Master the Media: How Teaching Media Literacy Can Save Our Plugged-in World

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and my guest today is Julie Smith. Julie is the author of Master the Media, How Teaching Media Literacy Can Save Our Plugged-In World.

[00:26] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:28] SPEAKER_02:

Julie, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:30] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me.

[00:32] SPEAKER_02:

So tell us a little bit about what you do in higher ed and at conferences and with audiences around the country in the area of media literacy.

[00:41] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it seems like the first thing I need to do usually with people is explain what media literacy is because people have a lot of misconceptions. If I was a geography teacher or a geometry teacher, it'd be really easy to explain to people what I do because we're familiar with that topic and we understand it and we know where it fits, right? But media literacy is a different animal because we all spend so much time with the mass media, but we don't ever step back and really analyze it. And that's kind of how I explain what I do. So my classes that I teach, I teach at Webster University and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. are based around the critical consumption of the 11 and a half hours a day of media that the average American typically consumes.

[01:20]

So I teach classes on intro to mass media, media literacy, religion in the media, digital media and culture. Anything that's media related is really up my alley. And what's interesting is that I've been able to see the interest in this topic really take off in the last couple of years because I think teachers and parents are starting to realize how important it is.

[01:41] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we most often think about this in terms of a problem. We think, you know, okay, I've got my phone. I'm holding it, you know, 12 hours a day. I'm constantly checking it. And my kids are even worse.

[01:53]

My teenagers are even worse than I am at just kind of being glued to that phone. You know, am I going to get neck problems? But I think... We more often think about, you know, what it's doing to our minds, what it's doing to our relationships.

[02:06]

What do you see as some of the key concerns that educators have around media literacy for their students? Because we've gotten into Twitter as the education profession has kind of adapted. So we're kind of on board with this general idea of, you know, Social media, especially not being a bad thing, but at the same time, attention spans and the ability to read complex text and focus on things for a long time. You know, I think at the back of our minds, we worry, or maybe at the front of our minds, we worry that we're losing some skills as a society. What do you think about that?

[02:43] SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I absolutely agree. Typically, when people hear about media literacy, they assume that anybody that preaches media literacy is anti-media. And I'm not. I'm as much of a junkie as anybody else. But I think what we need to remember is that the media are tools, just like anything else. It depends on how you use them, right?

[03:03]

So is there a problem with our attention span? Absolutely. But did that start with television? Sure. Is there a problem with violence? Absolutely.

[03:10]

But have we been violent since we came out of the caves? Yes. So I'm not sure that the broad negative generalizations about the media are really all that valid. But I think the idea that it doesn't need to be analyzed and evaluated, that's a problem. The struggle I think that teachers have, you know, there's never a teacher or a parent who says, oh yeah, you know, I disagree with what you're trying to teach. The issue really, I think, with a lot of teachers and administrators is where to put it.

[03:45]

It's so cross-curricular, so multidisciplinary that a lot of administrators, even though they are fans of the idea of media literacy, they don't have room in the day to insert it anywhere in the schedule. And so that's something that I think the book does, is help teachers figure out how to insert media literacy ideas in what they're already teaching.

[04:06] SPEAKER_02:

Right, not something that we would add a course on per se, but that we would just kind of have things that we want to help our students accomplish and skills that we want to help them master. What might be some of those media literacy skills? Because we teach things like close and critical reading. to help students really dive into complex text. What are some of the skills for media literacy? I mean, we don't even think sometimes that there are skills there beyond maybe critical thinking and distinguishing fact from opinion and things like that.

[04:40]

So get us into that. What are some of the skills that students need to develop and that we need to develop as adults?

[04:46] SPEAKER_01:

Well, let me go over a couple. I'd like to start with movies, for example. A media literate person can enjoy a movie at a completely different level because they're noticing the decisions that have been made about the construction of the text. I mean, media are texts in the way that a sentence is a text, right? So a media literate person might watch a movie and understand how the lighting is used, how the music is used, how the editing is used to tell a story. So you're aware, much like how we study how authors might put books together, You're aware of how a director makes choices to tell a story using different tools in a film.

[05:28]

Or social media, for example. I always encourage my students to have internal BS detectors. You know, so when they see something come across that they really notice, check the sources. There's so much that gets shared and floated around that's fake and shared by people who are supposed to be really smart, right? So that's where the critical analysis comes in. That little internal red light goes off when you think, you know, I don't think this is actually legit information.

[05:55] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think that's a great one. I think for, uh, for educators, especially, you know, we're always wanting students to cite their sources and cite their evidence and make, uh, evidence-based arguments. And yet you go on Facebook and you see, you know, across the political spectrum, you see these little graphics that say, you know, this terrible thing happened and then there's no citation whatsoever. So you can't click through to, uh, to make sure that, you know, that actually happened or that this is actually a Mark Twain quote. Uh, One of my favorite memes about that is that 50% of everything you see on Facebook is a lie attributed to Mark Twain. Mark Twain's best quote is about how Facebook is inaccurate.

[06:37] SPEAKER_01:

Have you seen the picture with Abraham Lincoln? He says, not everything on the internet is real.

[06:41] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

[06:42] SPEAKER_01:

But our brains – and see, that brings us to actually a media literacy point. Our brains are programmed. When we see a photograph of a person, a black and white photo especially, next to a quote, that gives us credibility. Just like when we see a commercial for some sort of – hair product, for example, and the spokesperson is wearing a white jacket. Well, our brain tells us that that white jacket gives them credibility, even though they're probably an actor. Right.

[07:10]

So it's that it's those kind of tools. And you brought up something, Justin, that I think is worth noticing that the lack of as we get more media mediated, I guess, for lack of a better term, other skills are diminishing. And I kind of play a joke on my students the very first day I ask them to introduce themselves to me and shake my hand. And I count how many of them actually make eye contact with me. And it's not very many, as you can imagine, because they're very comfortable in the texting environment, not so much in the face-to-face environment. So I bring that up later when we're talking about social media and the definition of relationships.

[07:49]

And I tell them so much of their communication happens through media, and a lot of my communication does too. But we have to remember that the really super important stuff still happens face to face. And I'm a huge fan of social media, but if someone is using it to the point where they can no longer maintain eye contact during a conversation, then that becomes a problem. So then you want to ask students or kids the question, What is it about this medium that is so attractive to you? How is this making you feel? Is there an intense fear of missing out that I think a lot of students and kids are victims of, that intense pressure to constantly be online?

[08:32]

You know, the very basic questions, how does this medium make you feel? Why do you use it? What do you expect out of this medium? Just very, very basic questions that I don't think anybody's asking these kids. And that's where I think we need to start.

[08:46] SPEAKER_02:

Well, it sounds like you're talking about metacognition, that not only do we need to be critical consumers of media and critical participants in media, but we need to think about how it's affecting us and we need to teach our students to think about how it's affecting them because it's not always neutral.

[09:01] SPEAKER_01:

No, no, not at all. And in fact, it upsets me because it seems like a lot of times when people are talking about social media, they talk about the bullying.

[09:11] SPEAKER_02:

Mm-hmm.

[09:12] SPEAKER_01:

And I don't think, I mean, I think that is just the very, very bottom of the list of the issues that Instagram, for example, that the effect that Instagram has on middle schoolers and high schoolers. Because what it's doing, essentially, is changing how they value themselves in an attempt to get quantitative affirmation from strangers. And I think that's what we need to be talking about, is that how... I've had a seventh grade girl tell me that she can name the exact number of Instagram followers she has every single day.

[09:48]

She can also name the so-called popular girls who she follows on Instagram that don't follow her back. The social hierarchy that we all endured when we were in middle school and high school still exists, except now it's public and it's quantitative. Yeah, that's kind of scary.

[10:03] SPEAKER_00:

That's pressure.

[10:04] SPEAKER_01:

That is. That's a lot of pressure. I mean, middle school is horrible enough without all that pressure, right? So those are the issues that I think we need to be talking about social media. You know, there will always be bullies. Always.

[10:18]

We can't fix those. So I think we really need to talk about how these media are making our kids feel about how they value themselves and what their worth is.

[10:31] SPEAKER_02:

And give us something on that. How can we teach kids to be more resilient and kind of less reliant on those external indicators? Because I think we all do that a little bit. If you're on Twitter, you kind of look at your follower count and say, oh, do I have a lot of followers? Do I have more followers today than I did yesterday? And that might be just kind of goofy for us as adults, but as you said, for a seventh grader, that can be serious.

[10:53]

That can be very serious. So how do we teach that? How do we teach that kind of metacognition?

[10:58] SPEAKER_01:

I tend to think that really just talking about it is the first step. That awareness that a student or a kid can have about why they use certain media and how they expect it to make them feel. I think that's the first step. But beyond that, I think it depends on the student, and I think it depends on the situation, because every student has a different motive for using social media, right? But the pressure, I think, is the same for every single kid.

[11:29] SPEAKER_02:

Well, tell us a little bit more about the book. What inspired you to write the book, and how do you hope people use it, especially for our audience of school leaders? How do you hope that we get into that and make good use of that?

[11:43] SPEAKER_01:

I, this is going to sound strange, but I feel like I've been kind of screaming into the wind about media literacy for years. Constantly always having to explain to people what it is. And yet I think it's so important, right? It's such a big deal because we spend so much time with the media and define ourselves by it. So I...

[12:01]

had a chance to get to know Dave Burgess the last couple years and he was so interested in the topic and one night I was barking about media literacy and how it needs to be out of the library because everyone assumes that I'm a librarian because I'm a media literacy advocate. I'm not a librarian. It needs to be in every classroom, every age. And he said, well, I think you need to write a book about this. And I thought, I think you're right. And so what I did was basically just pretend that I was talking to a room full of people about why I think this is so important.

[12:37]

And then, instead of just saying, this is really important, I follow up each chapter of the book with QR codes and questions and helpful links to actually implement all of the things that I bring on in the book. So it's not just my call to media literacy education. It's a call to implementing media literacy in the classroom, every classroom, every age, and here's how. Let me show you how to do it. And so I'm using the links in the book because, you know, with the media the way it is, anything that I would have included in the book would have been outdated by the time the book got printed, right? So that's why it's loaded with QR codes that are dynamic and I'm updating them constantly.

[13:22]

So anyone who... gets a copy of the book, has access to all of my media literacy resources, including all the examples that I use in classes with news and film and television and radio and magazines and publishing. So it's not just me barking about media literacy being important. It's me sharing what I have accumulated over the last 15 years.

[13:45]

Because really, Justin, the most important thing to me is that other people start to do what I do. That's what would make me so happy is if other people say, I get it. And I'm going to start doing this too because I think it's so important. So that's kind of where the book came from. And it was really, God, this sounds cliche, but it was really a labor of love because I love this topic so much. It was very, very fun for me to do.

[14:09]

Excellent.

[14:10] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is Master the Media, How Teaching Media Literacy Can Save Our Plugged-In World. And that is available on Amazon and published by our mutual friend Dave Burgess. And probably everyone recognizes the name Dave Burgess, but Dave is the teach like a pirate guy. And Julie, if people want to find you online, where can they locate you and your work online?

[14:32] SPEAKER_01:

Well, my website is actually called medialiteracyed.net. Perfect. So that has a link to the book. It also has a link to a lot of my resources. And I am very accessible on social media, ironically enough.

[14:47]

And I love it when teachers or principals or administrators will reach out to me and say, hey, we'd really like to implement media literacy. How can we do it? I'm more than happy to help out because this is a topic that's very near and dear to my heart.

[14:59] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Julie, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[15:01] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks Justin.

[15:03] SPEAKER_00:

And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[15:08] SPEAKER_02:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Julie Smith? It really sunk in for me as I spoke with Julie about how the same issues that are affecting our students are affecting us as adults when it comes to the way we interact with our devices, our phones, our computers, the media around us. And I think some of the psychological issues have kind of snuck up on us. The sense...

[15:33]

that we're always seeking validation in the form of likes and retweets and things like that. And I think this falls under the category of social and emotional learning, which is something that we're finally paying more attention to in our classrooms. And we probably need to continue to pay more and more attention to it. So I hope you'll take Julie's advice in learning more about media literacy and looking at how we can help our students to develop the confidence and develop the literacy with these new media that they need to be successful, to be confident, to not be distracted or dragged down. And also so that we can understand what other skills we need to teach in order to respond to the changes that media are bringing. And I certainly believe that newer media can be a great thing.

[16:18]

You can find me on Twitter at Eduleadership. And I think thousands and thousands of educators are connecting there and finding some new possibilities. I've also been experimenting with Periscope, the live video streaming app. And these media can allow us to do new things. So I think it's worth exploring. But one of my big takeaways from talking with Julie is that metacognition issue.

[16:39]

We need to think about how all of these things affect us, the way we see ourselves, the way we think, and we need to help our students adapt to those impacts as well.

[16:48] Announcer:

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