Building Media Literacy in Higher Education: Department Approaches, Undergraduate Certificate, and Engaged Scholarship

Media Literacy Research In Higher Education: A Limited Field

Given the relative absence of higher education in media literacy discourse, perhaps it is not surprising that there is minimal research on media literacy in higher education. Indeed, most scholarship on the topic observes the dual absence of media literacy in the classroom and in research. Yet, scholars from college and university settings have long played an important role in media literacy development in the United States. The field has experienced sporadic growth over multiple decades, with short bursts of published empirical research as well as large gaps of multiple years between publications. This start-stop approach is familiar in it similarity to the growth, in fits and starts, of media literacy as both theory and practice in the United States.

Media literacy, as a topic, was formally codified in the United States at the 1992 meeting of various American scholars who believed that it was time to have a conversation about the influence of media on young people and to formalize its study. The group defined media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, and produce a variety of media¹ (Aufderheide & Firestone, 1993). This conversation lagged behind the United Kingdom, for example, which had already developed a codified set of key aspects of media literacy (Bazalgette, 1992) and had delved into explorations of power, pleasure, and critical analysis (Buckingham, 1998) long before the United States. In 1998, the National Communication Association included media literacy in its standards, writing: