Celebrate Media Literacy Week!

By: Michelle Ciulla Lipkin*

The media have a profound impact on all of us. It doesn’t matter what you are passionate about - it can be social justice, health care, climate change, gun control, or immigration - you are influenced by the messages you are receiving and creating. It doesn’t matter where you are from or which side of the political spectrum your beliefs fall on. The media ecosystem is part of your world and you need to understand it.

That’s why I do this work – I am so please to serve as the executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education – or NAMLE for short.

NAMLE is a national non-profit membership association. With over 6,000 members, we are the largest membership organization for media literacy education in the world. As the umbrella organization for U.S. media literacy education, NAMLE amplifies the work of our partners and members; acting as a resource, a convener, and a leading voice.

NAMLE defines media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication. In its simplest terms, media literacy builds upon the foundation of traditional literacy. To become a successful student, responsible citizen, productive worker, or competent and conscientious consumer, individuals need to develop expertise with the increasingly sophisticated, multi-sensory media world.

Media literacy represents a necessary, inevitable, and realistic response to the complex, ever-changing information and communication landscape that surrounds us.

We work every day towards our vision to see media literacy highly valued by all and widely practiced as an essential life skill of the 21st century.

Every year – and starting today, Monday, October 21, 2019 - we host Media Literacy Week, which is now in its 5th year. This year, we are hosting media literacy week events in Detroit, New York City, and Minneapolis bringing together partners such Thomson Reuters, PBS Student Reporting Labs, MediaWise, CIRCLE, the Journalism Education Association, News Literacy Project, Facebook, Twitter and many more. We anticipate over 250 partner organizations being involved.

As a representative of the media literacy community, I want to provide you all with a bit of context about the practice of media literacy education. To know where we need to go, we need to know where we are.

There are countless numbers of ways of fostering media literacy education. In general, we see media literacy education happening in three different areas:

  • Primary and Secondary school

  • Higher education

  • Communities

In the Primary and Secondary school world, media literacy education is happening in libraries, in subject area classrooms and within technology training and professional development. We also see outside non-profits and community based organizations going into schools to supplement curriculum.

In higher education, media literacy is being taught in various contexts: communication schools, education schools, media production schools, and media studies programs for example.

In the broader community, there are a growing number of non-profit organizations working with public libraries, afterschool programs, and community centers. Public media also plays a role in advancing media literacy skills.

Despite all this and the broad agreement about the need to ensure that people of all ages are equipped to understand and negotiate the influence of media in their lives, the United States currently does not devote any significant government effort, nor funding for media literacy education research, training, or implementation.

In our recently published snapshot of the state of media literacy education, we made six recommendations on next steps we can take to increase practice in the U.S. We must:

  1. Expand training and professional development opportunities for media literacy instruction;

  2. Outreach to diverse populations, specifically communities of color, to support their participation, scholarship, and teaching of media literacy;

  3. Support inquiry into practice in order to understand structures that invite or prevent media literacy practice;

  4. Aggregate and disseminate high quality resources, including not only content materials, but also thoughtful and complete course designs and lessons;

  5. Continually survey stakeholders to gauge changes, improvements, and challenges in media literacy research, practice, and assessment; and

  6. Advocate for public understanding, such as through public service announcements or community-based engagement.

The role that media literacy can play in protecting our democracy is becoming clearer every day, yet media literacy education is not a national priority in the United States. We have a moral imperative to improve our educational system to provide all the skills students need to succeed in the digital world.

NAMLE envisions a country where media literacy education is the norm in our homes and classrooms, rather than the rarity it is today. We hope the Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act is a first step in the right direction. NAMLE and our community are committed to working with you to move things forward.

This Media Literacy Week become part of our community. Here are your next steps:

  1. Sign up for free NAMLE membership by clicking on the Join Now button on our homepage

  2. Follow us on Twitter @medialiteracyed,

  3. Check out all the Media Literacy Week activity at #medialitwk.

*Michelle Ciulla Lipkin

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin is the Executive Director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. Michelle has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the U.S. She launched the first ever Media Literacy Week in the U.S. now in its 7th year, developed strategic partnerships with companies such as Thomson Reuters, Facebook, Twitter, and Nickelodeon, and restructured both the governance and membership of NAMLE. She has overseen four national conferences and done countless appearances at conferences and in the media regarding the importance of media literacy education. Michelle is an alumni of the U.S. Dept. of State's International Visitors Program (Australia/2018). She is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at Brooklyn College where she teaches Media Literacy.

Michelle has been a guest on CNN's Reliable Sources in 2017 and 2020. Michelle was the recipient of the 2020 Global Media and Information Literacy Award given by UNESCO. In 2020, Michelle appeared in the documentary "Trust Me" from award winning director Roko Belic as well as the PBS Documentary "Fake."

Michelle began her career in children’s television production, in various roles on both corporate and production teams. She earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University. Michelle focused her grad work on children and television where she caught the “media literacy bug”. After graduate school, Michelle worked as a facilitator for The LAMP (Learning about Multimedia Project) teaching media literacy and production classes for Pre-Kindergarten to 5th grade students.

Michelle is on the Advisory Council for the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) and also serves on National Judge's Panel for Trend Micro's "What's Your Story?" Youth Media Contest. She is also a member of the Brain Trust for the documentary "Disclosure."

Here passion for media literacy education stems from a very personal place. Read more about Michelle's story here.