Guest Post: Media Literacy in Secondary Ed. Classrooms

Please meet my former student--a teacher!--and one of the co-authors of Transparent Teaching of Adolescents, AnnMarie Dearman.

Secondary school. . . Technically speaking, it just means that it comes after primary school. But really? Secondary? The connotation of the word is that well, they’re done with us already.  So it’s not that much of a surprise that there is such debate about what is and should be taught in the secondary classroom. The bigger issue, though, is what is NOT being taught in the secondary classroom… media literacy skills.

A concept I’ve recently stumbled upon is the more profound definition of “literacy.” Yes, it encompasses reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and all skills that need to be steadily built upon to improve. However, in Education, what sometimes we forget is that literacy in the real world is changing – so many aspects of our lives are based in technology, and our approach to literacy skills must incorporate this arena. The use of media literacy is an excellent strategy for teachers to use in bringing our content areas up into the 21^st century.

Teaching students how to evaluate and analyze their literacy, which is a combination (a cacophonous barrage of data, really) of music, video, art, and severely condensed consumer information and news bites that they process in nanoseconds--if not simultaneously--is our responsibility. They process this information quickly, but do they process it wisely? How can we better help them navigate their literary world in every content area? 

I know that it’s impossible to please everyone, but I encourage you to consider incorporating media literacy into your classroom in some facet, whether through applicable YouTube videos, tweets, movie trailers, commercials, Facebook posts, and texts. Any classroom, any level, any subject. Not only do I think you can get them more engaged and stimulate some in-depth cognitive thinking skills, instigating synthesis of the content, I think you’ll find that you enjoy your days a little more, too. 

And I think students will learn to make a little more sense of their world.

Love to Hear the Robin…

Recently, I joined the Twitter crowd(@MindyKellerKyri, here), fully prepared to burst forth with elegantly concise, precise, brevity of thought. I began following a few political and educational twits twitterers, and in a matter of moments, an opportunity for me to debut arrived in the form of a debate:

Creativity is a natural ability of all people. Wisdom is not.     

 Discuss. #edchat #education

Challenge accepted! I began to fill in my box. “Don’t forget to include who you’re sending it to,” advised my so helpful, technologically-inclined husband, “and you should include the hash tags, too.”  

So, I diligently erased what I’d written, including these parameters. “Awww, c’mon! These take up like 20 characters!” I whined. 

Nonetheless, I was determined to state my position articulately.  Each time, I ran over the word count. 

What’s the matter with me? I know what I want to say. Why can’t I say it in fewer words? 

Stumped, I stared at my cursor, which was mercilessly winking at me in the white-cold bareness of its blue-lined box. 

This wasn’t so different than my often-offered advice to students (particularly on doctoral dissertations) to make something clearer and more concise. I wonder how many of them would be able to use the confines of a tweet to help them arrive at the significance of what they were trying to say in five sentences that could better be stated in two.

Then I wondered at the possibility of using this “box” thinking for struggling readers who have a really tough time with main idea, especially implied main idea. What if I asked them to “tweet” that main idea? Would that help move them closer to understanding how the brain takes in details and arrives at a connection between them?

In no more than 140 characters, including your teacher’s twitter handle and one relevant hash tag, state the main idea of this article. 

Or perhaps helping students understand the nature of a thesis as a concise overview of their entire paper? 

And, while we may not be able to have students follow us on Twitter, we can still use the thinking behind it to perhaps move them closer to where they need to be. The haiku of their generation? Maybe. 

Whatever it is, let’s grab onto it in the hopes that we reach at least one student that we might otherwise not reach. 

Just in case the title didn’t tweet with you (or even if it did!):