"Media literacy should not be considered as an add-on to the already crowded curriculum. A truly interdisciplinary activity, media literacy should be conceived as a means of facilitating the integration of critical thinking skills, aesthetics, the study of value messages, and the study of the social and political implications of media texts. Media education should permeate many activities in geography and global education, science, and language arts which will be conditioned by the mass media experiences young people bring to the classroom."

Barry Duncan

In Canada, many teachers are now expected to integrate media education into their classrooms, often for the first time. When you consider the scope of media education—from learning hands-on production techniques, to recognizing how the various elements of a specific medium convey meaning, to thinking critically about media issues and media influences—it’s easy to see how studying the media lends itself to a number of approaches within a wide variety of subject areas.

The following excerpts and articles offer ideas and strategies to help teachers tackle this subject across the curriculum.

John Pungente, S.J.

Nine Factors that make Media Literacy Flourish

A study of media literacy around the world shows that there are nine factors that appear to be crucial to the successful development of media literacy in secondary schools.

1. Media literacy, like other innovative programs, must be a grass-roots movement. Teachers need to take the initiative in lobbying for its inclusion in the curriculum.

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Media Literacy Resource Guide

Teaching Strategies and Models for Media Education

The teacher’s attitude to the mass media and to students as avid media consumers is crucial to the success of any media-literacy program. Most students bring to the classroom an enormous amount of information about and experience with the media—in many cases, far more than do their teachers. While it is important for teachers to start where their students are, it is also necessary for them to lead their students to where they are not.

Rick Shepherd

Elementary Media Education: The Perfect Curriculum

Introduction
There is a growing realization on the part of media educators that secondary school, or even the transition years (7, 8, 9), is far too late to begin a field so central to our culture, so much a part of the lives and development of our children, as media studies. Many of the issues media literacy naturally addresses—such as gender stereotyping, representation of racial and ethnic minorities, consumerism—need to be dealt with far earlier in students' lives than in early adolescence. If media literacy is worthwhile at the secondary level, it is doubly worthwhile at the elementary level.

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A Critical Framework for Media Literacy
The field of media is broad and amorphous, extending not just from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television and film, but also now encompassing many areas of popular culture such as fashion, toys and dolls, the nature of celebrity, etc. Anyone attempting to make sense of this area needs a clear conceptual framework that will allow for discussion of a variety of complex and interrelated factors. For elementary teachers, this need is perhaps even greater than for their secondary colleagues because of the more fluid, integrated nature of the elementary class—things tend to just "come up" as the result of student interest or enthusiasm.

Barry Duncan

A Media Literacy Menu: Ingredients for Successful Media Studies

Ideas and suggestions to stimulate discussion and debate about media education and media studies.

In the media education classroom, we all want to do thoughtful media analysis in which it is understood that class discussions and reflections are the basis for constructing new knowledge. In this context, the classroom is a "site of struggle" in which meanings are negotiated. U.K. educator Len Masterman reminds us that media studies should be inquiry-centered, co-investigative (rather than seeking to impose a specific set of values), egalitarian and dialogic—though of course, dialogue is not loose, rambling discussions. 

Chris Worsnop

Integrating Media Lessons into the
Classroom

Media education lessons are lying all around us, offering themselves to our eyes, ears and brains for no more effort than it takes to pick them up, look them over and take them into class. Think about it. Is there a media lesson for you:

• in the debate that goes on in families over who holds the remote control for the TV at viewing time, or over who decides which channel to watch?
• in studying the styles people of different ages and backgrounds adopt when they watch TV? (E.g. surfing, planning in advance, watching while reading, sleeping through three-quarters of the program, etc.)

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