Best Practices

There are several challenges in identifying evidence-based best practices in media education: first, because most evaluations compare media literacy interventions either to a control group or to another intervention not based on media literacy; second because, as noted above, there is often a mismatch between what a program is teaching and the results it is measuring. As a result, “empirical evidence of best pedagogical practice, as opposed to self-testimony or retrospective reporting, is scarce”[1]; in other words, while we can say generally that media literacy works, it is difficult to say precisely which elements of media literacy programs work better than others. 

That being said, there is general consensus on these best practices for media education:

  1. Emphasize hands-on involvement over rote learning. Interventions whose topic was directly relevant to students,[2] had an outcome focused on engaged citizenship[3] and included media making[4] were considered to be more effective. In the same way, the most effective way to promote critical thinking is through “teachers creating a supportive environment where small student-peer groups actively construct and critique arguments about problems specific to [their] discipline… In classrooms where the teachers explicitly focus on the arguments and justifications for particular ideas in their discipline (i.e., emphasizing not just the what but also the why and how), students are more likely to engage in effective epistemic cognition.”[5]
  2. Provide students with authentic tasks and experiences. Media are an important part of students’ world, and networked technologies allow them to connect with the world outside of the classroom. For this reason, it can be more effective to focus on students’ own mediaspheres rather than specific media works: the teacher may use particular works as models, or assign them for analysis, but students will do more engaged work with works from their own mediaspheres.[6] At the very least, teachers should include student experience and make sure that topics and examples are relevant to students.
    • Authentic tasks and experiences provide “an emphasis on student engagement with media in an interactive and dynamic way— empowerment through production, interaction, and dialogue”[7] and must acknowledge both the cognitive and affective elements of media.[8]
    • Showing students how to use familiar digital tools to make a difference in their communities “may significantly increase both the quantity and the equality of young people’s online political engagement… many of the skills youth need to participate politically online align closely with skills youth often employ when engaged in social media more generally.”[9]
    • Providing opportunities to make media, especially in ways that help them better understand the workings of media industries, provides an experiential insight into how these affect their own media experiences.[10]
    • Giving students an opportunity to share and publish their work, and participate in communities in meaningful ways, engages youth in digital media literacy work and gives the opportunities to practice civic action.[11] “This orientation helps media literacy move beyond distanced critique, interpretation without application, and a focus on tools and technologies over the processes and applications that define them.”[12]
    • Finally, an authentic task means one where students are given the chance to make their voices heard in a meaningful way: “Young people respond well to leading the dialogue within the intervention, and a dialogue-based rather than a didactic approach is often more effective.”[13]
  3. Help teachers understand why digital media literacy is important and provide them with training in how to teach it. Teachers cannot simply be expected to teach media literacy; they must be given training and support in doing so[14],[15],[16],[17] and helped to understand the importance of media literacy.[18] Research has frequently identified a lack of training and support as one of the biggest barriers to teaching media literacy, even among teachers who are enthusiastic about it[19],[20] and also limits their ability to push students to more sophisticated thinking or assess digital media literacy work.[21]
    • The same applies to teachers’ use of digital technology in the classroom, even though teachers’ tech skills are generally comparable to or more advanced than their students.’[22]
    • Because every teacher needs to teach digital media literacy but not all have the time or resource to become an expert, it can be effective to train some teachers to become “media literacy mentors,” sharing resources and best practices.[23] As with teachers and students, this mentorship can be reciprocal, as more experienced teachers share their professional knowledge and younger ones share their familiarity with media and technology.[24]
    • Moreover, given the constant change in media and technology, professional development has to be ongoing[25] and it may also have to help teachers unlearn some views about media education: a “leaning towards the protectionist approach may be combined with the lack of knowledge about the complexity of the relationship between media texts and audiences, and about the sophistication of media representations.”[26]
  4. Deliver media education through multiple channels and stakeholders. In Media Literacy: Empowering Youth Worldwide, Paul Mihailidis argues that “successful programs penetrate education systems through collaboration with schools, teachers, and administrators via clubs, classroom visits, or shared curricula.”[27] Other researchers have found that media education “appears to be most effective when it’s a collaborative effort between one or more teachers and the school librarian. This collaboration comes in many different forms: teachers accompanying students to the library for a class period, or a librarian coming into the classroom or meeting students in a computer lab for a period to model research strategies.”[28] Media education should also make connections with the world outside of the classroom: “successful implementation of media literacy education at the school level is facilitated by approaches to pedagogy that combine and/or cross boundaries between spaces and roles —the classroom and the extended ‘third space.’”[29]
  5. Start media education early and keep it going. Recent research has found that media education can be effective with children as young as five.[30] Young people typically start using media and networked devices long before they enter school, so it’s essential that they start learning digital media literacy as early as possible.[31] The key concepts approach allows teachers to deliver media education to students in a way that fits their cognitive and emotional development, and research into critical thinking has found that young people are often able to accomplish significantly more sophisticated tasks than their teachers believe with the proper scaffolding and supports.[32]  
  6. Allow plenty of time for exploration, practice and reflection. Students need more than one opportunity to learn and practice each digital media literacy skill: “ongoing and varied practice can help students to integrate skills and strategies as well as these ways of thinking into their habits and to apply these approaches across settings and contexts.[33] Because the practical and creative aspects of digital media literacy often come more naturally to students, it may be necessary to build in steps that force them to slow down and do the critical work while doing practical projects.[34] Time to reflect on one’s thoughts and experiences – whether in the form of journals, debriefs, reviewing or revisiting a topic[35] – also provides opportunities to make students’ learning more visible. This has been identified as a key strategy in developing students’ critical loyalty.[36]
  7. Take a holistic, comprehensive approach to digital media literacy. While it’s important not to try to do too much in any single lesson or activity, and critical thinking skills don’t always transfer from one domain to another, students should receive education in every aspect of digital media literacy over the course of their schooling. In their study of media literacy in Australia, Notley et al. found that “media literacy programs focussed too narrowly on news and information media are likely to be less effective… Given the value people place on entertainment media and the role that many believe it plays in their lives, media literacy must align with and connect to people’s use of entertainment media. At the same time high levels of concern about misinformation, privacy, digital privacy and security demonstrate that people need to know enough about media infrastructures and the business models that underpin them to be able to critically engage with media.”[37] Similarly, while it may make sense to focus solely on teaching students how to use a media tool they’re unfamiliar with, if students are already confident then there should always be an additional element involving analysis and/or engagement.

 

[1] McDougall, J., Zezulkova, M., Van Driel, B., & Sternadel, D. (2018). Teaching media literacy in Europe: evidence of effective school practices in primary and secondary education, NESET II report.

[2] Hodgin, E., & Kahne, J. (2018). Misinformation in the information age: What teachers can do to support students. Social Education, 82(4), 208-212.

[3] Mihailidis, P. (2009). Media literacy: Empowering youth worldwide. Center for International Media Assistance.

[4] McDougall, J., Zezulkova, M., Van Driel, B., & Sternadel, D. (2018). Teaching media literacy in Europe: evidence of effective school practices in primary and secondary education, NESET II report.

[5] Greene, J. A., & Yu, S. B. (2016). Educating critical thinkers: The role of epistemic cognition. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 45-53.

[6] Vasquez, V. M., Janks, H., & Comber, B. (2019). Critical literacy as a way of being and doing. Language Arts, 96(5), 300-311.

[7] Mihailidis, P. (2009). Media literacy: Empowering youth worldwide. Center for International Media Assistance.

[8] Garcia, A. G., McGrew, S., Mirra, N., Tynes, B., & Kahne, J. (2021). Rethinking Digital Citizenship: Learning About Media, Literacy, and Race in Turbulent Times. Carol D. Lee, Gregory White, and Dian Dong, Editors, 319.

[9] Hodgin, E., & Kahne, J. (2018). Misinformation in the information age: What teachers can do to support students. Social Education, 82(4), 208-212.

[10] Teaching media literacy in Europe: evidence of effective school practices in primary and secondary education

[11] Middaugh, E. (2019). More than just facts: promoting civic media literacy in the era of outrage. Peabody Journal of Education, 94(1), 17-31.

[12] Mihailidis, P. (2018) A novel civic idea: Building the capacity of youth to critique and create media in digital culture. Civic Idea.

[13] Reynolds, L., & Scott, R. (2016). Digital Citizens: countering extremism online.

[14] McDougall, J., Zezulkova, M., Van Driel, B., & Sternadel, D. (2018). Teaching media literacy in Europe: evidence of effective school practices in primary and secondary education, NESET II report

[15] Mihailidis, P. (2009). Media literacy: Empowering youth worldwide. Center for International Media Assistance.

[16] National Literacy Trust. (2018). Fake news and critical literacy: The final report of the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy in Schools.

[17] Simons, M., Meeus, W., & T'Sas, J. (2017). Measuring Media Literacy for Media Education: Development of a Questionnaire for Teachers' Competencies. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 9(1), 99-115.

[18] Simons, M., Meeus, W., & T'Sas, J. (2017). Measuring Media Literacy for Media Education: Development of a Questionnaire for Teachers' Competencies. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 9(1), 99-115.

[19] Manfra, M., & Holmes, C. (2020). Integrating media literacy in social studies teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1), 121-141.

[20] Sabado, K. X. (2018). Exploring Teachers' Perspective of Digital Literacy Pedagogy: Implications for Future Practice.

[21] Schilder, E., Lockee, B., & Saxon, D. P. (2016). The Challenges of Assessing Media Literacy Education. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 8(1), 32-48.

[22] Wang, S. K., Hsu, H. Y., Campbell, T., Coster, D. C., & Longhurst, M. (2014). An investigation of middle school science teachers and students use of technology inside and outside of classrooms: Considering whether digital natives are more technology savvy than their teachers. Educational Technology Research and Development, 62(6), 637-662.

[23] Maqsood, S., & Chiasson, S. (2021, May). “They think it’s totally fine to talk to somebody on the internet they don’t know”: Teachers’ perceptions and mitigation strategies of tweens’ online risks. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-17).

[24] Johnson, M., Riel, R. and Froese-Germain, B. Connected to Learn: Teachers’ Experiences with Networked Technologies in the Classroom. Ottawa: MediaSmarts/Canadian Teachers’ Federation, 2016.

[25] Maqsood, S., & Chiasson, S. (2021, May). “They think it’s totally fine to talk to somebody on the internet they don’t know”: Teachers’ perceptions and mitigation strategies of tweens’ online risks. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-17).

[26] Friesem, E. (2018). Too Much of a Good Thing? How Teachers' Enthusiasm May Lead to Protectionism in Exploring Media & Gender. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10(1), 134-147.

[27] Mihailidis, P. (2009). Media literacy: Empowering youth worldwide. Center for International Media Assistance.

[28] Costello, D., & Lawrence, K. (2015) “Five surprises about college student information literacy.” Strategic Library, 11(1).

[29] McDougall, J., Zezulkova, M., Van Driel, B., & Sternadel, D. (2018). Teaching media literacy in Europe: evidence of effective school practices in primary and secondary education, NESET II report.

[30] Stanley, S. L., & Lawson, C. A. (2018). Developing discerning consumers: an intervention to increase skepticism toward advertisements in 4-to 5-year-olds in the US. Journal of Children and Media, 12(2), 211-225.

[31] Media Literacy Advisory Committee. (2019) Media Literacy Advisory Committee Report.

[32] Greene, J. A., & Yu, S. B. (2016). Educating critical thinkers: The role of epistemic cognition. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 45-53.

[33] Hodgin, E., & Kahne, J. (2018). Misinformation in the information age: What teachers can do to support students. Social Education, 82(4), 208-212.

[34] Castellini da Silva, R. C. (2021). Media literacy and ICT in education treading together: exploring how new digital technologies can help promote media literacy in secondary students (Doctoral dissertation, Dublin City University).

[35] Epitropoulos, A. (2017) “Five ways to develop critical thinking skills.” ASCD In-Service. Retrieved from <https://www.ascd.org/blogs/5-ways-to-develop-critical-thinking-skills>

[36] Hodgin, E., & Kahne, J. (2018). Misinformation in the information age: What teachers can do to support students. Social Education, 82(4), 208-212.

[37] Notley, T., Chambers, S., Park, S., & Dezuanni, M. (2021). Adult Media Literacy in Australia: Attitudes, Experiences and Needs.