Relevance to Majors:

Critical media literacy is especially relevant for majors because many go on to work in media-related fields.  For these students, Comm 240 provides an opportunity to reflect on, and begin making difficult choices about, how to reconcile interests in media-related careers with other social and ethical commitments.

For instance, I frequently have students that enter the course with aspirations to work in the advertising industry.  After studying the social impact of contemporary advertising, struggling to reconcile this awareness with other personal values, and learning about opportunities to employ advertising-related skills for noncommercial purposes, many of these students inform me that they plan to shift their direction away from the commercial sector and toward the public and non-profit sectors -- which are increasingly looking for people with "social marketing" skills in order to get their messages out. 

In addition, for communication majors that are considering graduate school, Comm 240 exposes them to a field of teaching and research to which many have had no prior exposure.  A number of students have expressed interest in this field after taking the course. As support for media literacy education continues to grow world-wide, these students will also be positioned for successful careers in a field that is socially beneficial and personally rewarding.

For majors as well as non-majors, media literacy is also relevant for the everyday practical insights it offers -- insights that help students make sense out of, and make decisions about, the increasingly mediated environments they live in.  Granted, many students have already had some exposure to specific media literacy themes.  For instance, representations of women in the media are increasingly being analyzed in high school social studies classes as well as in university women's studies classes -- such as those offered at WWU.  And these courses are indeed very valuable.  However, unlike these thematic courses that critically examine specific categories of media representations, Comm 240 helps students develop a larger conceptual framework within which they can make sense out of their entire media environment.

Toward this end, rather than jump immediately into analysis of specific media content (as valuable as that approach is in other courses), Comm 240 initially helps student construct a conceptual model with which they can understand the many influences that shape the production of media content.  This model integrates psychological, sociological, political, economic, organizational, and ideological perspectives, among others.  Together, these perspectives provide complementary and mutually informing insights into the many factors that shape and constrain media content. With this model in place, the course then examines theories of media influence -- focusing especially on "cultivation theory" which is consistent with the cultural environment metaphor that underlies the course. 

Only after these conceptual frameworks are in place do students then go on to examine specific categories of media representations and how they influence us both individually and collectively.  In this regard, students study not only representations of women, they also critically examine representations of masculinity, race and ethnicity, the natural environment, consumerism, citizenship, and several other themes. 

By this point in the course, students often begin to express various degrees of discontent (or anger) at the state of our media environment, along with pessimism (or despair) regarding the possibility of meaningful change.  In response, the final section of the course attempts to raise awareness regarding the prospects and possibilities of constructive change.  Toward this end, students examine ways to gain some control over their own media environment, the impact of their choices as media consumers, alternative practices within various sectors of the media, concrete policy proposals for media reform, the emergence of social movements pursuing media reform, and so forth -- all of which are again as relevant to non-majors as they are to majors.