Center for Media Literacy

The Center for Media Literacy (CML) is an educational organization that provides leadership, public education, professional development and educational resources nationally. Dedicated to promoting and supporting media literacy education as a framework for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating and participating with media content, CML works to help citizens, especially the young, develop critical thinking and media production skills needed to live fully in the 21st century media culture.

CML provides a thorough and comprehensive overview of the history, theory, and practice of media literacy education, and positions it as a core unit of study, as well as a discipline that can aid educators in core subject areas, as well as providing skills that satisfy a variety of state education standards.

Media literacy is a subject area that can be taught on its own or used as a support to aid existing curriculum for core subjects, and the CML has created a wonderful guide, called the MediaLit Kit, which provides theoretical, practical, and anecdotal information regarding media literacy application.

In beginning to explore media literacy, the CML has prepared the “5 Key Questions to Change the World” for teachers to begin to understand what media literacy is.  (The PDF document can be downloaded by following the link).

CML really understands the importance of promoting media literacy as a vehicle for progressive education and outlines how it can do so, even in a standards-based system.

They also offer case studies that highlight successful media literacy projects that have taken place in the classrooms across the US, especially one of the larger projects that CML was part of, called Project SMARTArt.

Additionally, they are very friendly to those beginning the process of considering and/or implementing media literacy, and offer a strategic overview of methods for adoption.