On Friday, October 10, and Sunday, October 12, my dear friend Roni Ben-David and I will instruct an interactive course at a conference in San Francisco entitled Project Zero Perspectives: Making, Thinking, Understanding. We’re thrilled for the opportunity to work together and to share the extraordinary work of our service-learners.

Description of course:

Service-learning is a hands-on, holistically enriching strategy for developing global competence without leaving the country. This course will explore how two institutions — the University of Southern California’s Dornsife Joint Educational Project and the Jewish Community High School of the Bay — seek to enrich service by applying theoretical and conceptual understandings as well as enrich learning by encountering diverse others’ lived realities. While the institutions differ in terms of student populations, length of engagement, and service sites, both rely upon academic preparation, community partnerships, and thoughtful reflection. Course participants will identify the synergies between service-learning and global competence, articulating how global competence skills can be practiced within service-learning contexts. Then participants will brainstorm service-learning projects for their own students, analyzing with partners if/how these projects scaffold their students’ global awareness as well as cultivate their heads, hearts, and hands.

Goals of course:

KNOWLEDGE goals: By the end of this course, participants will know…

1a. The definition and key properties of service-learning.

1b. Characteristics of globally competent students — K-12 (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2011), post-secondary (Russo & Osborne, n.d.).

1c. How the USC Dornsife Joint Education Project & the Jewish Community High School of the Bay facilitate service-learning experiences that cultivate global competence.

2. ATTITUDE goals: By the end of this course, participants will believe…

2a. Service-learning is a valuable strategy not only for enhancing global competence, but also for enriching theoretical knowledge, supporting social-emotional competence, honing professional skills, learning about communities, and delivering useful assistance.

2b. Global competence is an important asset for work and life, both domestically and internationally.
3. PRACTICE goals: By the end of this course, participants will be able to…

1a. Brainstorm a service-learning experience for their institutions that respects their particular philosophies/objectives, models a process of academic preparation, community partnerships, and tailored curriculum, and incorporates reflection.

1b. Identify and amplify how these service-learning proposals facilitate students’ development of global competence characteristics.

Intended audience: 

Anyone interested in service-learning, high school administrators and educators (particularly grade 12), university administrators & educators (particularly sociology, community psychology, history, American Studies, urban planning, public policy, pre-service teaching), newcomers welcome!

re-posted from http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/open-classroom/hacking-for-gold-south-la-youths-code-towards-a-better-future.html

(from left): Kevin Amaya (student), Jerome Johnson (tech mentor), Ben Coppersmith (tech mentor), Gisela Hernandez (student), and Ashley Shorter (student) | Photo: J. Morr

Hacking for Gold: South L.A. Youths Code Towards a Better Future

By Laurel J. Felt |

May 5, 2014

Gisela Hernandez scrutinized the computer screen and frowned. “That’s going to make it really clashing,” she said, referring to the proposed change in font color.

“We can try it,” reasoned Ashley G. Shorter, Gisela’s friend since the start of this 2013-2014 school year and her coding partner for designing the homepage of Los Angeles Trade and Technical College (LATTC) Auto Shop.

“We can try to see what it looks like,” Gisela agreed, and turned back to her screen with equanimity. Ashley typed in the new code and hit the Preview button to evaluate the modification.

Along with these two young women, 18 other high school students were assembled in the Sage Hall Computer Lab at LATTC, each engrossed with their own projects. Time pressure, potential awards, and public visibility motivated their focus. By the end of WebSlam, the intensive 12-hour Saturday hack-a-thon, the youths’ websites would be evaluated by a panel of experts and launched on the Web.

Oscar Menjivar, founder and CEO of URBAN TxT, who had taught daily coding classes over the past week leading up to Saturday’s event, noted how engaged the students have been. “They don’t want to leave the computer station and the coding that they’re doing,” he said. “They’re liking it — they’re loving doing it.”

Nadia Despenza, WebSlam’s organizer, retold an anecdote that has become WebSlam legend: A group of three high school students — Jose Sandoval, Hector Linares, and Michael Taton — were tasked with developing the website for LATTC student Robert Hubbard’s cookie business, Shaquann’s Gourmet Cookies. “They told their mentor Steven, ‘We’re not having lunch today, we’re not doing that, we need to finish our website, we need to get this done,'” Despenza recalled. “And their mentor was like, ‘We have to have lunch, I’m super hungry.’ And they were like, ‘No, no breaks.'”

Steven eventually convinced the young men to grab a slice of pizza or a sandwich. But it wasn’t easy.

 

Client Robert Hubbard (Shaquann’s Gourmet Cookies) goes over the design elements he’d like incorporated into his website with Jose Sandoval (student), Hector Linares (student), Michael Taton (student), and Steven Sullivan (technology mentor) | Photo: J. Morr

 

WebSlam was born of Despenza’s determination to help youths learn about careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). WebSlam’s participants, half of whom are female and all of whom identify as either African-American or Latino, are youths who could use such help, as recent research suggests. While women represent slightly more than half of this nation’s population, and individuals of African-American and Latino descent represent 12% and 16%, respectively, ¹ only 19% of the high school students in America who took the 2012 Advanced Placement exam in Computer Science were female, and 12% identified as African-American or Latino. ² Unequal participation rates persist during college, with women earning 18% of all bachelor’s degrees in computer science, ³ and underrepresented minorities (e.g., blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians) earning 18% of these degrees. ⁴ Workforce participation rates in computer science similarly vary along gender and ethnic lines; of all individuals employed in science and engineering careers, 27% are female and 11% are African-American or Latino. ⁵

This disparity has major economic implications, both for individuals and for the nation. According to U.S. News and World Report‘s 2014 coverage of the nation’s best jobs, in 2012 web developers earned a median salary of $62,500. ⁶ To put that figure in context, it is more than triple the median salary of a nail technician, and more than double the median salary of a preschool teacher. Construction workers’ and clinical laboratory technicians’ median salaries slightly exceed half those of web developers.

As Despenza explained, “A lot of our students think, ‘How am I going to get outside my neighborhood?’ or ‘How can I help my neighborhood, how can I support my family?’ And it boils down to, not only just a passion for learning, but how can I support myself?” As leading education blog Mind/Shift stated succinctly, “For low-income and disenfranchised youth, learning to code might lead to a lucrative career in an industry that’s both booming and lacking in diversity.” ⁷

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 28,500 new web developer jobs will be created from 2012 to 2022 ⁸; in fact, the next decade demands massively more highly skilled employees across the technology industry. The technology industry is growing, and there is space for our citizens — including women and people of color — to serve it.

This is why Despenza decided to earn a Master’s degree in STEM education, and join the staff at YouthBuild Charter School of California (YCSC) as STEM Coordinator. YCSC is a competency-based dropout recovery school rooted in social justice. YCSC oversees 18 sites across the state, with 13 in southern California. Three of these — Slauson Site at Home Sweet Home, Long Beach at W.I.N.T.E.R. YouthBuild, and South L.A. Site at CRCD Academy YouthBuild — sent some of their finest students to participate in WebSlam.

 

YCSC STEM Coordinator and WebSlam organizer Nadia Despenza | Photo: Laurel J. Felt

 

The WebSlam experience took place over six days. First, students attended five afternoon coding sessions, taught by Menjivar. In Despenza’s view, these sessions were crucial, not just educationally but also socially. “We just all became like one big team … they became like their own site.”

Joseph Guerrieri, LATTC’s Dean of Academic Affairs and Workforce Development, who hosted WebSlam at LATTC, would occasionally pop his head in to check out the students’ process. He recalled seeing several intimidated young people on the first day.

“Talking to Oscar [Menjivar], a lot of these students came in completely green, either having little or no background in this,” explained Guerrieri. “Just watching them work now, they look so confident. It’s really great to see that in one week … It’s remarkable.”

The infamous lunch refusal is consistent with many of the students’ behavior all week. Although instruction ended each day at 3 p.m., Menjivar said, “We had students stay until 4 — that’s the time that we stayed. But I think if we were to stay maybe later, until 8 or 9, I think they would have wanted to stay.”

Following this one-week intensive, participants arrived at LATTC on Saturday, April 12, for the 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. hack-a-thon. Students split into four teams and met with four LATTC-associated clients who needed new or updated websites. This local connection played directly to YCSC’s values. “YouthBuild is about giving back to the community,” said Despenza. “Freely you give, freely you receive.”

Student teams created wire frames that reflected their clients’ requests for particular styles and content, then distributed tasks amongst team members in order to finish each website by 6 p.m.

While WebSlam is Despenza’s brainchild, it’s several people’s baby. Samantha Walters, Colocation America’s Vice-President of Online Strategy, is among them. “I was doing an article for National Women’s Day and it took me an entire week to find five women in my industry who were making a difference,” she remembers. As soon as Walters heard of Despenza’s WebSlam concept, she delivered sponsorship dollars within 24 hours.

Despenza already had found a teacher in Menjivar, whose company, URBAN TxT, is dedicated to encouraging inner city teen males to become catalysts of change in urban communities. Guerrieri, who’s currently developing a digital media program at LATTC, embraced the opportunity to host WebSlam on campus. Melanie Vaget, Senior Manager of Culture & Engagement at Factual, a L.A.-based company that sells such products as global location data mapping and cleaning, rounded up several mentors from among Factual’s ranks. Not only was Vaget interested in supporting education and opportunity, she also was enthusiastic about providing a physical representation of a woman who works in the tech industry.

 

Colocation America VP of Online Strategies Samantha Walters talks to student Jose Sandoval and client Robert Hubbard | Photo: J. Morr

 

According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, several factors dissuade girls from participating in computing, including: computing curriculum that is disconnected from student interests and environments that are uncomfortable for girls; unequal opportunities and early experiences vis-à-vis computing; a sense of isolation for lone girls who get involved; perceptions of computing as masculine and “geeky”; and limited knowledge or inaccurate perceptions about what computing careers involve. ⁹

“This isn’t just a dream,” said Vaget, narrating what she hoped her presence would convey to female WebSlam participants. “This is me at the other end of the tunnel and you totally can get here …if you have it in your heart to stick with it, you can do it.”

Yasmeen Summerlin, an 11th grader at Youth Build’s Slauson site, worked with Morgan Mullaney, a Factual software engineer and WebSlam mentor, on a website for the Cosmetology Department team. Her procedural mastery and grasp of the vernacular was spot-on.

“I was resizing [an image] into a banner using Gimp so that we could put it on our website,” said Yasmeen. “So you either save it as a jpeg for image, and then png would be like if you don’t want no background on it, so the layers can come out. I stayed with the jpeg …”

Such commitment to and proficiency in both problem-solving and perseverance are among the most important participant outcomes of WebSlam.

“Today our server went down,” sighed Despenza, “and we just had to problem-solve right then on the spot. If the students hadn’t been here throughout the week they might have been like, ‘What do we do now?’ But they were like, ‘Let’s look up some codes!’ So they started to work through it.”

This also exemplifies sensitive and functional communication, another key take-away from WebSlam. “There was one kid who wasn’t talking too much to his group members,” said Menjivar. “But then after realizing, if I don’t talk to them, my ideas won’t be heard, he had to figure out, how do I talk to them?” Menjivar facilitated discussions on the subject, offered useful language for negotiating conversations, and modeled best practice by coordinating with Despenza aloud, for students to hear.

 

Factual tech mentor Morgan Mullaney (R) assists student Yasmeen Summer (L) with her site | Photo: J. Morr

 

Educational researchers and computer scientists report that learning to code develops practitioners’ systems thinking and collaboration skills, and might even inspire a passion for computer programming. ¹⁰ This is why hack-a-thons for students, particularly low-income students, have become more prevalent across the United States, from Oakland, CA, to Philadelphia, PA, to Seattle, WA.

Hack-a-thons are also occurring on a global scale. During the same weekend as YCSC’s WebSlam, UCLA hosted “L.A. Hacks,” a 36-hour event catering to ambitious, tech-savvy college students and conferring both monetary prizes and access to CEOs and VIPs associated with such hot companies as Tinder, Amazon, Coinbase, and Pandora. ¹¹ In Argentina, the city of Buenos Aires recently welcomed hackers to solve problems in the public sector as participants of FINDEMO, “the world’s first Public Innovation Festival.” ¹² And this April in New York, the Tribeca Film Institute is inviting coders, designers, and filmmakers to their hack-a-thon in order “to imagine and invent new possibilities for storytelling in an increasingly mobile and connected world, experimenting with storytelling on wearables, smartphones and tablets, using social media and connected devices.” ¹³

Back at YCSC’s WebSlam, the judges awarded top prize to the site built by the three young men who refused to leave for lunch; Yasmeen and her partner Anai’s Cosmetology site came in second; a team working on behalf of the Associated Student Government came in third; and Gisela, Ashley, and their colleague Kevin’s site for LATTC’s Automotive Department came in fourth. ¹⁴ But considering the participants’ knowledge gains, skill development, and professional prospects, as well as WebSlam partners’ collaborative success and the community’s receipt of both new websites and empowered learners, everybody was a winner.

As District 9 City Councilmember Curren Price said during his lunch-time site visit, these youth are part of a revolution, and their WebSlam helps to advance the rise of the “New Ninth” as a place for new ideas, new energy, and new enthusiasm.

Power to the people.

 

Students and teachers from YouthBuild Charter School of California, technology mentors, clients, employees from URBAN TxT, Colocation America, Factual, and Los Angeles Trade Tech College with Los Angeles City Council Member Curren Price (center) | Photo: J. Morr

 

_____

¹ National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (2013). Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2013. Special Report NSF 13-304.
² The College Board. (2012). Program Summary Report.
³ Ashcraft, C., Eger, E., & Friend, M. (2012). Girls in IT: The Facts. Boulder, CO: National Center for Women & Information Technology.
⁴ National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. (2013). Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2013. Special Report NSF 13-304.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ “Best Technology Jobs: Web Developer.”
⁷ Mind/Shift. (2014, March 3). Looking for the Hidden Genius Within Disenfranchised Youth.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ashcraft, C., Eger, E., & Friend, M. (2012). Girls in IT: The Facts. Boulder, CO: National Center for Women & Information Technology.
¹⁰ Quillen, I. (2013, May 23). Why Programming Teaches So Much More Than Technical Skills.
¹¹ LA Hacks. “Info.”
¹² UNICEF Stories. (2014, March 17). FINDEMO: First Festival of Public Innovation.
¹³ “Hackathon Overview.”
¹⁴ Suttmeier, E. (2014, April 16). WebSlam a Huge Success.

reposted from http://namle.net/2014/04/25/org-member-profile-tribeca-film-institute/

by Laurel J. Felt | April 25, 2014

Tribeca Film Institute, an affiliate of the well-known Tribeca Film Festival, offers cutting-edge, socially conscious educational opportunities for youth across New York City. Tribeca Education and Engagement Coordinator Flonia Telegrafi recently took the time to discuss with me Tribeca’s educational impacts, offerings, and plans for the future.

IMPACTS
Founded in the wake of September 11, 2001, Tribeca aims to support community-building by sharing socially relevant stories, empowering storytellers, and working with youth. Its extensive and process-based education department, staffed by individuals who either have taught or still are teaching, outreaches year-round to educators and students. Collectively, Tribeca’s five education programs aspire to “help young people gain the media skills necessary to be productive global citizens and creative individuals.”.

Explained Telegrafi, “The largest program we have is called Tribeca Teaches. We’re in 30 K-12 schools all throughout the five boroughs, and we send a teaching artist into these schools for a year-long residency. They work with students both in-class or after-school (depending on the specific residency) to make films.” In so doing, Tribeca Teaches seeks to “help children with expression tools, self-discovery, bring young people together whether they’re classmates or peers in a school, and really explore storytelling as a tool for self-expression.”

Last year, one of Tribeca Teaches’ participating schools was the East River Academy, an educational program serving incarcerated students aged 16-21 on Rikers Island. Thanks to a grant provided by New York’s Hive Learning Network, Tribeca is currently wrapping up its second year on Rikers Island at the Rose M. Singer Center, the only all-female facility on the island.

Telegrafi herself teaches Rikers’s 40 participants per year, and uniquely designed the curriculum to accommodate the contextual constraints of a jail. For example, because the students enter and leave Telegrafi’s tutelage as they enter and leave the facility, “it’s really important to scaffold the lesson. If a student is in the classroom for only two sessions, they can complete something,” said Telegrafi.

This “something” might be finishing a writing prompt, creating a spoken word poem, or recording their voice. Because surveillance equipment — which includes video cameras — is not permitted on Rikers, students cannot capture their own footage. But this doesn’t prevent their filmmaking.

“We instituted an exchange with one of our Tribeca Teaches classroom on the outside, the Young Women’s Leadership School in Astoria,” explained Telegrafi. First, she asked her Rikers students to consider “what their version of the world would look like if they had all the power.” Next, they wrote poems visualizing this world and recorded their own recitations via Garage Band. Then Astoria students received these recordings along with a shot list and filmed images around the neighborhood and city that, they believed, respected their partners’ vision. Finally, Rikers students took the footage and edited together their own videos.

“What we discovered is that art is an amazing tool to increase self-esteem,” enthused Telegrafi. “Doing and reinforcing self-esteem through art-making, where there’s lots of do-over and that’s okay, I feel like it drives home the fact that there is no right and wrong, you can do it over and that’s okay… It’s not about black-and white or right and wrong, you can keep growing and learning just by doing and redoing. Art and filmmaking reinforces that… And the fact that the young women are using MacBooks and don’t have to share, they’re working on their own computer, and using FinalCut, a professional editing tool, and getting over the frustration to get good at it, and not pushing the computer away…” Telegrafi trailed off. Obviously, the impacts of this engagement are significant. Telegrafi also points to “the validating aspect of being able to share their work and their words with the young women outside, having an actual audience.”

Sharing with audiences occurs both on and off the island. At Rikers, “as soon as they [the students] finish something, even if it’s a rough cut, we invite people in to take a look. It shows that the women are willing to share, open to feedback, and are just proud of their work.”

Back on the mainland, Tribeca Teaches culminates with an annual screening of the students’ work, which is integrated within the Tribeca Film Festival. Held just a few days ago (April 25) at the 1000-seat Tribeca Performing Arts Center, this celebratory event enabled students, families, teachers and members of the public to appreciate participating youths’ creativity and perspectives. “We actually rent buses for each school so they come in busloads,” said Telegrafi. “We also reserve seats for students who didn’t partake in the program.” Read more about the partnership at Rikers, and the experience of one liberated inmate as she witnessed her film’s debut in The New York Times.

OFFERINGS
The Tribeca Youth Screening Series pursues media literacy through more “traditional” channels, via screening socially relevant films and discussing these films’ implications. Notably, educators from around the world can access Tribeca’s original curricula and Educators’ Guides.

Rather than a foray into art-making, like Tribeca Teaches, this program is “seen more as an intellectual exercise, building students’ capacity to examine, deconstruct, analytically discuss.” What do they discuss? “Issues, stereotypes, different social justice aspects,” listed Telegrafi. “In a year’s worth of schooling, where students are exposed to math, science, social studies, we think it’s important that they also understand that they have a voice and can make educated decisions.”

Ten diverse schools situated across New York City participate in the Tribeca Youth Screening Series. Each fall and spring, these students explore four films that look at a particular theme. Said Telegrafi, “We want to always make sure that the themes we select and the films we screen resonate with students’ identities and backgrounds. We’re always thinking in terms of points of access.” An understanding of participating students’ origins, e.g., where some students have immigrated and where they currently reside, informs the curation process. This past fall of 2013, Tribeca Youth Screening Series investigated “food justice”; this spring, the theme was “home,” explored via the films Persepolis,Do the Right Thing, Herman’s House, and Inocente.

Youths from every school attend the four film screenings together, which provides a special engagement opportunity for members of various communities who meet rarely, if ever. For example, schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn participate in this series, as well as three English Language Learner institutions respectively located in Queens, Chinatown and Union Square. As soon as the lights go up after each film, associated directors, producers, or actors welcome questions from the student audience. According to Telegrafi, this provides “…a forum where they can ask questions and are not afraid to make a point. So it’s important in terms of opening people’s minds to different perspectives and realities, and taking that back to their homes, communities, and classrooms.”

Before and after each screening, Tribeca equips teaching artists with original curricula and sends them to every participating school in order to facilitate additional in-class discussions — 8 sessions in all. In terms of the curricula, Telegrafi explained, “We’re looking to address the issues that are raised in the films through different hands-on, student-driven activities… [Educators’ Guides] include activities around keywords and actual discussion prompts, and have a thru-line and make sense from pre to post.”

This program also ends with a final celebration. Because Inocente examined art — specifically, art’s role in empowering a 15-year-old, homeless, undocumented immigrant, Tribeca invited professional muralists to wrap up the spring series by assisting students in their own mural-making. Like the film’s protagonist, Tribeca’s “graduates” appropriated color and form to tell stories, make statements, and re-dedicate themselves to their dreams.

“The overall goal is to ensure that young people are open and receptive to seeing different life experiences acted out on film,” Telegrafi elucidated. “One of our main goals is to introduce the young people who participate to different cultures so that we leave our daily life for a second and observe and try to understand how somebody else is living.

“We hope that, not only are they engaging in conversations in the classroom and are able to analyze a film by breaking down the different issues and themes that affect our lives, but that they’re open to debate, friendly debate, conversation. Hopefully watching one of these films will change their mind or their perspective on an issue. Maybe they’ll leave more open-minded and see somebody else’s point of view.”

Also of note to local media educators is Tribeca’s Blueprint For The Moving Image. This program consists of three, large-scale professional development sessions offered each spring, various skill-building workshops on Saturday’s, and the option to receive teaching artists who will offer classroom-based instruction in whichever areas the teachers have expressed interest over a three-day residency period.

Articulated Telegrafi, “Our purpose is to not only to provide these workshops where they’re exposed to new tools, technologies, ways of designing a lesson or approaching a topic through media, but [to offer] a place where media teachers across the city can get together and meet each other and be part of a learning professional network of their peers.”

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
“We’re going to continue doing the work that we do,” said Telegrafi. That work entails “…constantly assessing, checking in with folks. We’re trying to listen to folks and their needs and have that inform our process. But definitely [we plan on] exposing more young people to filmmaking, art-making, [and we will be] building platforms for our students’ work, getting our Rikers students’ work out, and inspiring young people across the city to the possibilities of art and having their voice heard and expressing themselves.”

Tribeca Film Institute’s Director of Education Vee Bravo also shared his big picture visions. “In the future we imagine an educational environment where media literacy programs reach multi-generational students through partnerships among schools and institutions such as prisons, hospitals, environmental and social justice groups. This means redefining the classroom into a lab where the make-up of students includes young people, teachers, parents and professional artists collaborating on meaningful art projects.”

NAMLE salutes the Tribeca Film Institute!

re-posted from http://namle.net/2014/03/24/org-member-profile-center-for-media-literacy/

By Laurel J. Felt | March 24, 2014

The Center for Media Literacy (CML) occupies a cornerstone in our community. CML President and CEO Tessa Jolls recently took the time to discuss with me CML’s impacts, offerings, and plans for the future.

IMPACTS

Since 1989, when media literacy pioneer Elizabeth Thoman established CML, this organization has served as a global resource for media literacy education. CML has worked with overseas partners in such far-flung nations as Peru, South Korea, and Bosnia/Herzegovina, while simultaneously continuing to produce original curricula that meet the United States’s diverse education standards.

It’s impossible for Jolls to quantify how many individuals from around the world have logged onto medialit.org over the past 20+ years. “Our website has always been really high in the Google rankings,” Jolls admitted. “I wouldn’t be surprised if our reach is better described in the millions rather than the thousands…” She estimates that CML’s MediaLit Moments, which are free downloadable classroom activities designed to promote discussion, reach thousands of people per month.

Recently, CML published Voices of Media Literacy: International Pioneers Speak, a series of interviews with 20 trailblazers of media literacy. Jolls recognizes this work as a real contribution due to the lack of any first-person information previously available. “We did that project to really capture the points of view of these pioneers —and since we’ve done it, two have already passed away. It was a real privilege to be able to talk with people who helped form the field.”

For any critical consumers of media literacy pedagogy, and especially for advocates whose petitions would benefit from persuasive evidence of media literacy’s return on investment, CML’s assessment of media literacy’s value is phenomenally useful.

Beyond Blame has been selected by the California Department of Education as a high quality curriculum for in-class and after school programs, and is now included in the California Healthy Kids Resource Library and the Resource Library of the California After School Resource Center. Smoke Detectors! meets Common Core Standards for Language Arts for both middle school and high school, as well as California State Health Standards and National Technology Standards.

Jolls explained, “We’ve now evaluated our methodology in a longitudinal study and so we have research that really shows the effectiveness of using media literacy as an educational strategy.” Jolls and co-investigator Kathryn Fingar (2013) found that CML’s curriculum Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media “…is associated with improved knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors related to media use and aggression” (p. 1).

In a separate study that also looked at 2007-2008 Beyond Blame data, UCLA researchers Webb and Martin (2012) found, “compared with controls, students in both intervention groups were more likely to agree that media violence may cause aggression, fear, desensitization and an appetite for more media violence at the post-test. Students in the trained group were also more likely than controls to understand the five core concepts/key questions of media literacy post-intervention” (p. 430).

Media literacy efforts must be consistent, replicable, and scalable, Jolls emphasized. “We believe that it’s imperative, really, for the media literacy field […] to take the scientific approach.”

OFFERINGS

Explained Jolls, “We have developed a consistent framework and materials that can be applied to any content area or academic subject; so our work, we believe, is very in tune with the demands for education today. We really have developed a methodology that lends itself to anytime, anywhere learning.” To realize that goal of supporting anytime/anywhere learning, CML offers many materials for free online, including Connections, its monthly newsletter, and critical literacy curriculum Teaching Democracy: A Media Literacy Approach.

CML’s online store also sells over 20 resources for classroom use and professional development. This includes CML’s new curriculum, A Recipe for Action: Deconstructing Food Advertising. Around late March, Jolls estimates, CML also will release Smoke Detectors!. This timely curriculum addresses modern tobacco cessation using the CML framework — Questions/TIPS — and the Empowerment Spiral of Awareness, Analysis, Reflection, Action. Observed Jolls, “It seems that, especially with the introduction of e-cigarettes, that tobacco cessation has become of concern to people again, and so we’ve tried to include some of the media around e-cigarettes in the curriculum. I think that that would be of interest to people because most curricula don’t address that.”

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

While CML has supported a few recent events — notably, the National Telemedia Council’s 60th anniversary and a March 4 screening & discussion of This Is Media: Eyes Wide Shut at California State University-Northridge — its emphasis is on “providing leadership, research and development that can really help teachers to teach media literacy.”

Jolls believes that CML, and the pursuit of media literacy, will remain relevant, even as technological and social changes continue to shift the way we work, learn, and live. Reflected Jolls, “It’s not so much about the technology, it’s about critical thinking, and having the process skills, whether you’re producing or consuming. So that’s what we’ve been trying to focus on — what’s timeless, what’s a systematic way of looking at media, and how media operate as a system.”

NAMLE salutes the Center for Media Literacy!