Contact Renee directly at renee.hobbs@temple.edu or phone (978) 201-9799 to arrange for a keynote address, staff development program, workshop, seminar or consulting. 

Renee Hobbs is one of the nation's leading authorities on media literacy education. She is a Professor at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia and holds a joint appointment at the College of Education.

Renee Hobbs has spent a lifetime helping educators around the nation and around the world to integrate media literacy into existing curriculum through research, curriculum development and advocacy. She founded the Media Education Lab in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media.  Over her career, she has contributed dozens of scholarly articles, multimedia curriculum resources and professional development programs to advance the quality of media literacy education in the United States and around the world.

Hobbs is a field-builder. She helped create the Partnership for Media Education, which evolved into the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), the national membership organization for media literacy. She served as President in 1998. She is co-editor of the Journal for Media Literacy Education, a new open-access online peer review journal.

In 2008, Renee developed Powerful Voices for Kids, a university-school partnership to address the needs of low-income and minority children in terms of media, technology and digital learning. Powerful Voices for Kids is a comprehensive program for urban public schools that offers a summer enrichment program for children, staff development for elementary educators, hands-on mentoring and curriculum development support for teachers, and a program of research designed to develop alternative assessment methodology to document children’s development of the critical thinking and communication skills in response to mass media, popular culture and digital media.

Hobbs’ scholarly work explores the intersection of the fields of media studies and education. Her book, Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of the impact of media literacy education on reading comprehension skills.  In 2006, Hobbs wanted to explore how to reach pre-teen and tween girls directly with a media literacy message. With support from the U.S. Office on Women’s Health, she created My Pop Studio, an award-winning multimedia edutainment website that introduces tween girls to media literacy concepts that takes girls “behind the scenes” of popular music, television, magazines, and online media. Along the way, girls are asked to reflect on the messages the media offers about what it is like to be a teen girl in America today and to think about the cultural and economic factors shaping the media and digital environment that has become so much a part of their everyday life.

In 2007, Renee became the recipient of a research grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, with her colleagues Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi at American University in Washington DC to work on copyright and fair use issues in media literacy education. Her forthcoming book on the project, Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning helps teachers understand copyrighted law as it applies to digital media.

Hobbs has worked with educators internationally to advance media literacy education. She has worked in Italy, The Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, France and China to help bring media literacy education to students and teachers worldwide.  She designed the first-ever teacher education program for the nation of Qatar, sponsored by the Qatar Foundation, and is involved in a partnership with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations to explore how media literacy can promote children’s global understanding.

Teachers need tools to help them explore the power of social media for learning. In 2008, she created an online interactive education program for integrating social media into the teaching of the 2008 Presidential election, with support from PBS Teachers.  Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement is an interactive website for teachers designed to strengthen their ability to use social media tools developed by the PBS community.  The project received the Creative Projects Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in 2009.

She received an Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (1985), an M.A. in Communication from the University of Michigan (1981), and a B.A. with a double major in English Literature and Film Video Studies from the University of Michigan (1979). Her children, Roger and Rachel, are enrolled in college at Reed College and Franklin& Marshall College.  She lives in Center City Philadelphia with her husband, Randy, who is studying to be a chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, Canada.