Media literacy education is an emerging field in the US. At the same time, accountability in public schools is soaring. Critical media literacy, with its liberatory pursuits, is very much at odds with repetition and recall. Yet media culture is persuasive and pervasive, and critical media literacy's concepts are in line with critical pedagogy. So…

What is the value and what are the consequences of students gaining access to "critical" academic discourses about the media? Ideally, the acquisition of an academic discourse should make it possible for students to reflect on their own experience in a systematic and rigorous way. Nevertheless, a critical discourse about the media may…