Media Literacy
From an ideological stance, media literacy shifts 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 is 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 may be evident in the lived experiences of MDL that occurs with the OEPr of teacher educators.
UNESCO combines media and information literacies (MIL) into a singular concept that encompasses and combines with a range of literacies such as computer, internet, digital, library, news, media and information literacies. This MIL framework outlines five laws of MIL (Grizzle & Singh, n.d.) that are presented in a matrix with three components (access, evaluate, create) and includes competencies and performance indicators that can be applied to individual teacher's practices and FoE at the organizational level.
Additionally, media literacies can include 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 provides is a closer examination of the protectionist versus permissive perspectives when integrating medial literacies into teaching and learning contexts.
The concept of educommunication emerges from Latin American media literacy education contexts. As defined by Oliveira Soares in 2003 and translated into English, educommunication is a:
Educommunication is further framed by the Latin American notion of ‘lo popular’ that focuses, not on popular culture, but on the narratives ‘of the people’ as mediations of media practices in everyday experiences (Rincon & Marroquin, 2020). This approach incorporates media practices grounded in current issues in communities. Educommunication suggests an end to the division between receivers and emitters of mass media (Aguaded & Delgado-Ponce, 2019; Torrent & Aparici, 2010).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).