I believe that media literacy is a fundamentally important part of a modern education—right up there with readin’, writin’ and arithmetic. The average American kid spends about 4 hours per day viewing television or movies [1]. At the same time, critical thinking is being plucked out of school curricula in favor of rote memorization and standardized testing. Now, more than ever, it is essential that young people are trained to analyze media messages and have their own voices represented in the media swarm.
To put my money where my mouth is, I have worked with the following organizations:

TILT (Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools) was a pioneer in combining media literacy with hands-on video production. I was the director of TILT in 2006, and was responsible for strategic planning, workshop and curriculum development, promotion, instructor training, client relations and all other aspects of management. During my time there, we did filmmaking workshops with a wide range of underserved and underrepresented youth, from children of mixed-race adoptive families, to LGBT teens, to middle school students in one of the most volatile areas of the inner-city. My biggest accomplishment at TILT was overseeing the production of an entirely updated curriculum, consisting of over 40 lessons and activities that took students from story development, all the way through post-production of their own films.

Listen to a middle school math teacher describe the exciting results of my work in her classroom with Just Think.

Just Think is one of the foremost media education organizations in the world. I served as a curriculum developer and on-site coordinator for their Media Education, Arts and Literacy Project, a three-year program conducted in partnership with the Alliance for a Media Literate America and funded by the U.S. Department of Education. As JT describes it, “the goal of the project was to create an innovative and cohesive model curriculum demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating media literacy and media production into core middle school curriculum, strengthening critical and creative thinking skills, and improving students’ academic performance.” That’s a mouthful, but the gist of it is that I got to work with 16 sixth and seventh grade teachers and 444 students from two schools on a bunch of awesome media projects in the classroom that met state standards in Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, Science, and the Arts.

Evaluation results of the MEAL project have been disseminated nationally here.

[1] Roberts DF, Foehr UG, Rideout V. Generation M: media in the lives of 8-18 year-olds. Kaiser Family Foundation. March 2005.