wing parties became less directly accountable to their less-educated supporters. This made such parties more liable to embrace the preferences and priorities of educated professionals over those of the median working-class voter.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a thriving civic culture, voters became increasingly reliant on the mass media for their political information.

Today’s media landscape is fertile terrain for right-wing populism.

The dominant media technology of the mid-20th century — broadcast television — favored oligopoly. Given the exorbitant costs of mounting a national television network in that era, the medium was dominated by a small number of networks, each with an incentive to appeal to a broad audience. This discouraged news networks from cultivating cultural controversy while empowering them to establish a broadly shared information environment.

Cable and the internet have molded a radically different media landscape. Today, news outlets compete in a hypersaturated attentional market that encourages both audience specialization and sensationalism. In a world where consumers have abundant infotainment options, voters who read at a graduate-school level and those who read at an eighth-grade level are unlikely to favor the same content. And the same is true of voters with liberal and conservative sensibilities — especially since the collapse of a common media ecosystem leads ideologues to occupy disparate factual universes. The extraordinary nature of today’s media ecology is well illustrated by this chart from Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public :

This information explosion abets education polarization for straightforward reasons: Since the college educated and non-college educated have distinct tastes in media, in a highly competitive attentional market, they will patronize different outlets and accept divergent facts.

Further, in the specific economic and social context we’ve been examining, the modern media environment is fertile terrain for reactionary entrepreneurs who wish to cultivate grievance against the professional elite. After all, as we’ve seen, that elite (1) subscribes to some values that most working-class people reject, (2) commandeers a wildly disproportionate share of national income and economic status, and (3) dominates the leadership of major political parties and civic groups to an unprecedented degree.

The political efficacy of such right-wing “populist” programming has been repeatedly demonstrated. Studies have found that exposure to Fox News increases Republican vote share and that the expansion of broadband internet into rural areas leads to higher levels of partisan hostility and lower levels of ticket splitting (i.e., more ideologically consistent voting) as culturally conservative voters gain access to more ideologically oriented national news reporting, commentary, and forums.

What is to be done?

The idea that education polarization arises from deep structural tendencies in western society may inspire a sense of powerlessness. And the notion that it emerges in part from a cultural divide between professionals and working people may invite ideological discomfort, at least among well-educated liberals.

But the fact that some center-left parties have managed to retain more working-class support than others suggests that the Democrats have the capacity to broaden (or narrow) their coalition. Separately, the fact that college-educated liberals have distinct social values does not require us to forfeit them.

The commentators most keen to acknowledge the class dimensions of the culture wars typically aim to discredit the left by doing so. Right-wing polemicists often suggest that progressives’ supposedly compassionate social preferences are mere alibis for advancing the professional class’s material interests. But such arguments are almost invariably weak. Progressive social views may be consonant with professional-class interests, but they typically represent attempts to universalize widely held ideals of freedom and equality. The college educated’s cosmopolitan inclinations are also adaptive for a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected and interdependent and in which population asymmetries between the rich and developing worlds create opportunities for mutual gain through migration , if only xenophobia can be overcome. And of course, in an era of climate change, the professional class’s strong concern for the environment is more than justified.

Nevertheless, professional-class progressives must recognize that our social values are not entirely unrelated to our class position. They are not an automatic by-product of affluence and erudition, nor the exclusive property of the privileged. But humans living in rich, industrialized nations are considerably more likely to harbor these values than those in poor, agrarian ones. And Americans who had the privilege of spending their late adolescence at institutions of higher learning are more likely to embrace social liberalism than those who did not.

The practical implications of this insight are debatable. It is plausible that Democrats may be able to gain working-class vote share by moderating on some social issues. But the precise electoral payoff of any single concession to popular opinion is deeply uncertain. Voters’ conceptions of each party’s ideological positioning are often informed less by policy details than by partisan stereotypes. And the substantive costs of moderation — both for the welfare of vulnerable constituencies and the long-term health of the progressive project — can be profound. At various points in the past half-century, it might have been tactically wise for Democrats to distance themselves from the demands of organized labor. But strategically, sacrificing the health of a key partisan institution to the exigencies of a single election cycle is deeply unwise. Meanwhile, in the U.S. context, the “mainstream” right has staked out some cultural positions that are profoundly unpopular with all social classes . In 2022, it is very much in the Democratic Party’s interest to increase the political salience of abortion rights.

In any case, exactly how Democrats should balance the necessity of keeping the GOP out of power with the imperative to advocate for progressive issue positions is something on which earnest liberals can disagree.

The case for progressives to be more cognizant of the diploma divide when formulating our messaging and policy priorities, however, seems clearer.

Education polarization can be self-reinforcing. As left-wing civic life has drifted away from mass-membership institutions and toward the ideologically self-selecting circles of academia, nonprofits, and the media, the left’s sensitivity to the imperatives of majoritarian politics has dulled. In some respects, the incentives for gaining status and esteem within left-wing subcultures are diametrically opposed to the requirements of coalition building. In the realm of social media, it can be advantageous to make one’s policy ideas sound more radical and/or threatening to popular values than they actually are. Thus, proposals for drastically reforming flawed yet popular institutions are marketed as plans for their “abolition,” while some advocates for reproductive rights insist that they are not merely “pro-choice” but “ pro-abortion ” (as though their objective were not to maximize bodily autonomy but rather the incidence of abortion itself, a cause that would seemingly require limiting access to contraception).

Meanwhile, the rhetoric necessary for cogently theorizing social problems within academia — and that fit for effectively selling policy reforms to a mass audience — is quite different. Political-science research indicates that theoretical abstractions tend to leave most voters cold. Even an abstraction as accessible as “inequality” resonates less with ordinary people than simply saying that the rich have too much money . Yet Democratic politicians have nevertheless taken to peppering their speeches with abstract academic terms such as structural racism .

Relatedly, in the world of nonprofits, policy wonks are often encouraged to foreground the racial implications of race-neutral redistributive policies that disproportionately benefit nonwhite constituencies. Although it is important for policy design to account for any latent racial biases in universal programs, there is reason to believe that, in a democracy with a 70 percent white electorate and widespread racial resentment, it is unwise for Democratic politicians to suggest that broadly beneficial programs primarily aid minority groups.

On the level of priority setting, it seems important for college-educated liberals to be conscious of the fact that “post-material” concerns resonate more with us than with the general public. This is especially relevant for climate strategy. Poll results and election outcomes both indicate that working-class voters are far more sensitive to the threat of rising energy prices than to that of climate change. Given that reality, the most politically viable approach to reducing emissions is likely to expedite the development and deployment of clean-energy technologies rather than deterring energy consumption through higher prices. In practice, this means prioritizing the build-out of green infrastructure over the obstruction of fossil-fuel extraction.

Of course, narrowing the social distance between college-educated liberals and working people would be even better than merely finessing it. The burgeoning unionization of white-collar professions and the growing prominence of downwardly mobile college graduates in working-class labor struggles are both encouraging developments on this front. Whatever Democrats can do to facilitate labor organizing and increase access to higher education will simultaneously advance social justice and improve the party’s long-term electoral prospects.

Finally, the correlation between material security and social liberalism underscores the urgency of progressive economic reform. Shared prosperity can be restored only by increasing the social wage of ordinary workers through some combination of unionization, sectoral bargaining, wage subsidies, and social-welfare expansion. To some extent, this represents a chicken-and-egg problem: Radical economic reforms may be a necessary precondition for the emergence of a broad progressive majority, yet a broad progressive majority is itself a precondition for radical reform.

Nevertheless, in wealthy, deep-blue states such as New York and California, Democrats have the majorities necessary for establishing a progressive economic model. At the moment, artificial constraints on the housing supply , clean-energy production, and other forms of development are sapping blue states’ economic potential . If such constraints could be overcome, the resulting economic gains would simultaneously increase working people’s living standards and render state-level social-welfare programs easier to finance. Perhaps the starting point for such a political revolution is for more-affluent social liberals to recognize that their affinity for exclusionary housing policies and aversion to taxation undermines their cultural values.

Our understanding of education polarization remains provisional. And all proposals for addressing it remain open to debate. The laws of political science are more conjectural than those of physics, and even perfect insight into political reality cannot settle disputes rooted in ideology.

But effective political engagement requires unblinkered vision. The Democratic Party’s declining support among working-class voters is a serious problem. If Democrats consider only ideologically convenient explanations for that problem, our intellectual comfort may come at the price of political power.

• political science
• higher education
• the democratic party
• the big picture

Most Viewed Stories

• How Harris Wins
• Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left
• Democrats Should Ditch the J.D. Vance Couch Joke
• So, Trump’s Helicopter Crash Story Is Just a Crazy Lie?
• 5 Reasons Airbnb Is Having a Terrible Summer

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

• How Harris Wins By Jonathan Chait
• Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left By Rebecca Traister
• Democrats Should Ditch the J.D. Vance Couch Joke By Benjamin Hart
• So, Trump’s Helicopter Crash Story Is Just a Crazy Lie? By Margaret Hartmann
• 5 Reasons Airbnb Is Having a Terrible Summer By Kevin T. Dugan

What is your email?

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Lawrence O'Donnell Slams His Papers Over Media Taking This 'Insult' From Trump

Lawrence O’Donnell wasn’t having it with cable news outlets for their coverage of former President Donald Trump ’s rambling, false claim-filled press conference on Thursday.

The MSNBC anchor read a “good question” to Trump from NBC News’ Garrett Haake, who asked the former president if he’d direct the Food and Drug Administration to revoke access to mifepristone.

Trump’s response to the “yes or no” question was “not an answer,” said O’Donnell, who slammed his papers on his desk after reading what the former president told Haake .

“The words Donald Trump spoke to those reporters in response to that clear, simple and important yes or no question were an insult to everyone in that room and they took the insult. Nothing in those words was an answer, nothing,” O’Donnell said.

He later continued, “Donald Trump is not smart enough to answer questions. Anyone who then tells you that Kamala Harris has to answer questions from reporters because Donald Trump already answered questions from reporters is lying to themselves and to you and you must not allow them to do it.”

Lawrence is heated tonight pic.twitter.com/9KL5uvsrFj — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2024

O’Donnell ripped cable news networks for carrying the event live and called it “2016 all over again,” adding that outlets are making the “same mistakes” with their reporting as they did while covering Trump that election cycle.

He also criticized reporters for not asking follow-up questions and knocked networks for fact-checking only after Trump finished speaking.

“But that of course is way too late and utterly useless,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell also knocked networks for not covering Vice President Kamala Harris ’ Michigan speech live after the Trump presser, noting that his network was doing Olympics coverage before bringing viewers the last few minutes of her remarks.

He vowed to “correct that mistake” by presenting MSNBC viewers with full, unedited video of Harris’ speech.

“All of the networks knew [the speech] was coming, they knew what time it was coming, they knew how to cover it live and they didn’t after giving Donald Trump more than an hour of live coverage on all of their networks. It’s 2016 all over again,” he said.

You can check out more from MSNBC’s “The Last Word” here:

From Our Partner

More in politics.

• International
• Education Jobs
• Schools directory
• Resources Education Jobs Schools directory News Search

Dr Who Blink Episode Media Study (critical essay outcome)

Subject: English

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

6 August 2024

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

Unit of work on the Dr Who episode ‘Blink’ (the introduction of the Weeping Angels). Foucsed on analysis of media techniques, with a critical essay outcome.

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

California State University, Sacramento

Based on real user feedback and statistics, csus.edu no longer supports Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

Skip to Main Content

News and Top Stories

Story content, new ai course will teach how to explore the technology’s impact on education and jobs.

By Daniel Wilson

August 09, 2024

A new class at Sacramento State will help high schoolers, University students and others learn how to use generative artificial intelligence in the classroom and job market.

The College and Career with AI course , which launches this fall, will teach students to explore AI's role as an information aggregator, coach and counselor by applying AI in various scenarios and critically evaluating its outputs.

The course is offered through Sacramento State’s National Institute on Artificial Intelligence in Society (NIAIS) via the College of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies. Offering the course was one of President Luke Wood’s original goals for the institute , said Chief AI Officer Sasha Sidorkin , who will teach the new class.

“It's part of the strategy to go directly to students and future students and talk about AI,” Sidorkin said. “The other part is going to faculty and helping them to understand how to work with AI, so it's all part of the same strategy to create an AI-positive culture here.”

The fully online, two-unit course mostly targets area high school students and Sac State students, but it is open to anyone. Non-students may join the course via a free, no-credit Google Group, or earn credits through the College of Continuing Education's  Open University program for a fee.

“I think it’s an exciting concept to experiment with teaching students as we continue trying to identify what skills are going into the use of AI." -- Sasha Sidorkin, chief AI officer for Sacramento State's National Institute on AI in Society

The class will meet 5:30-7:10 p.m. Mondays to accommodate the schedules of high school students, who can enroll for free through the Accelerated College Entrance Program .

The course will help learners embrace the power of AI in real-world situations such as research, problem-solving and creative projects. It requires no textbooks and utilizes a free account through OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Students will be asked to participate in weekly discussion board postings, synchronous class activities and a final AI-assisted project that displays their ability to integrate AI into an academic or professional field.

“I want students to have a hands-on experience. I think that's the most important part,” Sidorkin said. “It's all about exposure, and I don't want them to have a negative connotation associated with using AI.”

Sidorkin called AI an assistive technology that helps students who face barriers to learning, such as neurological disabilities, as well as those who speak English as a second language.

“I really want to remove that bit of bad stigma from it,” Sidorkin said. “AI is a tool, and you have to learn to use it.”

He said the course will help high school students because it teaches them a valuable skill and familiarizes them with higher education.

“As they prepare for college, I think it's a great preparation to come into that college experience,” Sidorkin said.

Sidorkin said he wants the course to eventually evolve into a certificate program or a full degree program, but more knowledge about the technology is needed since it is unclear how AI will be adopted by career industries.

In the meantime, having the course on their resumes can improve students’ marketability when applying for jobs.

“I think it’s an exciting concept to experiment with teaching students as we continue trying to identify what skills are going into the use of AI,” Sidorkin said.

“The important thing that I realized already is that students learn AI differently than people like me who already have all the educational background. It's not just an opportunity to share what we know, but also an opportunity to learn about how students learn about AI.”

Information about the College and Career with AI course and how to enroll is available at sacstate.ai .

Share This Story

Related Topics:

• Student Success
• Research and Innovation

About Daniel Wilson

Daniel Wilson joined the Sac State communications team in 2022 as a writer and editor. He previously worked at the Sacramento Bee as an audience engagement producer and reporter. He graduated from Sac State with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism in 2018. He plays video games, watches pro wrestling, and loves spending time with his wife and cat.

• [email protected]

More AI and Computer Science Stories

Sac State President Wood announces formation of new artificial intelligence institute and its ‘czar’ as University moves to take lead in AI education

Artificial intelligence experts share insights on the technology’s effects on education and society

New grant boosts Sac State training for area K-12 educators to teach computer science

Media resources.

• Media Resource Page
• Administration
• Public Records Requests
• Policy for Recording Film/Sound On Campus

Faculty/Staff Resources

• Briefing Submissions
• University Marketing
• Brand Center
• Editorial Style Guide

Looking for a Faculty Expert?

Contact University Communications (916) 217-8366 [email protected]

Keep up with Sacramento State!

Get the Sac State story right in your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter, The Sacramento State Leader

August 11, 2024 90 °F PBS Passport .st0{fill:#0A145A;} .st1{fill:#5680FF;} .st2{fill:#FFFFFF;} UH Search for: Search MENU CLOSE News & Information Features Hello Houston inDepth Topics Local News Texas Education News Politics Criminal Justice Transportation Energy & Environment Weather Hurricane Tracker All Stories >>> Arts & Culture Arts & Culture Main Classical Music Music Opera & Musical Theater Dance Visual Art Literature Theatre & Film Voices and Verses: A Poem-A-Day Series Awareness Hispanic Heritage Pride Month: Better Together! Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Black History Women’s History Education Programs & Podcasts Local Programs Party Politics Houston Matters with Craig Cohen I SEE U Texas Standard UH 100 Years of Houston Bauer Business Focus Briefcase Engines of Our Ingenuity Health Matters UH Moment Features Dead and Buried Career Frontier Podcasts Below the Waterlines: Houston After Hurricane Harvey Party Politics Skyline Sessions Encore Houston All Podcasts >> Support Membership Update Payment Method Upgrade Your Monthly Gift Give a Gift Membership Giving Programs Affinity Council Studio Society In Tempore Legacy Society Innovation Fund Volunteers Foundation Board Young Leaders Council Mission Ambassadors Donations Vehicle Donation Giving Opportunities Employee Match Program More Ways to Give Partnerships Corporate Sponsorship About About Us Meet the Team Join the Team Contact Us Ethics and Standards Reports & Financials Press Room Listen Watch Donate Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Linkedin Mastodon googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1488818411584-0'); }); Education

The sales tax holiday is this weekend. what items qualify.

Some of the qualifying clothing includes graduation caps and gowns, sandals and slippers, and tennis or walking shoes. Some of the qualifying school supplies include pencils, papers, calculators, and composition books.

Backpacks, school supplies, shoes, and clothing under $100 are tax-free this weekend as students prepare to go back to school.

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Glenn Hegar, has a list of qualifying and non-qualifying clothing and school supplies for the tax-free weekend. Some of the qualifying clothing includes graduation caps and gowns, sandals and slippers, and tennis or walking shoes. Some of the qualifying school supplies include pencils, papers, calculators, and composition books.

The Sales Tax Holiday was originally passed by Texas lawmakers in 1999 and lasts through this Sunday at midnight. State Representative Ron Reynolds said the law helps teachers and parents who were purchasing supplies for their students and classrooms.

"We know that times are tough. We know that people are faced with inflation. Having to stretch limited resources,” he said. “And so, we want parents to take advantage of this. But also being hopeful that in the future, there'll be greater opportunities for more savings."

Reynolds said he has filed a new bill that could potentially increase the price limits for items that qualify for tax relief. He and State Representative Alma Allen both attended a press conference at a Walmart near NRG Stadium on Friday morning.

“$100 was a good deal [in the 90s]. It’s not a good deal anymore. You can’t buy too much with $100 anymore,” Allen said. “Kids don’t even ask you for nickels or dimes anymore.”

If the bill passes, the increase could come as soon as next year. But for now, anything that costs $100, and items like jewelry, technology, textbooks, and many other things still do not currently qualify for tax relief.

Reynolds said more classrooms are requiring technology in the classroom. He said he would like for a future version of this holiday to qualify technology.

“Most students, including my kids, they have an iPad that they use to utilize their learning,” he said. “There’s a digital divide, and we want to make sure all kids have access to the internet.”

The full list of qualifying tax-free school supplies is listed below.

• Blackboard chalk
• Calculators
• Cellophane tape
• Composition books
• Folders – expandable, pocket, plastic, and manila
• Glue, paste and paste sticks
• Highlighters
• Index cards
• Index card boxes
• Lunch boxes
• Markers (including dry-erase markers)
• Paper – loose leaf ruled notebook paper, copy paper, graph paper, tracing paper, manila paper, colored paper, poster board, and construction paper
• Pencil boxes and other school supply boxes
• Pencil sharpeners
• Protractors
• Writing tablets

Resources like these are made possible by the generosity of our community of donors, foundations, and corporate partners. Join others and make your gift to Houston Public Media today! DONATE

Sign up for our daily weekday newsletter - hello, houston sign up now.