Media Studies and Digital Literacies: A Rationale

Will this debate of whether or not digital literacies and media studies are a waste of time ever end?

Our current curriculum focuses on reading texts such as poetry, short stories, and novels; writing expository essays with evidence and commentary; and effectively telling personal narratives in print format. As usual, our current method of teaching these skills comes down to paper, pencils, and the occasional trip to the computer lab to simply type up what we have already handwritten.

To ignore the untapped resources available with our fabulous computers is a sin. All of the things we have been teaching our students are definitely useful, but given everything that has happened with technology in the past 20 years, we owe it to our students and society to start utilizing these things in the classroom so that our students can actually understand, analyze, and use them.

Reading and Analyzing Texts:
No one would argue that this is important. However, there is more than one way to go about doing it. The internet is full of short stories, poetry, news articles, how-to writings, and various commentaries on endless subjects. Rather than simply reading and discussing what we have in our textbooks, we can send students on “missions” to find both effective and non effective examples of poems, short stories, news articles, etc. We would be teaching them how to first find information and then how to analyze it looking for deeper meanings, hidden agendas, and overall correctness. We would fulfill all the same goals as before, but we would do so with a 21st century method, for which local and national employers will praise us once these students hit the work force.

Writing Expository Essays:
Rather than just throwing down some point/proof/commentary on a piece of paper that a teacher is going to read, why can’t we have students use blogs and wikis? When students write for an actual audience, they are more likely to put increased effort into their final product as opposed to a piece that will only be read by their Language Arts teacher. In addition to publishing work on the internet, students could search other blogs and wikis to see examples of similar work. This would both help feed their minds in approaching assignments and show them how wide of an audience they can potentially reach by posting online. Students could also see and comment on the work of their peers in a helpful manner thus yielding an even more positive product. In many cases, debate on the assigned/chosen topic of each essay may result, which would only increase student learning.

Personal Narratives/Short Stories:
This aspect of the curriculum would be enhanced by all the reasons in the “Writing Expository Essays” suggest, but would also provide a way for students to build community in the classroom by sharing and commenting on each others’ experiences. The entire process would be improved even more if teachers included some of their own work on a class blog or wiki.

In short, digital literacies are only gaining importance in today’s world. Multimodality is the way of the future as indicated by Beach, MTV, VH1, The Disney Channel, and even our new president with his fancy Blackberry, Twitter account, and other web communication tools. If we want our students to compete on the world stage, we must embrace these new modes of expression in order to teach our students how to use them effectively and responsibly. To not do this would be unethical and detrimental.

To accomplish this rather intense goal, it will be necessary for current teachers to undergo professional development experiences that will teach them how to present media studies and digital literacies in an effective manner. We need to know how to present media as a text rather than a passive experience such as watching a movie and answering a few questions. A shared process and language to this effect is the first step in preparing our students for a 21st century society.