Media Literacy is Contextual and Relational

Abstract

This article describes how a high school science teacher incorporated Eco Media Literacy into an elective Sustainability course in a suburban high school. A variety of materials were used to source the curriculum with an emphasis on Eco Media Literacy specifically,Environmental Ideology and Discourses. The various contexts that impact media literacy in a classroom are shared. It sheds light on how relationships can be developed and maintained in a classroom as an important aspect to media literacy content integration.

Keywords

Media Literacy, Contextual, Relational, Eco Media Literacy, Sustainability, High School, Open Educational Resource

I believe in the power of the personal story. This is my story of how I incorporated Ecomedia literacy into my Applications of Sustainability course in a suburban high school. One of my core beliefs is that education is contextual and relational. This means that media literacy is also contextual and relational. The implementation of media literacy in any classroom is impacted by national, state, district and classroom contexts. Each context is different and unique. Relationships within the classroom between teachers and students and student to student also impact media literacy. This paper tells the story of my national, state, district and classroom contexts. It is the story about how I daily work to create relationships with my students. I hope you find something that resonates with you and your own educational context. 

Let’s begin with context. My national context is the United States of America. In April of 2024 the Pew Research Center released a report entitled What’s it Like To Be a Teacher in America Today. It paints a dim view from teachers who are exhausted and burnt out. Of the teachers surveyed 77% say their job is frequently stressful, 68 % say it’s overwhelming, 70% say their school is understaffed and 52% say they would not advise a young person to enter the teaching profession (2024). Post pandemic, teachers are leaving the classroom earlier. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,in 2022 there were 567,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools than there were before the pandemic (Jotkoff, 2022). A survey of teachers conducted by the National Education Association in 2022 found that 90% of their members say that burnout is a problem (Jotkoff, 2022). This national context plays out in my daily interactions with my colleagues. Many conversations I have with younger teachers revolve around their desire to get out of education and find a new career. The question I am most often asked at work is how much longer I have until I can retire. Teachers are hanging on for dear life. I see young first and second year teachers fleeing the profession. This national content is important for media literacy organizations within the U.S. to understand. Expecting teachers to incorporate media literacy into their classrooms is a huge ask. Teachers nationwide are being asked to do more and more with less and less resources at their disposal. They feel piled upon. They are tired. 

National media literacy organizations that want to promote media literacy need to ask themselves what they are doing to support classroom teachers in this endeavor. High quality professional development along with editable resources that teachers can modify to fit their contexts would be helpful. Ask teachers what they need to incorporate media literacy into their classrooms, listen to their answers and provide appropriate support. Prescriptive, sweeping generalizations will not help teachers who are already struggling. 

My state context is Illinois. In 2021 the Illinois state legislature passed Public Act 102-0055 requiring a unit of instruction in media literacy in public high schools, starting with the 2022-2023 school year. However there is no data on implementation. Are these units being taught across the state? Currently no one knows the answer to this question. 

There is a gulf between policy and implementation. Research is needed to determine if these media literacy units are being taught and what are the variables that facilitate implementation and those that inhibit it. This information would go a long way in crafting media literacy policy that has classroom viability. The input of teachers is crucial to this process. Teachers’ experiential knowledge and expertise needs to be respected and utilized. Passing policy without the input of teachers who are being asked to do the work is not a strategy that will not achieve the goal of incorporating media literacy into classrooms. 

I work in a large suburban school district. All students and teachers are equipped with an iPad that the district provides. Students and teachers can share their screens to the classroom projector. During the pandemic there was a switch from an eight period day to a four block schedule. We continue to use the block schedule. Classes are 85 minutes long. The Applications of Sustainability course I taught in the spring of 2024 was created as part of the district initiative for career pathways. 

My classroom context was a semester elective science class called Applications of Sustainability. It was a small class of twelve students. This class contained one Autistic Student, one English Language learner, and two students with 504 plans. The class had students from all grade levels. There were two freshmen, one sophomore, one junior and eight seniors. The class was composed of eight males and four female students. The racial breakdown was four White students, one Asian student, one Southeast Asian student and six Latinx students. I identify as a White Ashkenazi Jewish woman. Classrooms are not neutral spaces. All members of the classroom community bring who they are and their experiences with them into the room. 

It is within the classroom context that relationships are built and maintained, both student to student and student to teacher. These relationships are essential in incorporating media literacy into any course. Every day I worked to build relationships with my students. I want my students to know who I am. Everyday I try to learn who my students are. I am my authentic self with my students in the hopes that this frees them to be their authentic selves with me and their classmates. It is a daily practice. There are two ways I go about building and maintaining relationships with my students. The first is Question of The Day. At the beginning of every class period I ask my students a question. Sometimes it’s a silly, would you rather, question. Some days it’s a mood check in. Sometimes it is a question about what media my students are watching, what music they are listening to or what shows they are binge watching. 

The second way I build relationships with my students is by creating a class playlist of songs. Every student contributes and I contribute as well. I consider this a culture exchange as a Gen Xer who grew up watching MTV, listening to college radio and to house music on the local Chicago radio stations. I am always fascinated by what music my students are listening to. I am interested in my students’ personal experiences with social media. A question I use that has generated classroom discussion is “ What is one thing you would change about social media”. I take time in the classroom to hear how my students are navigating that online space. There is a place for discussion of popular culture in classrooms. This makes my classroom a more relevant space where students’ online experiences can be shared and contemplated.

Incorporating music and learning about what my students are experiencing outside of school and online makes my classroom a site of joy and sharing. It serves to build a classroom community where students can hear the perspectives of others. I have been inspired since the beginning of my educational career by a Marshall McLuhan quote ” Education must always concentrate its resources at the point of major information intake. But from what sources do growing minds nowadays acquire most factual data and how much critical awareness is conferred at these points?” (McLuhan , 1969). My answer to this question is simply the media they consume. As social media platforms come and go, students are still gathering information about themselves and their world through media. My goal is always to help them think critically about what media they consume and create.

There are two media literacy principles at play here. The first and to me the most important is that all people negotiate media differently. We bring our whole selves to the media we consume and our understanding of it is distinguished by our positionality and how we identify. The same goes for students. The second is all media have ideologies embedded. During casual conversation with my students we were discussing the Netflix show Dating on the Spectrum. I shared with them my concerns around the exploitation of neurodivergent people on the show and what drives me to watch. My autistic student was able to share his perspective on the show with his neurotypical classmates. These casual conversations help students understand that different people can respond differently to the same piece of media. 

At the start of the semester I used two lessons from Antontio Lopez’s ecomedia literacy website. The lessons I used were Environmental Ideology and Environmental Discourses (Lopez,2024). The site provided google slides for these lessons. Because the website is an Open Educational Resource (OER), I had the ability to make a copy and make modifications to the content to serve my students. I had to front load vocabulary for my ELL student, my freshman students and my students who required accommodations. I also knew my students needed practice with identifying ideologies and discourses. To that end I created an assignment that had my students mining their social media feed for environmental organizations, or individuals who identify as environmental activists. They were asked to determine the positionality of the person or organization, the environmental ideology and discourse and provide evidence to support their position. I made the faulty assumption that students who enrolled in this course were already following such organizations and or individuals. I was mistaken. This activity led to a conversation around algorithmic literacy since students experienced first hand how searching for environmental messages on social media affected their feeds. I used materials from Common Sense media and we did a lesson on filter bubbles (2024). Students interrogated what they were seeing on their social media feeds and also what they weren’t seeing as well. I shared my own experiences with this alongside my students. This gives students an understanding of how social media delivers content to them. One student suggested we watch an Ali G video where he interviews Christine Todd Whitman who at the time was the head of the EPA along with his interactions with members of Earth First. After I previewed the video, I shared it with the class and we continued our discussion around environmental ideologies and discourses. ( Insert Figure 1 here ) This thread was maintained throughout the course and any media we encountered during the semester was subject to this analysis. Even after watching Wall E. 

I used the Story of Stuff video on YouTube and a curriculum called Buy, Use, Toss, A Closer Look at The Things We Buy from Facing The Future, Western Washington University (2024). The curriculum was created in 2010 and I had to update and redesign lessons to make the curriculum current. After introducing the unit with the Story of Stuff video, we continued to inquire who is telling the Story of Stuff, who do we not hear from and what is the environmental ideology and discourse of the video. One lesson had students tabulating the number of advertisements they encountered when online. Another lesson I modified to look at the social, environmental and economic impact of the mining of cobalt in the Congo to make cell phones. Students then had to come up with ways to make the cell phone ,so integral to their daily lives, more sustainable. We discussed fast fashion and its environmental impact. Where do they purchase their clothes? The final project was to take an existing product and make it more sustainable or create entirely new ones that would be sustainable. As part of the project students had to create an ad. They used generative AI to produce images. This led to a discussion around the sustainability of AI. We read about the water usage and waste heat generated from using AI. Again I asked my students to think of how AI could be more sustainable. This curriculum enabled me to take the materials of my student’s daily life, their phones, their clothes, and their experiences on line and put them all up for examination within the classroom.

Another focus for me in this course was introducing my students to Environmental Racism. When discussing Climate Change the burden of the effects often fall on communities of color and low income people . I used the climate Crisis Timeline from the Zinn Education project (2024). I also used lessons from People’s Curriculum For The Earth (2014). (Insert figure 2) As a non native person I tried to expose my students to Indigenous approaches to the environment. One example of Environmental Racism examined in the class was the water Crisis in Flint Michigan. I used materials from the Teach Rock organization called The Science and Civics of the Flint Water Crisis (2024). One lesson had students examining the Lyrics of a song by Vic Mensa Shades of Blue which references Flint Michigan. Again I was able to use the resources and modify them for my students. We listened to Shades of Blue and I provided my students with paper copies of the lyrics. Unfortunately due to time restraints I did not have the opportunity to do more analysis with the lyrics. 

Despite being burnt out and overwhelmed, everyday teachers continue to enter classrooms and do the best they can for the students in front of them with the resources they have at hand. Teachers would benefit from more resources being Open Education Resources (OER) that allow teachers to modify them to fit their unique and multiple contexts. Teaching and Media Literacy are contextual and relational. Incorporating Media Literacy into any classroom can serve to strengthen connections between students and teachers. It can provide a space for relationships to develop and for both students and teachers to begin to hear and see each other as individuals. Classrooms can be places where students interrogate their online experiences with a trusted adult. Media Literacy in the classroom can produce both joy and rigor. Thank you for taking the time to read my story. What’s yours? 

References

Bigelow, B. and Tim Swineheart, Editors (2014). A People’s Curriculum For Earth Teaching Climate Change And The Environmental Crisis. Rethinking Schools. 

Common Sense Media. (2024). Filter Bubble Trouble. Commonsense Media. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship/lesson/filter-bubble-trouble

Facing the Future, Western Washington University, “Buy, Use, Toss? A Closer Look at the Things We Buy – An Interdisciplinary Curriculum Recommended for Grades 9–12” (2010). Facing the Future Publications. 12. https://cedar.wwu.edu/ftf_allpublications/12 

Jotkoff, E. (2022, February 1). NEA survey: Massive staff shortages in schools leading to educator burnout; alarming number of educators indicating they plan to leave the profession. NEA. Retrieved August 1, 2024, from https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/nea-survey-massive-staff-shortages-schools-leading-educator-burnout-alarming-number-educators. 

Lopez, A. (2024). Environmental Ideology: A Spectrum of Environmental WorldViews. Ecomedialiteracy.org. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://ecomedialiteracy.org/environmental-ideology-a-spectrum-of-environmental-worldviews.

McLuhan , M. (1969). Counterblast (p. 119). Harcourt , Brace & World Inc. 

Pew Research Center, April 2024, “ What It’s Like To Be A Teacher In America Today?”

Teach Rock (n.d.). The Science and Civics of The Flint Water Crisis. Retrieved May 10, 2024, from https://teachrock.org/lesson/the-science-and-civics-of-the-flint-water-crisis-high-school-version/ Zinn Education Project (2024). The Climate Crisis Has a Timeline. Retrieved January 10, 2024, from https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/embed/1943738/4896488311.