Building Media Literacy in Young Children through Community Service

Abstract

Media literacy is the new buzz phrase among elementary educators. Interest ranges from teaching children to find credible resources on the internet to showing them how to create their own mass media messages. This article explores the approaches elementary educators have taken to teach students media literacy in the classroom. Then it discusses the curriculum developed by two graduate students who taught media literacy via a community-service project. Twenty eighth grade students were led through the professional process of creating one website for a local museum. The process aimed to teach students the importance of audience analysis, basic design principles, graphic copyright, and the art of pitching a design to a client.