Media Literacy: An entrée for pre‐service teachers into critical pedagogy

Media literacy education is an emerging field in the US. At the same time, accountability in public schools is soaring. Critical media literacy, with its liberatory pursuits, is very much at odds with repetition and recall. Yet media culture is persuasive and pervasive, and critical media literacy’s concepts are in line with critical pedagogy. So it seems that by introducing critical media literacy to future teachers, we might stand a chance of one day reversing this curricular narrowing. The author used qualitative methods to analyze a group of undergraduate elementary education pre‐service teachers’ discussions surrounding a particular controversial music video and various factors emerged with regard to this pedagogical simulation. These included the importance of choosing an appropriate media text, how dialogue about this chosen text can lead toward conscientization, how pre‐service teachers can recognize viewers’ subjectivity, and how they can reveal what knowledge they are lacking with regard to critical understandings. The discussion offers suggestions for teacher educators interested in including critical media literacy within teacher education. Implications strongly suggest that more of this work be conducted within teacher education.