Item
Teenagers’ reflections on media literacy initiatives at school and everyday media literacy discourses
- Author
- Tom De Leyn, Cato Waeterloos, Ralf De Wolf, Bart Vanhaelewyn, Koen Ponnet & Lieven De Marez
- Year
- 2022
- Publisher
- Taylor and Francis
- Abstract
-
Often coined as digital natives, contemporary teens are ascribed a paradoxical status of skilled but vulnerable media users. Therefore, media literacy initiatives often target young audiences in order to mitigate detrimental media effects as well as to facilitate emancipatory media engagements. The literature on media literacy draws from diverse disciplines (e.g. educational sciences, media studies) and examines a wide range of thematic areas (e.g. privacy, news, citizenship). However, the voices of those who are the target population of media literacy policy and research are seldom heard. We identify the absence of teenagers’ perceptions and experiences as a limitation in contemporary debates on media literacy. Therefore, this study aims to shed light on how teenagers give meaning to media literacy, how they perceive the contemporary discourse on the importance of media literacy for teens, and in which way they encounter concrete media literacy initiatives at school. Based on in-depth interviews with 31 high-school students between 16 and 18 year old, we found how teenagers primarily have a risk discourse in mind when talking about media literacy. Contextualizing these perceptions, it became clear that both the public discourse and media literacy initiatives largely draw from protectionist approaches.
- Keywords
- Media Education
- Tags
- Critical thinking
- PGDMIL Course
- C06 – Media, Information and Empowerment
- PGDMIL Block
- C06-B4: Implementation of MIL Strategies
- Has Part
- C06-U16: MIL Integration Across Curricula
- Corpus Status
- Accepted – In Corpus