week 2

This week’s readings offered a broad lens on the field of media studies, proposing key definitions, concepts and questions, as well as important dispositions and frameworks to hold. Thoman & Jolls offer a comprehensive tool for teaching media literacy - many good questions to prompt dialogue and exploration with students! These questions are particularly useful, because the authors emphasize the centrality of inquiry/questioning and creating space for student-led discovery in the classroom. 

The Jenkins reading discusses the development of the New Media Literacies initiative and underscores the importance of this field. My biggest takeaway from this excerpt was reflecting on how there are multiple kinds of literacies - literacy is referred to here as “a generalized capacity to decipher the signs and symbols of our culture”.

What I’m left thinking about with Bulger & Davidson’s article is this quote about how media literacy cannot just be about “individual’s responsibility for vetting information, but how state-sponsored disinformation efforts and our everyday technologies influence the information we see and how we interact with it”. Having this lens is essential to understanding how power functions and moves through media. I’m curious about how we successfully teach students both individual agency as well as an awareness/understanding of the power structures that dictate much of our media landscape.