Media Literacy Pedagogy: Critical and New/Twenty-First-Century Literacies Instruction

This article offers a conceptualization of media literacy pedagogy in light of National Education Technology Plan efforts, which name teaching as one of five essential areas to build an education system that can increase as well as sustain the United States' economic growth and prosperity in the global economy. In particular, two distinct forms - critical media literacy, with origins in the Frankfurt and cultural studies tradition, and new/twenty-first-century literacies instruction, the result of socio-linguistic and ethnographic traditions - can be evaluated from Fenstermacher & Richardson's quality in teaching model that includes assessment based on the process-product paradigm, cognitive science, and constructivism. This article concludes that, while all three of these research programs may help to gauge media literacy models of pedagogy in general, constructivism, and to a lesser extent cognitive science, may be the most appropriate paradigms. Ways in which to teach media literacy have caught the attention of federal stakeholders, in so far as such instruction can help to leverage the world standing of the United States' economy. The current Obama administration is pouring millions of dollars into 'connected teaching', a frame that helps K through 12 teachers of all subject matters to improve their practice by being connected - virtually speaking - to all kinds of media technology, which would allow twenty-four-hour access to the latest trends in their respective subject fields. This access is presumed to optimize learning performance outcomes of our students. Meanwhile, one could argue that literacy educators, who have adopted media literacy pedagogy, have been at the forefront of advancing the connected teaching model, perhaps albeit unknowingly, for decades to stay abreast of cutting-edge media texts, tools, and technologies (Hobbs, 2007) that influence the out-of-school literacy practices of our nation's kids. In particular, pedagogues of critical and new/twenty-first-century literacies embrace technology-laden - though not necessarily technology-driven - instruction that challenges hierarchical readings of various media and acknowledgement of students' use with media as a segue into development of higher-order skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving (NCTE, 2007). Accordingly, one might argue then that connected teaching, from a media literacy standpoint, can best be realized from a quality in teaching model that makes use of constructivism and, to some extent, cognitive science more than conventional process-product teaching. This article charts a conceptual framework of media literacy pedagogy, which includes a means to understand practitioner-level quality of instruction when one is engaged in teaching media literacy. The article opens with a conceptualization of media literacy pedagogy, and moves to cover theory of critical and new literacies instruction. Fused into the discussion is the connected teaching idea from the National Education Technology Plan (NETP), and its relationship with media literacy pedagogy. In addition, this article draws from Fenstermacher & Richardson's (2005) 'quality in teaching' model that looks at three dominant fields of teaching - process-product, cognitive science, and constructivism - all of which, one may argue, can be employed as a means