Research and Scholarship

Because of the rapidly changing nature of our global cultural environment and the role of literacy in enhancing personal, social and cultural development, the concept of literacy is now expanding to include digital, visual and electronic media and popular culture.

Purpose. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the US, and 90% of adults who die from smoking begin as adolescents. Youth aged 8-18 are exposed to 81⁄2 hours of mass media daily, and such exposure is associated with increased smoking. Media literacy therefore presents

While they demonstrate some ability to critically analyze the more obvious forms of deceptive weight-loss advertising, many girls do not recognize how advertising evokes emotional responses or how visual and narrative techniques are used to increase identification in weight-loss advertising.

This paper examines some instructional practices concerning the non-optimal uses of video, films
and other mass media in the K–12 classroom. Based on a six-year process of observing and