Privileging materiality, action, care and kinship in critical media literacy education

The International Media Literacy Symposium was a gathering of acutely caring scholar-educators deftly zeroing in on problems of social and ecological injustices embedded in our media cultures and sharing research aimed at tackling these problems through various educational practices. The panel I participated in was about the similarities, connections and gaps  in media and information literacy theories and practices. This panel came about because of my participation in the Winter 2023 special issue of the Journal of Media Literacy on this topic, along with my dear colleague and co-author Alaa Al-Musalli, and we cherished the opportunity for a rich discussion with esteemed panellists Karen Ambrosh, Spencer Brayton, David Buckingham, and Natasha Casey. The article that Al-Musalli and I wrote joked that we are “lost in the literacies,” and I arrived at the symposium with the goal of finding threads to challenge, reconsider and enrich my thinking and pedagogical strategies for media literacy education. My desire for a reconsideration of media literacy has felt urgent as I ever-increasingly struggle to comprehend and design learning about the anti-democratic harms produced by disinformation. As I listened to panels and roundtables at the symposium, and engaged in insightful espresso-fueled conversations in the library coffee shop, I arrived at four concepts that symposium participants kept highlighting in their presentations on media literacy research: materiality, action, care and kinship. This reflection aims to define and track these concepts as an offering of a productive summary of symposium sessions embedded with hope for continued bolstering of media literacy strategies capable of addressing the urgent crises produced by our current post-truth era. 

Materiality

I understand materiality to be a recognition of lived experience, and also the ways social structures impact or influence lived experience. Materiality can be both affective and ontological; both how we feel as well as our condition of existing within social structures. In the keynote panel on day one, Antonio Lopez emphasized affect in media and cinema studies, notably for students studying cinema for media-making practices. An emphasis on affect, according to Lopez, might situate students more firmly in relation to audiences and impact of cinematic or digital media work, and help students critically examine their role in shaping social discourses that have material effects. A similar connection between media practice and materiality was in Mariana Och’s description of her in-depth critical algorithmic literacy (CAL) project. Och’s CAL project de-emphasized instrumental approaches to understanding algorithms, and asked students to instead explore how algorithms determine access to both information and  representation in relation to students’ lives. Similarly, Steve Connolly’s talk on “techne pedagogy” emphasized the possibility for social theory to be realized through creative digital media practices. These presentations connected the processes of media-making and media-use to both an understanding of social structures and the ways digital media impacts life.

Some of the presentations spoke more directly to media projects and theories attending to contemporary humanitarian or ecological crises and work being done to attend to these crises. Meredith Baldi and Prescott Seraydararian from George School presented on a service-learning program in their secondary school wherein the students used their digital media skills for producing podcasts, social media posts, short videos and magazine content for a non-governmental organization (NGO) doing work to support Palestinian and other refugees in Greece. Their presentation showed how critical media production literacies can be engaged through carefully considered content-creation with an emphasis on privacy, ethics, and self-determination for media subjects. 

Content analysis was emphasized by Yasamina Molana as a productive methodology for showing the gaps in Iranian news coverage of significant ecological changes and devastation in Iran, particularly gaps between sensational international news coverage and more local environmental issues. Molana’s presentation served as a reminder of the importance to situate media literacy learning close to home for students as a way to connect and critically evaluate wider media discourses in relation to personal or local contexts. In the same session, Antonio Lopez provided a framework for ecomedia literacy that helps students recognize how corporate publicity produces greenwashing that masks or diverts attention away from a company’s environmental harm and responsibility. This framework asks students to analyze greenwashing examples using the “five E’s: enclosure, extraction, expendability, exploitation, and externalization” (Lopez). The five “E’s” help students see the way corporate marketing distances or “externalizes” and “encloses” environmental issues so that there is a disconnection between corporate action and material impact. These examples show the importance of designing media literacy learning to think with social concepts through critical media-making processes towards action for change. 

Action

The symposium featured many approaches to action and reaction in media literacy education. The panel I presented in yielded commentary about the problems facing media and information literacy noting that they are: political (Al-Musalli, Buckingham), epistemological (Buckingham), and are problems that require strategies for connections beyond our silos (Ambrosh) and narrow work fields such as libraries (Brayton). Buckingham traced these problems to elitism, binary thinking, and behemoth legacy media corporations and their alienating outdated practices. The action suggested in the panel was the centring of people and relational media literacy strategies, building capacity and spaces for dialogical and discomforting discussions outside of our usual social and professional spheres. Al-Musalli even referred to this as “teaching anxiety” about information within human-centred and political contexts. 

The actions noted in Jessica Jabr and Zeina Abi Assy’s roundtable gave an overview of how  design-thinking exercises to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can support social and ecological justice. Jabr and Abi Assy’s work uses design-thinking and design education to challenge and open up justice-oriented possibilities within AI and other digital design. 

Other actions included policy and regulation. Antonio Lopez offered that some digital media platforms are choosing to self-regulate as a means of addressing the social and ecological problems associated with disinformation. Lopez noted that self-regulation can be undertaken disingenuously, and can fall short on needed interventions and broader social considerations. The importance of media policy and regulation is, what I believe, one of the many contributions of Carol Arcus that was recognized at the symposium with the Jessie McCanse Award for Significant Contributions to the Field of Media Literacy Education. Carol’s work was also recognized for her persistent commitment to the “tedium of daily curriculum design” for justice. Carol’s presentation emphasized the importance of always moving critical media literacy principles forward by picking up, and attending to tasks one day at a time in different educational actions from policy to program design. I appreciated Carol’s reminder that media literacy education is iterative. It is about always building, assessing and renewing taxonomies, rubrics, learning outcomes, and active learning exercises that are responsive to our students and our local and international communities. This dogged attentiveness is also a care-pursuit, emphatically listening and adjusting our teaching as we learn, our students learn and social or environmental contexts require us to act.

Care

In the keynote, Antonio Lopez asserted that “media literacy is a care discipline” and cautioned that this needs to be distinguished and differentiated from corporate “care-washing.” As a care discipline, Lopez reinforced that critical media and ecomedia literacy is based on building affinities in educational communities, and studying topics based on power imbalances, empathy and ethics. Lopez suggested that student learning should be based on what students care about, and emphasized that a core literacy learning outcome should be students’ ability to communicate their care. David Buckingham responded with the comment that media literacy must be practiced “beyond instrumental effectiveness” towards care for people and behaviors; I understood Buckingham’s comment as a move to push media literacy beyond fact-checking towards the study of social structures and behaviors within these structures. Thinking with what Buckingham and Lopez offered, media literacy learning needs to ask students to grapple with questions about  who receives or doesn’t receive care, what is evidence or expression of care, and what does this care produce or influence? 

Care was also framed by Georgios Terzis and Dariusz Kloza as an ethical stance to allow for privacy and the option to “opt-out” of digital life. This ethical stance would produce digital justice by ensuring equitable access to analogue processes for active and connected citizenship. Citizenship can be thought of as the ability, and perhaps responsibility, to participate in communal life, and according to Terzis and Kloza, media literacy frameworks need to consider how citizenship can be served outside of digital media platforms.

Kinship

Kinship is a term I understand as the bonds we build in the various community structures we live in whether familial, neighborly, cultural, or in other public and private spheres. I am starting this section with Antonio Lopez’s work again as his scholarship in ecomedia literacy most overtly connects or spans the categories I have identified in this writing. Lopez’s work reminds me that kinship is not just connections and community amongst humans, but that kinship includes the non-human world. Thus, Lopez’s ecomedia literacy asks us to move away from neoliberal notions of individual responsibility towards considering how kinship is implied through the impact of mediated information on both humans and non-humans. For educational practices, then, media topics that are political, social and ecological can be evaluated based on how they relate to kinship structures and impact collective life. 

Evanna Ratner’s presentation on media literacy during time of war was an exceptionally moving call to centre empathy in media literacy by showing how the trauma of war impacts educators, citizens and journalists and both proliferates disinformation and media literacy approaches to combat disinformation. Ratner stated that “Israeli journalists are patriotic and it creates bias in mainstream news” and despite this bias showed examples of empathetic communication between Israeli and Palestinian citizens on TikTok. Ratner’s talk highlighted the importance of seeking emergent kinship structures during times of extreme humanitarian crisis as a means of moving the hard work of media literacy forward with urgent care and compassion. Despite my limited personal experience of war, I recognized in Ratner’s work a deeply humanizing imperative to discover and build connections across differences, even differences that are producing extreme violence in socio-political contexts. This lesson has had a lasting impact in the weeks and, now months, after the conference and has underscored for me the way that the daily tedium of my own scholarly and educational development work needs to centre deep care for the communities I engage with despite difference.

Conclusion

These categories of materiality, action, care and kinship interrelate and overlap. Admittedly, many of my session summaries should exist in all of these categories, but my aim here was to articulate examples within each towards some take-aways for media literacy education practice. With respect to educational development and instructional design of media literacy education, three educational priorities emerge:

1. Media literacy education should be active, student-centered and focused on determining what learning is taking place, understanding how learners are engaging with information and learning assessments, and how learners engage or mobilize their learning;
2. Media literacy education should actively engage with lived experience, material impact, social context, and centre education topics that learners care about; and
3. Media literacy education should be undertaken relationally with an emphasis on community-mindedness, including care for human and non-human existence.

These educational priorities are broad enough that they can apply to a variety of our work from instructional design and pedagogical approaches, to program development to media literacy policy and research. None of these strategies are specifically about fact-checking, a limited practice noted throughout the symposium, but all of these strategies can consider information with critical care. Media literacy practices surely must seek notions of informational accuracy that are grounded by concepts such as social responsibility, relationality, and ecological impact. In the keynote panel Sally Reynolds asked us “what does good media and information literacy assessment look like?” As Al-Musalli and I noted in our Winter 2023 JML article that summarized critical media and disinformation media literacy taxonomies, we shared that we are lost in the literacies, so Reynolds’ question underscores our concerns. Coming away from the International Media Literacy Research Symposium, though, I am inspired to ensure that relational care and action can exist in learning outcomes and assessments. 

Three presentations advocated for educational approaches that are aligned with the educational priorities I note above:

1. Julian McDougall’s presentation on media literacy and theory of change emphasized precise and exploratory approaches to media literacy over prescriptive actions. McDougall’s talk advocated for concise planning in media curriculum, pedagogy or policy development with affordances for experimentation and discovery, and to assess media literacy actions based on positive social change. I appreciated the encouragement to proceed in our media literacy work with both precision and affordance for non-traditional or creative methodologies. 
2. Michael Hoechsmann called on us to move the word “disinformation to a verb” so that we can respond more directly to the political and social harms undertaken through the actions of intentionally spreading inaccurate and often violent information. I found this suggestion incredibly poignant because to disinform is often to undermine democracy, to refuse justice, and so on.
3. Mari-Liis Madisson commented in her presentation on disinformation literacy training for military personnel in Estonia that it was important for the students to have the opportunity to learn to deconstruct challenging disinformation examples and to avoid easy examples. In other words, if media literacy tools and processes are offered to students, it is important to give them ample time to work through and discover the disinformation through detailed, complex or nuanced cases. I was struck that this kind of  trust in the students’ abilities likely builds relationality between instructors and students, and yields a more significant learning experience.  

I have one last comment: the concepts in this reflection are explored through my note-taking process during the symposia and have omitted many presenters and may unintentionally misrepresent the work of many presenters, and for this respected colleagues, I am sorry. Overall, I was in awe of the creative, critical and ethical depth of each presenter’s work, especially in how well your work integrated a deep care for realizing justice through media cultures and education.