Ask, Don’t Tell: Pedagogy for Media Literacy Education in the Next Decade

NAMLE was founded (as the Alliance for a Media Literate America) ten years ago with a mission ”to expand and improve the practice of media literacy education in the United States. ” There have been many successes since then, and some disappointments. The expansion of media literacy education into schools has fallen into the latter category, with modest and grow-ing numbers of teachers and library media specialists on board, but far short of the organization’s vision of universal media literacy education in the U.S. There are varied and complex reasons for the slow embrace of media literacy education by U.S. schools. Some obvious explanations include overt po-litical resistance, narrow focus on high stakes testing mandates, continuing lack of access to media technolo