Towards a Local Media Literacy: Community-Based Understanding in a Globally Connected World, 2022

"This thesis project documents the process of designing a prototype to help the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) support and regularly engage its individual members. I focused my design prototype on Boston K-12 teachers as a trial demographic, with the understanding that each teaching and media ecosystem has its own unique challenges and context. On NAMLE's website, they define media literacy broadly as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. Media literacy education refers to the practices necessary to foster these skills" (NAMLE 2021). Despite this relatively broad definition, media literacy is seen by many, including NAMLE (2019) and the state of Massachusetts (Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 71, § 2a, 2018), as a vital tool for civic engagement and democratic participation. Since 2016, NAMLE and media literacy more broadly received growing attention for this civic and democratic potential. With long dominant ideologies suddenly destabilized by a rapidly shifting communication landscape and crumbling beneath cascading crises, media literacy education emerged to prepare people for this new world of climate denialism, fake news, and growing fascism (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2021). My thesis explores how media literacy teachers might be a part of this preparation and how NAMLE might support them in their efforts. My thesis design prototype, Media Literacy Local (MLL), is a community engagement plan for NAMLE. The plan seeks to place democracy-oriented K-12 teachers at the center of a participatory design process that brings them together with the wider Boston media literacy community in creating an intervention to support K-12 media literacy teachers in Boston. Primary school teachers are inundated by decontextualized tools, plans, and professional development, which task them with compensating for an ever-growing list of social problems with ever-shrinking resources and professional autonomy. I hope MLL can help to demonstrate and invest in re-orienting teaching interventions and media literacy tools around the specific context in which they are used. In aiming to build a social and community infrastructure around determining how NAMLE can support Boston media literacy teachers, MLL strives to increase trust in NAMLE by facilitating and strengthening relationships and networks within the Boston media literacy ecosystem. Networks of connected media literacy educators and media makers can better address how to teach media literacy and the media ecosystem in which students learn those skills. This approach brings the wider community into support and solidarity with teachers, holding both the vital role media literacy education plays in democracy, while demonstrating the important way media context can help or inhibit our media literacy development." -- Executive Summary