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Jamila Lyiscott Co-authors Policy Research Brief on Need for Critical Media Literacy
Jamila Lyiscott, assistant professor of social justice education and founding co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, has co-authored a policy research brief for the James R. Squire Office of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) on the need for critical media literacy skills in the nation’s schools.
Lyiscott, along with co-authors Nicole Mirra of Rutgers and Antero Garcia of Stanford, uses the paper to outline recommendations for policy and practice for American schools. These recommendations include ensuring that all students have equitable and expansive access to sources of media and popular culture for learning, including access to digital devices, internet access and multimodal/multisited instructional resources. The brief also recommends school districts provide better support to teachers to engage students in critical media literacy and analysis of popular culture.
The brief also calls on educators to integrate a wide range of media and popular culture into standards-based literacy instruction, including an expansion of the traditional English Language Arts (ELA) traditional literary canon. Additionally, the recommendations including having teachers to make a commitment to critical analysis and racial literacy and to go beyond the “five-paragraph essay” as a way for students to express their learning.
The brief calls for the recognition of the influence of digital media and popular culture in students’ lives and the need to engage them in thinking critically about the messages that surround them.
“New perspectives are urgently needed in ELA to help teachers critically engage media and popular culture to avoid continued harm and to center students as critically engaged members of a new digital social reality,” the brief states. “Critical media instruction should also enable students to discern the political and biased nature of the digital tools and platforms themselves.”