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Media literacy can be defined as “the ability to critically understand, question, and evaluate how media work and produce meaning (Chauvin, 2003) and the ability to derive pleasure from mass media and choose selectively among popular cultural icons (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999).” (Serafini, 2011, p. 347). With the amount of messages that float around television, cyperspace, advertising, and all around us in society, Educators need to adopt a curriculum of media literacy in order for students to think critically, and make sense of the messages around them
Students need to be taught, critical listening, reading, and observation skills, for a variety of multimodal texts. Media literacy education must be put into place so that students can collectively and effectively evaluate the quality of texts, and their purpose. In order to better create meaning from them. When students understand the purpose for different types of media, they can then use specific skills to decipher them. In news they need to look for what information they may not be told. In advertising they need to know and understand who is being marketed to, and why they feel the desire to purchase. By thinking critically about these things, teachers are able to help students lose their naivety of believing everything they hear, and helps them decide how to produce meaning from the texts they engage with. By having an understanding of how such structures work, students become able to take the media they absorb, and act on it appropriately – a skill all 21st century humans need to have in order to be successful. |