Media literacy compels us to look anew at the most mundane, that which surrounds us: the media and our popular culture. From there media literacy compels us to accept that the media are constructed and to seek various ways to analyze them, while considering our own beliefs to evaluate for ourselves an ultimate interpretation. This process has the…

In 2004 the Australia Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) released a report entitled "New teaching, new learning: A vision for Australian education". This report was prepared on behalf of the ACDE by Mary Kalantzis and Andrew Harvey, respectively the President and Executive Officer of the ACDE. The argument put forward in the report is…

Each of the four distinct ideological positions concerning the literacy problem is deficient. "Technological utopianism," the position arguing that traditional literacy standards are obsolete in the world of mass media, not only presents major conceptual and research difficulties but also suffers from the fact that its proponents, most…

This paper suggests teaching strategies for grades 4 through 12 that examine the commercial media and their messages as agenda setters, i.e., as mechanisms for selecting social issues, establishing their importance, and defining socially acceptable attitudes and responses to those issues. The strategies also explore how the media can create biased…

A clear assumption in much of the current theory about cultural studies in composition is that the classroom is an appropriate and necessary site for teaching strategies for social resistance. Students who learn to challenge their culture through reading and writing critically about its artifacts and codes will carry these empowering skills into…

In "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman's nightmare is that the content of education will come to be determined by what can be turned into entertainment. Where does effective pedagogy end and mere entertainment begin? Currently, education is in a period of transition between dominant media, moving away from print and toward…

Since media consumers must make a great many judgments about media messages and the effectiveness of any given message in meeting one's needs, media teachers should develop materials and activities to facilitate the learning of effective media usage skills. Teachers can help students to become more effective media consumers by providing an…

Kenneth Burke's concepts of identification, the five terms of dramatism, and strategic uses of ambiguity can be successfully taught to undergraduates if appropriate and familiar examples are used. Print and electronic advertising offer the instructor an up-to-date, familiar, and abundant source of classroom examples. Market segmentation models…

The erosion of students' ability to use the printed word caused by electronic media has led some communication scholars to predict that a new literacy of communication may be needed for the future. Activities enhancing awareness and analysis of telecommunications and performance in telecommunications can easily be integrated into the speech…

This paper proposes the use of international media events as instructional tools in the basic college communications course. The international media event examined, as one such application, is the spring, 1989 student protests in China. This type of instructional tool offers an excellent means of integrating world events into the curriculum. As…

Developing individuals who can think and read critically when confronted by the language of commercial and political persuaders is an important goal of reading instruction and of education in general. To make students capable of dealing with the omnipresent propaganda of the modern world, teachers themselves must have a functional concept of…

This paper attempts to assess the influence of development communication theory on the planning and implementation of technical assistance projects in the Third World that utilize mass communication as an agent of change. Like political development theory, communication theory has often been applied in an ethnocentric manner in less developed…

Discussion focuses on teachers' beliefs and values as they relate to working with young children. Specific attention is given to (1) whether the reported blurring of the boundaries between child-life and adult-life has affected the education of young children; (2) parental pressure to provide very young children with persistently optimal…