A sketch note on media literacy for teachersLalit KishoreJaipur, India

Key points

According to the media literacy community in the United States, media literacy consists of basic competencies to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and formats.

Media literacy education provides tools to help teachers to critically analyze messages, offer opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and develop creative skills in producing their own media messages.

According to David Buckingham, four key concepts of media literacy are related basic knowledge about production, language, representation, and audience.

For a teacher, the language used in the creation of media and its presentation is most important since the form of language to convey messages, ideas and meanings that matters a lot. A good amount of knowledge and skills are needed to combine images and sounds.

David Buckingham further adds that the notion of 'representation' is main principle of media education as a “re-representation of reality”.

"Media production involves selecting and combining incidents, making events into stories, and creating characters. Media representations allow viewers to see the world in some particular ways and not others. Audiences also compare media with their own experiences and make judgments about how realistic they are," he says.

For a teacher, transforming concepts of media literacy into pedagogical practice can be a major challenge, for which a short training is a must. But, it is worth it to integrating media literacy concepts and skills into classroom instruction and practices.