New Media Literacy Education (NMLE): A Developmental Approach

Abstract

Despite the efforts made by the media literacy movement in the U.S. to institute media education as a means of addressing social issues, there still exists the potential for a more politically empowering media literacy education.While media literacy scholars and practitioners' avoidance of adopting particular political or social agendas is understandable, others have noted that while an apolitical media literacy curriculum might be easier to pitch to schools and parents, this approach is ultimately inadequate at addressing problems that plague modern society (Lewis and Jhally 1998;Kellner and Share 2005, 2007).This paper argues that by reexamining the foundational philosophies of Plato and John Dewey, tracing the development of their ideas in contemporary social theory and media scholarship, and identifying their application in media literacy scholarship, we may be able to create a media literacy education that more effectively confronts injustice and promotes social change.I call this process the 're-politicization of media literacy education' because I argue that at the heart of the philosophies of Plato and Dewey, from which current approaches to media education commonly draw, is a commitment to the creation of a just society through critical civic engagement. PlatoThe writings of Plato, describing the dialogues engaged in by the Greek philosopher Socrates, account for some of the most foundational theoretical principles underlying Western thought in general, and the fields of communication and education in particular.To distill the entirety of Plato's philosophical work into a few key concepts is inevitably inadequate.But for the purposes of this paper, I have identified some salient themes from some of Plato's most well-known

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.