Critical Action: A Framework for Curricular Integration or Implementation
Biographical Sketch
Veteran high school teacher and researcher Ben Boyington, M.Ed., founded his high-school media studies work on the idea that skepticism and activism are essential to citizenship. He believes that depth of understanding comes from integration, design, and teaching others, and that heutagogy is more important than pedagogy. His research into the 1:1 screen initiative (wherein each student in a school is supplied with an Internet-enabled screen) is published in Media Education for a Digital Generation (Routledge, 2015). Boyington is also vice president of the Action Coalition for Media Education and K-12 Networks Facilitator for the Global Critical Media Literacy Project.
Type of Presentation
Individual presentation
Brief Description of Presentation
This framework for curricular reform, integrating or implementing critical media literacy across the content areas (or unifying the content areas), connects with various movements taking hold in US public schools, including project-based learning, competency- or standards-based education, and elimination of grades. The focus will be on middle grades and high school, but elements will be scalable for all grade levels. The presentation will culminate in a group exploration of value, purpose, and feasibility.
Abstract of Proposal
This critical media literacy (CML) curricular framework relies on four concepts: civic literacy, community engagement, heutagogy, and standards-based or competency-based education. This framework will be established within a “responsive curriculum” designed to evolve with students’ needs rather than to push them toward preconceived outcomes that comprise “career and college readiness.”
➔Standards and competencies: If we align CML to the standards in use across the nation, or to the competencies that drive programming in some areas, districts and states will readily see its value.
➔Heutagogy: Student self-determination of learning, which is core to CMLE, anchors students to skills and dispositions by allowing them personal agency. It also leads neatly to service learning and project-based learning.
➔Active participation in community and society in order to initiate change is impossible without civic literacy: knowledge of civics as well as education in protest and resistance.
Critical media literacy teaches us not only to “read” media’s messages but to examine and understand the motivations and power dynamics behind the messages. This helps us to understand the challenges of our communities and how we might harness that understanding, as well as media tools, to foment change and address real-life problems.
Critical media literacy must be embedded across the curriculum through aligned explorations of literature and history (community action/resistance movements), through aligned grounding in the sciences (from STEM to Postman’s “ascent of humanity” model), and through service-learning projects in which students create solutions to problems both actual and designed for coursework.
A framework designed to establish a CML core in a responsive curriculum will provide schools and districts with the tools and understandings to inculcate skill sets and understandings that enable students to become not just career- and college-ready adults but critical actors who can help to shape the world, not simply exist within it.
Location
Coastal Georgia Center
Start Date
2-25-2017 2:35 PM
End Date
2-25-2017 4:05 PM
Recommended Citation
Boyington, Ben, "Critical Action: A Framework for Curricular Integration or Implementation" (2017). International Critical Media Literacy Conference. 18.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/criticalmedialiteracy/2017/2017/18
Critical Action: A Framework for Curricular Integration or Implementation
Coastal Georgia Center
This critical media literacy (CML) curricular framework relies on four concepts: civic literacy, community engagement, heutagogy, and standards-based or competency-based education. This framework will be established within a “responsive curriculum” designed to evolve with students’ needs rather than to push them toward preconceived outcomes that comprise “career and college readiness.”
➔Standards and competencies: If we align CML to the standards in use across the nation, or to the competencies that drive programming in some areas, districts and states will readily see its value.
➔Heutagogy: Student self-determination of learning, which is core to CMLE, anchors students to skills and dispositions by allowing them personal agency. It also leads neatly to service learning and project-based learning.
➔Active participation in community and society in order to initiate change is impossible without civic literacy: knowledge of civics as well as education in protest and resistance.
Critical media literacy teaches us not only to “read” media’s messages but to examine and understand the motivations and power dynamics behind the messages. This helps us to understand the challenges of our communities and how we might harness that understanding, as well as media tools, to foment change and address real-life problems.
Critical media literacy must be embedded across the curriculum through aligned explorations of literature and history (community action/resistance movements), through aligned grounding in the sciences (from STEM to Postman’s “ascent of humanity” model), and through service-learning projects in which students create solutions to problems both actual and designed for coursework.
A framework designed to establish a CML core in a responsive curriculum will provide schools and districts with the tools and understandings to inculcate skill sets and understandings that enable students to become not just career- and college-ready adults but critical actors who can help to shape the world, not simply exist within it.
