It becomes more and more clear each day that media literacies are critical to empowering people to make sense of their worlds. The chances of success go up when we are working with the people around us who share the same set of concerns. So it is worth asking around to see where we might find fellow travelers who want to see the same potential realized in our students and our culture that we do.
The basis of my work at the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy was developing a collaborative plan to get my colleagues in my department, Creative Media Production, at the University of Oklahoma involved in addressing media literacy issues in all of our classes. But after several conversations with other colleagues from around campus, it became clear that many of us shared similar concerns. How could we develop a university-wide culture that values a deep, critical understanding of our media world? Where does the variety of approaches we might take to this goal create the possibilities for an intersectional set of literacies?
So I sent out a call to a wide range of people on my campus to see if they would be interested in meeting to discuss our mutual concerns. Several people were enthusiastic in response, so we started meeting in late 2017 and early 2018 to see where the roads crossed.
There were participants from the university library who were interested in information literacies. There were faculty from both education and political science who were interested in civic and democratic literacies. People from education, along with several of my colleagues in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication and another colleague from the Department of Communication were interested in the media literacy angle. And several of the staff from IT and from our Center for Teaching Excellence got involved from their interest in both faculty development and enhanced student accomplishment in digital skills.
The discussions were spectacular. It was amazing to see not only how deeply we were concerned about similar social trends, but that there was a shared sense of hope about what we could do, who we could collaborate with on campus, in the community, and with education across the state.
I learned quickly how valuable it was to see these different perspectives—media, information, and democratic literacies. For a conference paper, I outlined how I interpreted this connection scheme between the three:
- Media literacy – moves from opaque to transparent
- Information literacy – moves from false to true
- Democratic literacy – moves from disempowered to empowered
So clearly the worst state for ignoring critical literacy would be: media opacity, with no real understanding of how the media works or what truly drives it over time and change; surrounded by a sea of false and undetermined truth; in a disempowered and disengaged relationship with power and politics.
The best state would arrive from any efforts we make to accomplish the opposite:
- Determine the digital and legacy tools that make it efficient to determine true and false information, along with the identification of reliable and unreliable brands and sources;
- Media transparency, where curricula focus on developing a deep and inquiring understanding of how media works, both in terms of consciousness and experience, and in terms of the professional and corporate activity that shapes modes, platforms, and technologies;
- Engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of the public sphere for individuals, coalition groups, and communities of interest, under the realization that the conditions of our existence—including law, economics, identity, and creativity—are creations of interested parties who have benefitted from their own “status quo” constructions.
From Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970), we understand that all literacies are about consciousness raising (conscientização), about being awakened to how and why things work the way they do in our communication environment, to intervene in reality and to change it. Freire was concerned about the humanity of people who were alienated from power by having alien ideas imposed on them, replacing their own interests.
So, the promotion of these literacies should seek to engage students, individuals, and citizens in their own terms, rather than imposing values and desires from outside of their lives. Committing to such a goal demands hope for a potential outcome, and faith in the possibilities that each of us brings to our media/information/democratic experiences, whether we are teachers, students, audiences, or creators.
This past fall, following from our discussions, the library started work on a Digital Skills Hub. Still in its formative stages, this will be a place where students, faculty, and interested parties can ask questions, see demonstrations, and network with each other about their digital/information/media work. It is right now being organized, so in a future posting, I hope to be able to bring that project to you, so you can see some of the results of this collaboration. And it might show the value of taking the time to see who around you shares your interests and concerns and see if there are ways you can draw strength in numbers.
Dr. Beliveau is on the faculty for the Gaylord College, affiliate faculty in Film and Media Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He writes and teaches about media education and literacy, race, documentary, rhetorical criticism, video production, popular culture, horror media, & cultural studies. He is the co-author of Digital Literacy (2016), and the co-editor of International Horror Film Directors: Global Fear (2017).
He attended the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy in 2015 and 2016 and the Winter Symposium on Digital Literacy in Higher Education, January 2017 at URI. He has taught media for over 30 years at both the secondary and higher education level. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and during graduate work at the University of Iowa. Dr. Beliveau ran an educational FM radio station at Argo Community High School in the Chicago area, and worked in Los Angeles in independent film and television production. He served as editor of the Journal of Communication Inquiry, chair of the Cultural and Critical Studies division of AEJMC, and chair of Student Documentary for the Broadcast Education Association. Beliveau co-directs the Gaylord British Media Program, and taught the “Gaylord in Arezzo” summer program, where he taught Documentary and Italian Popular Film and Literature. Beliveau earned his B.S. from Northwestern University and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
From PD to Practice 