Centre for Media Literacy

http://www.medialit.org/

Authors/Editors

The Center for Media Literacy (CML) is a nonprofit educational organization that provides educational resources. Dedicated to promoting and supporting media literacy education as a framework for accessing, analyzing, and evaluating media content, CML works to help citizens develop critical thinking needed to live fully in the 21st century media culture.

Description of Contents

Because of the shortcomings concerning the inclusion of media education in EDC, discussed in the introduction to this directory, you'll find almost no direct clues as to the cross connections between EDC and media education as an essential, indispensable part of it.

Navigating the site and finding relevant resources therefore is far from easy which is due to the fact that the various sections of the site and the categories used in the dropdown fields of the search forms are - as the screenshot shows - tailor-made for scholars of media education as a separate area and not for scholars of EDC!

I therefore intensively explored the site for you in order to indentifiy those areas with publications and (teaching) material containing the cross connections between EDC and media education. And these are:

• the resource catalog and especially

• the reading room

• Media & Values and

• Best Practices.

As the online resource catalog is quite slow, the best way to find relevant titles is to download the full catalog as PDF document and then use the search function of the Adobe Reader using keywords like "citizen", "democracy" etc. When doing so, you'll discover a "toolkit for democracy" including 12 interactive lesson plans suited for high school and up or a very interesting book from David Buckingham, "The Making of Citizens - Young People, News and Politics", which provides a critical background for EDC teachers, etc.

The reading room is organised in five subsections which are quite easy to browse and comprise articles like Renee Hobbs' "Building Citizenship Skills through Media Literacy Education".

Media & Values contains the archive of the Media&Values magazine (published 1977-1993) and therefore is a little bit out-of-date. Nevertheless some editions like that on "Rethinking Democracy: Citizenship in a Media Age" (spring 1992) are still worth having a look at them.

Best Practices finally explores how media literacy ties into the world of education – from standards to case studies to start-up teaching activities. A central feature is CML's MediaLit Kit which succinctly summarizes and articulates the core concepts, key questions and basic principles of media literacy as a new vision of literacy for the 21st century. The editors of the CML consider it a framework for learning and teaching in the media age.

To sum up: The CML certainly is not a typical EDC-website. But it contains interesting articles, ideas and even teaching material which can support teachers and educators of EDC in integrating media education - as an absolutely indispensable part of EDC - in their courses, seminars and teaching activities in general.