Media-savvy kids: for students inundated by images, critical thinking skills help sort fact from fiction

We are deluged every day by a steady stream of noise and images. Children seem especially vulnerable to the pace, the pitches, and the pounding sounds as media defines what is fun, relevant, and important.

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According to research, elementary-age children spend an average of four and a half hours a day in front of a television screen, computer monitor, or video game. But schools may not be helping young viewers handle what they're seeing and hearing.

"How do we prepare kids for living in a society where almost all their information and entertainment comes to them through a screen?" asks Renee Hobbs, Ed.D., director of the Media Education Lab at Temple University in Philadelphia.

The answer: We teach media literacy, which trains children to think critically about both the overt and subtle media messages that wash over them every day. Media literacy--the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce communication in a variety of forms--is growing in importance in schools across the country.

"Children take all media messages as truth--and I think that's a big problem. It's not going to help us as a society," says Lorenza Yarnes, a third-grade teacher at Leo Politi Elementary School in Los Angeles.

Policymakers agree. Today, all 50 states mandate some form of media literacy as part of their educational framework. Seven states, including Texas and Maryland, have made it a separate strand in their standards. But in many states, teachers are finding little guidance for helping their kids become media-savvy. Teaching to statewide testing standards often leaves little time to create independent media literacy units. In recent years, the growing trend is to teach media literacy not as a subject in itself, but as a way to approach the entire curriculum.

"Teachers say to me, 'I can't teach media literacy because I have too much already on my plate,'" says Elizabeth Thoman, founder of the Center for Media Literacy, an information clearinghouse. "But what you're really doing with media literacy is using examples from the media as the raw material to teach critical-thinking skills."

"Many teachers are doing media literacy already. They just aren't calling it that," says Faith Rogow, Ph.D., founding president of the Alliance for a Media Literate America, an umbrella organization for educators.

Media literacy is "a process, not a content area," explains Cyndy Scheibe, executive director of Project Look Sharp, a media literacy training program at the Center for Teacher Education at Ithaca College in New York. It is "an approach to teaching, a different way of teaching, rather than more 'stuff' to teach," she says.

The five basic questions of media literacy (see box, above), suggests Thoman, can be applied "to any message, in any format, in a structured, consistent way." Students can use these five questions to examine everything from Saturday morning commercials to newspaper articles to young adult novels.

Engaging the Disengaged

Students trained in media literacy spend less time watching TV and playing video games, according to studies by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. They may also become less aggressive and more skeptical of smoking and liquor ads. And being media savvy even leads to improved reading and listening comprehension scores on standardized tests. Furthermore, teachers report that media literacy often pulls in marginal students who are otherwise disengaged. It puts students from both print-literate and non-print-literate households on more equal footing, helps students learn collaborative skills, and raises kids' excitement level.

Changes in the Classroom

When students write, shoot, and edit their own videos on Macs, teaching media literacy can be high-tech. But it can also be as low-tech as teaching the computation of square inches by using rulers to calculate the inches in newspaper columns. That lesson can be a springboard to calculating ad revenues important to a newspaper. Today, teachers are incorporating both high- and low-tech media literacy lessons into such areas as technology, persuasive writing, library skills, health, and the arts. Here are just a few of the innovative ways some teachers use media literacy in their classrooms.

Fantasy and Reality

Carol Dentes Wilhelm's kindergartners at South Hill Elementary School in Ithaca, New York, know that Froot Loops and Tang are not exactly fruit, and that television ads are not exactly true.

That's because Wilhelm's students placed large paper cutouts of the FDA Food Pyramid on the floor, sorted their favorite foods into the categories, and learned what "100%" on the ingredients panel really looks like.

The children "were totally amazed that Tang wasn't a fruit or a juice and belonged more to the sugar group," recalls Wilhelm.

To her, this activity is a media literacy lesson. The students were "accessing, analyzing, and evaluating" the messages available to them on the cereal box. As she guided the class through a lesson on fantasy versus reality, Wilhelm showed a taped video of the products' television ads. The children quickly concluded that fruit or boats can't dance merrily on their own in real life. "I have students look for the 'tricks' being used," she says. "The word 'trick' is very important because it becomes a fun challenge for the students and empowers them, as opposed to saying, 'Someone's lying to you so you'd better be suspicious.' Empowerment is the key." Wilhelm wants her students to see themselves as active participants, rather than passive observers of media. "They have the power to create media themselves, not just to be the receivers of it," she says.