In 2005, the author and several colleagues were awarded a five-year grant to create the Center of Excellence for the Advancement of New Literacies in Middle Grades at the College of Charleston. From 2006-2011, they have worked collaboratively with over 200 middle school teachers in underperforming local schools to assist them in stimulating their…

An important challenge for media literacy education in the next decade will be to cultivate a commanding voice in the cultural conversation about new and emerging communication media. To really have a stake in the social, economic and educational developments that emerge around new digital media in the U.S. and globally, media literacy educators…

NAMLE was founded (as the Alliance for a Media Literate America) 10 years ago with a mission "to expand and improve the practice of media literacy education in the United States." There have been many successes since then, and some disappointments. The expansion of media literacy education into schools has fallen into the latter category, with…

Media Literacy Education has definitely come a long way. The author remembers mentioning Media Literacy at a Prix Jeunesse presentation in New York City in the early-mid 1990s-- all the participants looked at him as a weirdo and politely ignored his comment on the necessity for TV producers to include or at least reflect upon media…

The mass media rank among the most important socialization agents influencing the health behaviors of today's youth, with some researchers estimating that youth spend 33-50% of their waking hours with some form of media (Strasburger and Wilson 2002). The impact of the media on health and the large amount of time adolescents spend with media make…

This essay reviews the progress achieved in media literacy education over the past decade and emphasizes the importance of assessment, interdisciplinarity in furthering developing the field. The author says that it's nearly impossible to predict what may be possible for the future of the field over the next 10 years. In another publication, she…

There are those who agree with Tom Pettitt that we are entering into a period where text based literacy is no longer the only measure of intelligence, nor is it the only form of valuable communications and knowledge acquisition for today's media-centric children. As Prensky states, today's youth speak "digital" as their primary language. While his…

Graphic novels are "hot." They show up everywhere from book stores to TV shows. Educators, too, are discovering the possibilities for graphic novels across the curriculum. Among the possibilities, educators can explore the graphic novel as a bildungsroman, a coming of age story--an old genre in the literary canon appearing in a new medium. The…

When the author started working with teachers and students on classroom multimedia productions a little over 10 years ago, he had not yet encountered the term "media literacy", nor did he realize he had joined a long standing international movement of media literacy educators. Serendipitous exposure to "old-media" texts by Neil Postman and Noam…

The field of media literacy education is maturing, as evidenced by the quality of presentations of research and practice shared at the 2010 World Summit on Children and Media in Karlstad. In this article, we offer our reflections on the opportunities and challenges faced by media literacy educators as we build our global community network, develop…

The 5th World Summit on Media for Children and Youth held in Karlstad, Sweden in June 2010 provided a unique media literacy experience for approximately thirty young people from diverse backgrounds through participation in the Global Youth Media Council. This article focuses on the Summit's aim to give young people a "voice" through intercultural…

This paper describes a project called Peace Revolution [http://peacerevolution.net], which provides an opportunity for young people from around the world to learn and share positive messages and activities relating to peace. The Peace Revolution project aims to empower young people via a unique process related to youth development, helping young…

This paper presents and discusses the results of OnAir, a European project on Media Education funded by the European Commission. This two-year project aimed at collecting, documenting, and developing media education practices across Europe, especially in Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. In particular, the paper focuses on…

Empowering children for a critical and judicious use and consumption of media is a main objective of media literacy. This paper aims to examine the range of television programs available for children in Portugal through a comparative analysis of the programming for children broadcast by the four Portuguese terrestrial channels (RTP1, RTP2, SIC and…

School principals play an important role in managing media and technology integration into school teaching since they can foster the use of information communication technologies (ICT) at a strategic level, even supporting the introduction of media literacy education activities into teaching. Starting from a review on the role of principals'…