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!