Jeff Share weighs in on California’s new media literacy requirement

Last fall, California’s legislature passed and Governor Newsom signed new legislation requiring K-12 schools to teach students about media literacy.  Beginning this year, the new law, Assembly Bill 873, requires the integration of media literacy content across mathematics, sciences, and history-social science curriculum.

Faculty and researchers at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies have long been engaged in the effort to address issues of media literacy, providing training, resources and support to educators, and working to understand and address issues of bias, representation, and justice.  Recently, the school has launched a new Information and Media Literacy minor offering students courses providing a systematic, focused, and critical introduction to information and media literacy. 

Lecturer Jeff Share is one of the UCLA Ed & IS faculty members who is deeply engaged in issues of critical media literacy. Over the past decade, he has worked with UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Douglas Kellner to research media literacy, with a focus on the critical aspect of the field, exploring the politics of representation, and seeking to center the issues of social and environmental justice. Share created and has been teaching a course in critical media literacy that is required for all new teacher candidates in the UCLA Teacher Education Program, and currently teaches three courses in the new UCLA media literacy minor. 

Among other publications, Share wrote “Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read and Create Media,” is the co-author of  “Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference,” and, in collaboration with Professor Kellner co-authored, “The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education.” Share provides training to educators across the globe in support of teaching critical media literacy, and presents on the topic at national and international forums.  His research and work also helped to inform the development of the groundbreaking media literacy requirement in the Los Angeles Unified School District. 

We talk here with Share about the new media literacy requirement for California schools. 

California recently passed legislation requiring all students to have access to media literacy education. Can you tell me why you think this legislation is important?

I think it's important for numerous reasons. It shows that people in the government and the California Department of Education are finally recognizing the importance of media literacy. This is an essential knowledge, skill, and critical disposition that students need to be literate in the 21st century. This legislation will encourage educators across our state to teach students how to think critically about media, information and technology. It’s something that we've been doing at UCLA for over a decade. It's great to see recognition of the need for media literacy, but the legislation is just a start.

How can media literacy help students?

Media literacy can give students tools and encourage them to think critically about the social media they use every day, about the news, about their entertainment, about all the different messages that are coming to them all the time, and often the messages they're creating and sharing.  It can help them analyze biases in media, question the authenticity of information, and critically examine representations of race, class, and gender. This is essential for democracy because media messages are a huge part of our communication system that reproduces or challenges dominant ideologies of power. It’s an important opportunity to examine our basic ideas and society, who we are, what we think about other people and controversial issues, and how we should be treating each other and the environment. All of these ideas are embedded within our communication, the language we use, the images that are reproduced, and the stories we tell. The more students can learn to think critically, the more likely they will be able to see through misinformation and disinformation, recognize bias, and question problematic representations.

What should policymakers and education leaders focus on as the state moves forward with the implementation of media literacy?

One thing we need to do is prepare teachers. More professional development for experienced teachers and better pre-service training for aspiring teachers is essential for implementing critical media literacy. There’s a lot of curriculum out there, we don't need to reinvent the wheel and spend lots of money to write new materials. Bringing in new curriculum from outside is not the best strategy to help teachers improve their classroom instruction. A better approach is to help teachers understand the basic ideas of critical media literacy, to see examples of how it could be taught, and then coach them to integrate these ideas into the curriculum. When teachers incorporate this into the teaching they're already doing, their teaching will become more relevant, critical, engaging, and inclusive. 

Can you give us an example of the kinds of training opportunities and also the resources that schools and teachers will need?

Sure. First of all, resources should not be the issue. I don't think schools need new resources to teach critical media literacy. Most students walk into the classroom with cell phones that can do more things than we've ever imagined possible. Cell phones can be a powerful pedagogical tool and I would encourage educators to start using them strategically for teaching critical media literacy. Students should be using their phones to create videos, produce podcasts, take pictures, conduct research, and share their learning beyond the classroom. There are also many resources available online. At UCLA, we have our own critical media literacy library research guide with tons of lesson plans, articles, videos, podcasts, and other resources that are available for free to anyone interested in teaching critical media literacy, and they're organized into different topics. 

As for training teachers, there is a need for professional development and ongoing support for teaching critical media literacy.  Teaching should be democratic, and more about working with students instead of just lecturing to them. One of the teaching methods we encourage is critical media production -- having students create media as a means for learning to critically analyze media.  When the teacher becomes a facilitator of learning, they can guide students to create media by posing questions that encourage critical thinking, not just reproducing what's already out there. 

Through an inquiry process, students can explore the different biases in all mediums of communication, whether it's in history or science or mathematics. They should be asking who is benefiting from and who is being hurt by this information. When we don't ask these questions, we start to assume that information is just neutral and objective and our students lose the ability to recognize when information is disadvantaging some people while privileging others. 

There has been a lot of emphasis on helping students to discern fake news and to identify misinformation. Is that the most important part of media literacy for helping students?

It’s important to be able to know whether what we're listening to or looking at is real or not. But that should not be the main goal of media literacy. Since the majority of information is not “fake,” when we just focus on questioning credibility that leaves most information unquestioned and we don't think critically about the majority of the media. I think the more important focus is to analyze the construction, context, and commercialization of information and technology. We need to help students question the ways media are designed to sell products, ideas, and lifestyles; to influence society and reproduce or challenge dominant ideologies. Critical media literacy can help students learn to question power and create alternative media that promote a more just and sustainable future.

What’s the role of higher education in furthering media literacy education across K-12 education and what are you and others at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies doing to help?

We have recently launched a new information and media literacy minor at UCLA.  I think it's great. It’s a collaboration between the departments of education and information studies and it brings in ideas from information literacy, from the libraries, from archival studies, and from other areas that too often we as educators don't understand and don't address. The minor explores ideas like algorithmic literacy, understanding the importance of surveillance capitalism, analyzing the complexities of archiving information, and questioning what happens when our data is taken without our knowledge and sometimes without our permission, then used to target us as consumers. It's important to understand that social media and algorithms are strategically designed to capture our attention, collect our data, and keep us looking at their screens as often as possible, all to increase the profit of the wealthiest companies in the world.

For the minor, I’m teaching Ed M121 an introduction to critical media literacy, and Ed M137, which is critical digital media literacies. I also teach Ed M135, which examines environmental justice through the lens of media and education. That's my latest passion – exploring how all of this relates to the climate crisis and our connections and disconnections with the natural world.

People at UCLA have been working on critical media literacy for quite a while and I think we have an important role to play. For almost two decades, the work that Doug Kellner and I have been doing has focused on pushing back on the way media literacy is too often practiced in the United States, where many people tend to promote media education from a very neoliberal position - one often associated with free market capitalism that values corporate profit over the social good. I think that's problematic, especially now with more and more challenges to critical thinking, critical race theory, ethnic studies, and other important aspects of education. Media literacy is no different. We're seeing a lot of things claiming to be media literacy and some of it sponsored by organizations like NATO and Facebook that have been major contributors to misinformation and disinformation around the world. It's very important that we focus on developing a critical disposition that encourages students to be skeptical and question the word and the world, as Paulo Freire suggests. Doug and I have written a lot about this. We use a critical media literacy framework with six conceptual understandings and questions geared to help educators and students ask deeper questions about who's benefiting, who's being hurt, whose voices are loudest and whose are excluded, what ideologies are represented and which are missing. Critical media literacy encourages questioning how media support or challenge systems and structures that reproduce dominant narratives related to race, class, gender, sexuality, and all our identities.

We've also been hosting international conferences for the last four years. Here at Moore Hall, we have run the online component of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. It’s multilingual, international, and free. The last one was hosted in person in Argentina, and we ran the online sessions. We have been trying to build a bigger movement, both nationally and internationally specifically for critical media literacy.