It's an Exciting Time for Media Literacy in Washington

By Frank Gallagher / May 20, 2008

During the Clinton administration, money flowed into educational technology. During the Bush administration, repeated attempts have been made to zero out technology programs from the Department of Education budget. In the Bush years, many of the groups advocating technology in education had to learn to work together to successfully defend technology funding during budget deliberations.

What does that have to do with media literacy? Everything. In Washington, and in many state capitals, progress often depends on a clear, consistent and compelling message.

Rather than approaching Congress, or speaking to the education trade press as individual organizations advancing their own interests, those ed tech groups came together with a message they could all agree on. They spoke with one voice and were able to get Congress to put technology funding back into the budget.

The need for media literacy is compelling, but we speak with many different and sometimes contradictory voices that present policymakers with a bewildering variety of terms and programs. So long as different groups are advocating media literacy, information literacy, technology literacy, ICT literacy and more, we are competing against each other and are not going to make progress in departments of education, school districts or legislatures.

There is new interest in media literacy here in DC due, in part, to education and advocacy groups working together. With groups like the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, media and the other literacies are presented as an essential components for a 21st Century education. Each benefits from being seen as an important piece of the puzzle. Each complements rather than competes with the other and, together, we present a comprehensive vision for education. The 21st Century Skills framework presents the kind of clear, consistent and compelling message that resonates with policymakers as evidenced by the number of states signing up to revise their curriculum.

It's an exciting time for media literacy in Washington-maybe the best opportunity in years for a wide scale infusion of media literacy into teaching and learning. We're starting to get some interest and traction with education and policy groups and media literacy's profile is growing. The US Department of Education invited the Center for Media Literacy and Cable in the Classroom to brief its staff about the subject. Media literacy is becoming an important part of the conversation around internet safety. And policy makers are showing more interest in our field than I've seen since the early 1990s.