Media Literacy Pedagogy: Critical and New/Twenty-First-Century Literacies Instruction

This article offers a conceptualization of media literacy pedagogy in light of National Education Technology Plan efforts, which name teaching as one of five essential areas to build an education system that can increase as well as sustain the United States' economic growth and prosperity in the global economy. In particular, two distinct forms--critical media literacy, with origins in the Frankfurt and cultural studies tradition, and new/twenty-first-century literacies instruction, the result of socio-linguistic and ethnographic traditions--can be evaluated from Fenstermacher & Richardson's quality in teaching model that includes assessment based on the process-product paradigm, cognitive science, and constructivism. This article concludes that, while all three of these research programs may help to gauge media literacy models of pedagogy in general, constructivism, and to a lesser extent cognitive science, may be the most appropriate paradigms. (Contains 2 figures.)