KEY IDEAS FROM CHAPTER 14​​​​​​

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1. Media literacy changes in response to changes in technology, culture, and society Educational, institutional, and legislative actions have all contributed to the rise of media literacy over the past 100 years. In the future, there is no doubt that the changing uses of digital media and technology will continue to reshape media literacy education\

2. Media literacy educators are highly responsive to cultural changes that are rapidly shaping the use of media, technology, and popular culture but they work within schools and educational institutions that are risk-averse and slow to change. They give students choices about what to read, view, and learn, and value their critical autonomy. But because some media literacy teaching methods can be non-traditional, educators engage in strategic risk-taking to meet the needs of learners. 

3. Young children can gain confidence as independent learners and build habits of critically analyzing and evaluating all kinds of messages, aware that they are actively interpreting everything they read, view, and use. But creating media requires the practice of messy engagement that occurs when students use both their popular culture knowledge and their creative media production skills.

4. The nature of reading is changing reading on digital devices creates different reading strategies. Although reading is not on the decline, some people worry that the increasing centrality of screen reading will diminish or erode deep reading, literary reading, and empathic reading. But not all media literacy educators conceptualize analyzing media as an expanded reading practice. Those who emphasize critical media literacy see it as focused more on issues of identity, representation, and power relationships.

5. Media literacy education supports public health and global citizenship as students wrestle with difficult ethical issues about how truth is understood and who has the authority to claim it. Analyzing science and history textbooks and source materials help students learn how media reflect and challenge certain cultural myths and values.

6. Media literacy is responsive to an epistemological crisis brought on by an onslaught of polarized information from multiple sources in the context of a highly centralized group of digital platforms that now control how people access informative, entertaining, and persuasive media.

7. As false and intentionally misleading information has become a weapon for destabilizing societies, global media literacy in on the rise with support from platforms like Google and Facebook who have supported media literacy initiatives so that consumers can better navigate the increased range of quality and choice of media content.