Description
How and why do media texts target certain groups of people? How do media fit into your life and the lives of others? How do media shape people’s perceptions regarding race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, ability, the environment, and politics? In this course, you will focus on what you know and how you know it and learned it. As you explore how the media operates in society, you will gain the tools of critical media literacy that will allow you to make more informed choices as an active audience. This secular but inclusive semester course is offered in Naperville as a HALF year/semester elective course with in-person class meetings once/week for 1.5 hour with additional work done between classes qualifying for 0.5 transcriptable elective credit.
Critical Media Literacy
In-person class Friday mornings, 9:00 – 10:30am with an additional approximately 2 hours of work to be done between classes.
Registration is for the Fall 2025 semester-long course (16 weeks)
Over the course of the semester, students create a young adult budget based on real inputs and personal decisions about how they want to live in the future. An overview of the basics of earning, saving and managing money and risk. Wages, taxes, budgeting for daily living as well as debt, credit and compounding interest are all explored.
The key concepts for Critical Media Literacy are:
- Make decisions about where to get information
- Understand and use tools to evaluate media sources
- Recognize when you are being targeted by media
- Define media, bias, politics, “social media” and other critical aspects of media
- Create an action plan for how you interact with media
Minimum content covered in the course include:
- Understanding what media is, mass media and the history of media
- Evaluating sources and “fake news”
- Media bias and representations
- Politics, propoganda and media
- Advertising in the media
- Social media and data mining
Additional content may be covered depending on the pace of student learning and the direction their discovery moves.
- The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People (Project Censored and the Media Revolution Collective, 2022) ISBN: 978-1644211960
- The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (Higdon, 2020) ISBN: 978-0520347878
- Single subject notebook (70-100 pages) for use as a Digital Footprint Journal
- Pocket folder for handouts
- Writing utensils
Additionally, students will need technical ability to access Zoom, FlipGrid, EdPuzzle, Nearpod.com, Study.com and Canvas (our learning management system).
At home, students will need access to the internet (home or library) to look up information, related published materials and/or videos and do work through our class learning management system. Some videos will be subscription-based and issued by illuminat-ED (all students will have accounts for Discovery Streaming and Study.com for additional video support). Some videos will be freely available.
Amount of time will depend on your student’s speed/fluency with the tasks and topics at hand and the content of the week. Families should allocate approximately 2-3 hours/week to complete various assigned labs, tasks or group collaboration that might require internet access in preparation for live class. Some of this can be done during Flex Work Time at our facility.
Combined with our live class time, this is a total of 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 hours/week for a course total of 56-72 hours. This equates to one half credit using the Carnegie unit methodology.
We will be collaboratively sharing individual work/results and discussing results in the context of the current topic, learning new topics, and doing practical activities
