Media Literacy
From an ideological stance, media literacy shifted beyond encoding and decoding media texts to engage in meaning making within socially, politically, and culturally contextualized media consumption and production spaces (Baker, 2016; Hobbs, 2017; Hoechsmann, 2019; Hoechsmann & Poyntz, 2012; Kellner & Share, 2019). Media literacy was a process of becoming (Gee, 2017) that is networked (Ito et al., 2010; West-Puckett et al., 2018), participatory (Jenkins et al., 2009), discursive (Gee, 2015), and complicated (boyd, 2010). Within teacher education, these media literacy processes are evident in the lived experiences with MDL that occur within the OEPr of teacher educators.
UNESCO combined media and information literacies (MIL) into a singular concept that encompassed and combined with other literacies such as computer, internet, digital, library, news, media and information literacies. This MIL framework outlined five laws of MIL (Grizzle & Singh, n.d.) that are presented in a matrix with three components (access, evaluate, create) and included competencies and performance indicators that can be applied to individual teacher's practices and FoE at the organizational level.
Additionally, media literacies included categories such as remix literacies (Hoechsmann, 2019), critical media literacies (Kellner & Share, 2019), and conceptions of educommunication (DeWaard, in press). Remix literacies, considered both autonomous and ideologic, are described as "the capacity to communicate – drawing on a number of multiple modalities and knowledges – needed for broad participation in civic, professional and cultural life" (Hoechsmann, 2019, p. 94). Critical media literacies are constituted by a "specific body of knowledge and set of skills, as well as a framework of conceptual understandings" (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 8) that includes co-construction within social contexts, examining semantics relating to mediums used, understanding contextual media messages, challenging bias and dominant hierarchies, purpose of media messages, and media cultures are sites of struggle. What critical media literacy provided was a closer examination of the protectionist versus permissive perspectives when integrating media literacies into teaching and learning contexts.
A contrast to media literacies that are prominent in North American contexts includes the concept of educommunication found in Latin American education contexts which breaks from the dominant literacies focus. As defined by Oliveira Soares in 2003 and translated into English, educommunication is a:
Educommunication was further framed by the Latin American notion of ‘lo popular’ that focused, not on popular culture, but on the narratives ‘of the people’ as mediations of media practices in everyday experiences (Rincon & Marroquin, 2020). This approach incorporated media practices, often applying electronic or low-bandwidth digital technologies to educate, communicate or debate local initiatives and current issues in communities. Educommunication suggested an end to the division between receivers and emitters of mass media (Aguaded & Delgado-Ponce, 2019; Torrent & Aparici, 2010). With this contextual framework outlined, I notices the connection to this research design.set of actions inherent to planning, implementation and evaluation of processes, programs and products destined to create and strengthen communicative ecosystems in educational spaces, improve the communicative coefficient of educational actions, develop the critical spirit in users of mass media, adequately use information resources in educational practice and expand people’s expression capability (Freitas & Ferreira, 2020, p. 57).