Critical Media Literacy

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The goal of critical media literacy is to provide a toolkit that helps to improve our knowledge of media culture and thereby facilitate our agency when consuming, producing, interpreting, and responding to media texts. This course will introduce you to the basic theories and practices of critical media literacy so that you can in turn teach these concepts and skills to students in your future classes. In this course you will learn how to critically analyze U.S. media culture—including media texts in specific formats (films, television programs, social media posts, journalism, etc.) as well as their production, distribution, regulation, marketing, reception, and criticism. You will also learn about, discuss, and apply such concepts as medium specificity, convergence, representation, realism, authenticity, consumerism, citizenship, and democracy. Approaching media culture as a fluid structure inflected by competing objectives, ideologies, and power dynamics, we will examine mainstream and independent media production, as well as how media shape our identities and values as well as our relationship to the public sphere. In addition, we will survey and analyze media literacy education in the U.S. public school system and various youth programs, focusing on both state- and organization-based initiatives. Students will have opportunities to develop and workshop sample critical media literacy lessons.