Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy that includes the ability to access and analyze media messages as well as create, reflect and take action, using the power of information and communication to make a difference in the world. Media literacy is not restricted to one medium and is understood as a set of competencies that are essential for work, life, and citizenship. Media literacy education is the process used to advance media literacy competencies, and it is intended to promote awareness of media influence and create an active stance towards both consuming and creating media. Media literacy education is part of the curriculum in the United States and some European Union countries, and an interdisciplinary global community of media scholars and educators engages in knowledge and scholarly and professional journals and national membership associations.
Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
Henry Armand Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.
A hidden curriculum is a set of lessons "which are learned but not openly intended" to be taught in school such as the norms, values, and beliefs conveyed in both the classroom and social environment.
Critical literacy is the ability to find embedded discrimination in media. This is done by analyzing the messages promoting prejudiced power relationships found naturally in media and written material that go unnoticed otherwise by reading beyond the author's words and examining the manner in which the author has conveyed his or her ideas about society's norms to determine whether these ideas contain racial or gender inequality.
Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States. The flagship national organization for this field is the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative, and free schools for African Americans mostly in the South. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and economic equality in the United States. The most prominent example of Freedom Schools was in Mississippi during the summer of 1964.
Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life is a 1976 book by economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Widely considered a groundbreaking work in sociology of education, it argues the "correspondence principle" explains how the internal organization of schools corresponds to the internal organisation of the capitalist workforce in its structures, norms, and values. For example, the authors assert the hierarchy system in schools reflects the structure of the labour market, with the head teacher as the managing director, pupils fall lower down in the hierarchy. Wearing uniforms and discipline are promoted among students from working class, as it would be in the workplace for lower levels employees. Education provides knowledge of how to interact in the workplace and gives direct preparation for entry into the labour market.
Joe Lyons Kincheloe was a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. He wrote more than 45 books, numerous book chapters, and hundreds of journal articles on issues including critical pedagogy, educational research, urban studies, cognition, curriculum, and cultural studies. Kincheloe received three graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee. The father of four children, he worked closely for the last 19 years of his life with his partner, Shirley R. Steinberg.
Education sciences or education theory seek to describe, understand, and prescribe education policy and practice. Education sciences include many topics, such as pedagogy, andragogy, curriculum, learning, and education policy, organization and leadership. Educational thought is informed by many disciplines, such as history, philosophy, sociology, and psychology.
Shirley R. Steinberg is an educator, author, activist,filmmaker, and public speaker whose work focuses on critical pedagogy, social justice, and cultural studies. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about critical pedagogy, urban and youth culture, community studies, cultural studies, Islamophobia, and issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Steinberg is the Research Chair of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, executive director of the Freire Project freireproject.org, and a visiting researcher at University of Barcelona and Murdoch University. She has held faculty positions at Montclair State University, Adelphi University, Brooklyn College, The CUNY Graduate Center, and McGill University. Steinberg directed the Institute for Youth and Community Research at the University of the West of Scotland for two years.
The Rouge Forum is an organization of educational activists, which focuses on issues of equality, democracy, and social justice.
Educational capital refers to educational goods that are converted into commodities to be bought, sold, withheld, traded, consumed, and profited from in the educational system. Educational capital can be utilized to produce or reproduce inequality, and it can also serve as a leveling mechanism that fosters social justice and equal opportunity. Educational capital has been the focus of study in Economic anthropology, which provides a framework for understanding educational capital in its endeavor to understand human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology.
Thomas S. Popkewitz is an Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education, USA. His studies explore historically and contemporary education as practices of making different kinds of people that distribute differences. He has written or edited approximately 40 books and 300 articles in journals and book chapters translated into 17 languages. Recent studies focus on the comparative reason of educational research as cartographies and architectures that produce phantasmagrams of societies, population and differences. The studies entail theoretical, discursive, ethnography, and historical studies that explore school, professional identities, and the relation to conceptions of differences inscribed childhood, learning and cultural differences.
Christine E. Sleeter is an American professor and educational reformer. She is known as the Professor Emerita in the School of Professional Studies, California State University, Monterey Bay. She has also served as the Vice President of Division K of the American Educational Research Association, and as president of the National Association for Multicultural Education. Her work primarily focuses on multicultural education, preparation of teachers for culturally diverse schools, and anti-racism. She has been honored for her work as the recipient of the American Educational Research Association Social Justice Award, the Division K Teaching and Teacher Education Legacy Award, the CSU Monterey Bay President's Medal, the Chapman University Paulo Freire Education Project Social Justice Award, and the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group Multicultural and Multiethnic Education Lifetime Achievement Award.
Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas is a book by economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell that details Sowell's assessment of the state of education in the United States.
Public sphere pedagogy (PSP) represents an approach to educational engagement that connects classroom activities with real world civic engagement. The focus of PSP programs is to connect class assignments, content, and readings with contemporary public issues. Students are then asked to participate with members of the community in various forms of public sphere discourse and democratic participation such as town hall meetings and public debate events. Through these events, students are challenged to practice civic engagement and civil discourse.
Anthony G. Picciano is an American scholar, author, and academic who has made significant contributions to the study of digital technology in education leadership, planning, and instruction. He has conducted major national studies with Jeff Seaman on instructional technology use in American K-12 education. He holds faculty positions at Hunter College, the Graduate Center, and the School of Professional Studies, all at the City University of New York.
Ivor Frederick Goodson is a British educationalist. He is a professor at Tallinn University.
