Critical Media Literacies in Teacher Education

Introduction

The notion of young people needing to be “media literate” has a relatively long history (see below) despite the seemingly very modern preoccupation with ideas such as “fake news” and “fact-checking.” However, there is now the perception that media literacy is at a crucial point in its own existence as a field of study, primarily because of the explosion of digital technologies and platforms which allow young people to generate content but also because there is a wider debate in terms of both what schools need to know about this explosion and what teachers might be reasonably expected to teach about it.

A Short History of Critical Media Literacies

Critical media literacy probably has at least some of its origins in the work of the Frankfurt School, where the idea was first put forward that there might be a need to “protect” people from the tendency of popular culture and media to replicate the capitalist status quo. This “inoculative” view of media literacy, easily...