This chapter explores critical media literacy pedagogy. Using case study method, the author argues that The Washington Informer's, “Bridge” publication can be used as a practical pedagogical tool to teach students how to analyze and deconstruct media texts, and simultaneously inform students on how to produce alternative, counter-hegemonic media texts. This approach is consistent with literature on critical media literacy that calls for engaged and empowering pedagogy to encourage students to think critically about their roles in creating and maintaining a radical and participatory democracy.
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Potter (2016) defines media literacy as, “a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the mass media to process and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter,” (p.24). Potter’s concept of media literacy involves three main components: personal locus, knowledge structures and skills. This definition of media literacy basically explains that media literacy is developed when individuals actively use their goals and drive to seek out information (personal locus) to help develop useful sets of organized memory or knowledge (knowledge structures). This organized knowledge, according to Potter (2016), should exist along a continuum, inclusive of cognitive, emotional, aesthetic and moral dimensions. Potter (2016) argues that the internal drive to seek knowledge coupled with the diverse knowledge structures develop skills to process and interpret meaning in media.
In contrast to Potter’s (2016) concept of media literacy that largely focuses on meaning and interpretation of text, other scholars suggest that media literacy take a critical perspective—one that would focus on engagement with media as texts, and the conditions in which these texts are produced and consumed. Tisdell (2008) states that critical media literacy positions students to become transformative learners. Distribution of power during consumption and production practices is explored as students struggle to create and contribute to a more just society (Tisdell, 2008). Similarly, Kellner and Share (2005) state that critical media literacy is pedagogy that informs students how to analyze media codes and conventions, critique stereotypes, and dominant ideologies in media texts.
Lewis and Jhally (1998) state that teaching critical media literacy should “help people become sophisticated citizens rather than sophisticated consumers,” (p.109). Here, Lewis and Jhally emphasize the conceptualization of media systems as interlocking political, economic and cultural structures, rather than a myriad of media texts that we can choose to consume. This is an important distinction and component in the understanding of critical media literacy.