Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee
Media Literacy as a Way of Living
By Ralph Beliveau
AEJMC Standing Committee
on Teaching
University of Oklahoma
(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, July 2020 issue)
We are experiencing difficult challenges as teachers and educators. The pandemic undermines the structure of higher education and demands instantaneous changes to our practices and the time and space relationships of teaching and learning. Secondly, the social tensions connected to race and justice have called on us to rethink how students, staff and colleagues of color have different experiences than white people who have positions of privilege, regardless of any intersectional configuration we may have. Finally, the positions of knowledge, information and media may create less clarity and increase confusion in our culture.
As an advocate for the transformational power of media literacy, I find that the work that I have done with students, colleagues and fellow media literacy scholars is ongoing, immediately vital, and in need of constant care and attention. Media literacy is not something achieved in the rear view mirror. In fact, McLuhan suggested that the rear view mirror is not the best way to move into the future: “When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear‐view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” (McLuhan, Medium is the Massage, 1967).
This will not serve us well as a strategy to think about our present challenges, any more than a completely textual literacy, or a televisual literacy, is a good enough accomplishment (in the rear‐view mirror) to negotiate the present challenges in all their digital splendor.
Media literacy offers a corrective to the distortions that the past imposes on the present. But it only works through a constant state of interrogation and re‐interrogation. The questions we ask (and re‐ask) can be thought of in different ways. Typically, media literacy at any moment adopts a clear‐eyed posture and asks of a media experience:
• Who created this message?
• Which techniques are used to attract attention?
• How might different people interpret this message?
• Which values, lifestyles and points of view are represented… or are absent?
• Why is this message being sent?
We may have asked these questions in the past, about a particular mediated moment, but those answers may not be enough to work in the present. More important, asking these questions needs to be a habit, a way of interacting with the media world of the present moment to gain answers to the questions we face in these recent challenges.
This set of questions represents the deep dive approach. A different approach that comes out of an emphasis on information literacy is less invested in the deep dive, taking a faster strategy that seeks to verify the validity of what we might see or hear —especially before we go about repeating it (reposting, memeing, retweeting, etc.), and even before we consider how we feel about it. This quicker approach suggests you don’t think too hard about the claims you see and hear till you determine its value — is it true, or misinformation, or disinformation? This approach, “The Four Moves,” suggests:
• Check for previous work. (See if someone else has already fact‐checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.)
• Go upstream to the source (…of the claim. Most web content is not original.).
• Read laterally. (Read what other people say about the source [publication, author, etc.]. The truth is in the network.)
• Circle back. (If you get lost, or hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.)
(For more, see Mike Caufield’s free pub Web Literacy for Student fact Checkers, https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front‐matter/web‐strategies‐for‐student‐fact‐checkers/)
The result is a digitally oriented fact‐checking process that uses the tools available to us individually and collectively to get to that clear‐eyed perspective before we have invested too much time in it.
Either approach brings to our attention and the attention of our students how what we are learning is fundamentally tied to how we are learning. And, again, the process is not once‐and‐done.
For example, one thing we have learned in the recent educational environment is that online is different from face‐2‐face teaching and learning. The change sets up an interesting opportunity for either approach to the higher education experience. How does a program like Zoom, or our Learning Management System design, or our choices about synchronous vs. asynchronous change the teaching and learning experience? And what would students learn from considering such questions?
These are medium choices, and we should subject them to the same kind of critical interrogation that we would use to become, say, media literate about Zoom, or Canvas, etc. Our students are certainly aware, but do they consciously know and talk about that awareness? For example, how does it affect learning to be facing the “Brady Bunch” grid for a class that includes an image of you, the viewer? You can see what you look like while you are trying to learn. What effect is that having?
Now, back to the current challenges. How have we addressed the social world differently in an institution of shared isolation? In the transition, the digital world was full of suggestions from teachers, technologists and even students; don’t do synchronous, don’t make students turn their cameras on, dress professionally for Zoom appearances, don’t use weird backgrounds (which I completely ignore), try not to appear like you are being held hostage, or asleep, or more interested in your cat than you should, etc. But perhaps at some point we can subject the characteristics of the new environment to both types of interrogation suggested above. Learning that understands the health and social consequences of our actions, that takes the deep dive, may prepare us to recognize good and bad scientific or statistical information, perhaps even save lives. Even going through four moves would indicate that sources that blamed 5G networks for Corona virus were sketchy. But then we can interrogate the conspiracy theories, both to see their fact‐free‐ness, and to perhaps consider who gains power when another group feels lost, confused and disillusioned. And what are the characteristics of the social, digital and traditional media that spread the confusion?
We face a different challenge in our classrooms when it comes to racial justice. The murder of George Floyd was the immediate cause for a broad‐based protest movement. As we watch the coverage – mixed between local, national and international mainstream media, as well as live streams on social media of protest activities and police responses – our immediate reactions need to be informed by the history (the rear‐view, if you will). I am finishing these thoughts on the 99th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Our digital environment gives us access to the history that includes that moment, as well as the numerous other incidents of violence against people of color, at a moment where evidence in the digital world is having a new and profound influence. Tulsa 1921 was brushed over and ignored for decades (see https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/5/31/21276084/tulsa‐race‐massacre‐black‐wall‐street‐protests‐george‐floyd, and read Rilla Askew’s novel Fire In Beulah [2001]). We ought to talk to our students about what these videos — this evidence — means, so that mobile phone, body cam, and other witness footage is understood for all of its ethical complication, and its meaning to complex issues of justice.
The world of video evidence is a new and pervasive reality. We need to work hard as educators in real and virtual classrooms to give students the tools to understand the complexities of this environment. Using media literacy practices and habits to empower our students is our calling, because otherwise the advances in technology, the complexity of media economics and the churn of media regulation will be foreign and alienating to them. On the other hand, having different sets of skills to critically interrogate whatever is ahead for us and them may get us in the habit of realizing that media literacy is not a fait accompli but a discipline that we ought to instill in ourselves and our students.
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