Educational Standards and Media Literacy

Integrating Media Literacy Across the Curriculum
Media literacy is most successful when it is integrated across the curriculum and, thus, related to national, state or district educational standards and assessment rubrics.  CML's experience with Project SMARTArt demonstrated that, given training and practice through professional development, teachers can easily integrate curricula, devising lessons that incorporate CML's media literacy framework while meeting state education standards in at least three subjects in as little as 20 minutes. 

CML's framework for media literacy serves as an excellent integration tool and "metaframe" through which to provide a common critical thinking approach and vocabulary for teacher and students alike.  This metaframe applies to any and all content or subject areas or themes, and as students apply a process of inquiry, they can work across disciplines to solve problems.

Lesson plans that CML has developed for programs such as Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media or A Recipe for Action:  Deconstructing Food Advertising list national education standards for language arts, health, and technology; given the content, these standards could easily be extended to visual and performing arts, math, or social studies.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, which released new national standards adopted by many states in 2010, have four strands named for the language arts:  Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening.  The State of Texas, which has not adopted these standards, also includes Viewing and Representing as two additional strands, and although all of the strands can be connected to media literacy, Viewing and Representing tends to imply the multi-media nature of media literacy and the deconstruction and construction skills called for in today's global media environment.

The State of Montana has specifically devised media literacy standards, while other states incorporate media literacy skills into their standards in various ways.  National Technology, Health, and School Library Standards lend themselves very easily to media literacy implementations, as well.

Background Information on Standards and Media Literacy

How did the standards movement arise and what's the future for media literacy?

In the past decade, the educational world in the United States has been dominated by the movement to standards-based education. This resulted from the now-famous A Nation at Risk report (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) which pronounced a "rising tide of mediocrity" in schools and called for reform of the U.S. education system. In 1989, then president Bush and the nation's governors called an Education Summit which produced The National Education Goals Report: Building a Nation of Learners identifying six major Goals for education that were to be reached by the year 2000.

Goals 2000 were outlined in the State of the Union of 1990 and the education world was charged with addressing such questions as: What is the subject matter to be addressed at every level? What types of assessments should be used? What standards of performance should be set? The resulting establishment of "standards" for instruction, "benchmarks" for competency and "rubrics" for evaluation was determined to be the way to insure the vigorous pursuit of academic achievement and a raising of the quality of education throughout the country.

Soon national subject matter organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the International Reading Association and many others began to identify and chart what skills students needed to know in each particular subject area and at every grade level from kindergarten through high school. By 1999, further standards, allowing for regional variations, were also established by 49 of 50 autonomous state offices of education. Some districts, and even individual schools, may also have written standards to guide teachers as well as to reflect community values.

Although standards may differ from state to state, a national profile of standards is emerging as a result of reporting them on the Internet. The Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) one of the funded service providers of the US Dept. of Education, has emerged as the primary Internet site for a comprehensive overview of both state and national standards in every subject area. The Common Core State Standards Initiative issued national standards for language arts and mathematics in 2010; these standards cite being able to decode multi-media as fundamental to today's literacy requirements.