As teachers, of course our main goal is to get our students to learn something. After that, my goal is to help students become independent, informed, and critically aware members who are able to function productively in a 21st-century society. An incredibly large part of that society includes the use of computers, phones, instant results, multimodality, and pop culture. I think it is not only important, but vital to teach media literacy in schools so that our students can be successful after they leave the classroom.
First of all, media literacy helps with student engagement. As teachers, and English teachers especially, it is incredibly important and difficult to make centuries-old texts relevant to students' lives. Tapping into a source they are already so consumed by will help them see that not only do the themes and ideas in the texts we read resonate with our lives today, but they also see this universality of cannonical texts that justifies their use in the first place. If we can prove that the ideas talked about in Shakespeare are still used in Jonas Brother's songs or in most music videos, or that racism still exists today based on Family Guy episodes, or that satire isn't just found in Jonathan Swift but in Chandler Bing as well, why wouldn't we?
Second, along the lines of student engagement, I have found in my own experience that it is a struggle to get students to engage with a text, let alone be able to discuss it among their peers. Using things like blogs and wikis holds students accountable for their thinking about a text, and forces them to take a side or make an opinion about the themes being discussed. Second, it ensures that they feel comfortable talking and sharing their ideas with peers. I've noticed that either apathy or anxiety over speaking in class causes some students to not participate in in-class discussions for fear of being judged by their peers. A blog or a wiki allows students to adpot an online persona that, while not anonymous, removes some of the apprehension associated with defending one's opinions in class. This is because students have the opportunity to censor or edit or at least think about their thoughts before writing them down and publishing them with the class. Most importantly, it gives students the opportunity to have further reflection on their own thinking and be inspired hopefully by their peer's thinking too.
Finally, being able to navigate the internet and interactive collaborative websites in school helps students learn to be successful once they leave your class. That is because there is an entirely different set of skills needed to write in an interactive document than in just an individual Word doc. As Beach writes in chapter 2, "the fact that writers employ links to a range of other texts reflects the fact that hypertextual writing is highly collaborative - that rather than privilege single texts and the single tone author, hypertext writing consists of networks of texts in which the author herself is a part of the network" (13). In this sense, using blogs and wikis also holds students accountable for creating credible work themselves. Not only are they going to learn the skills necessary to be able to find credible sources and relevant material, they are also holding themselves responsible because technically their work can be made open to public viewing. As more and more people turn to the Internet for easily accessible news and information, it is imperative for students to be able to decipher which information can be trusted and which can't. As Beach writes, "through analyzing links, students are learning to scour sites to find a relevant topic and then filter posts to judge useful, credible, content that serves as the basis for posting reactions of their own ideas" (13). As more of the workforce post high school and post college becomes dependent on the online community for success, the more important it is going to be for our students to be able to navigate the waters of an online community.
The goal of any teacher is to help our students be successful. Incorporating media into the classroom can help students not only make English class more relevant and applicable, but it can also help them to become critical thinkers and productive members of society once they leave high school. While I can't necessarily tell my students what to think, I can help teach them how. The skills gained through the use, analysis, and collaboration of media can help students learn to question and hopefully better the world around them.
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