Repair of the Media: Exercises in Critical Media Literacy at the Jewish Community Center

Purpose of the Study:\ud This qualitative case study aims to provide insight into efforts to implement critical media literacy with elementary-aged populations in an after-school setting. Currently, The Center for Media Literacy's MediaLit Kit provides the only comprehensive pedagogical framework and curriculum on the subject. Consisting of three resources for educators, the Kit encourages adaptation, application, and evaluation to further research in this area. My work, building upon the dearth of study previously done, looks to a novel context for implementation in order to provide evaluative data for not simply student assessment, but also curricular assessment.\ud Procedure:\ud Utilizing a research framework that blends ethnographic research with personal narrative, The Repair of the Media study presents three months of critical media literacy instruction at a Jewish Community Center. Through classroom fieldwork, participant interviews, and classroom observations, the principal researcher engages both teachers and students in a fourth/ fifth grade classroom with seven developmentally appropriate CML Media Lit Kit lessons.\ud Findings:\ud My data presented five trends regarding student assessment of the curriculum in question, which I believe present a unique view in the previous landscape of study on this subject. These trends include: 1) The curriculum is extremely well liked, 2) The curriculum inspires students to want to learn more about the subject, 3) Students responded far more to the experiential portions of the curriculum, than to others, 4) Students often struggled to achieve deeper understandings and objectives associated with the curriculum's lessons, and finally 5) The curriculum did provide concrete opportunities that empowered elementary-aged young people to begin asking critical questions about the media and understanding media with a critical edge.\ud Conclusions:\ud My study discerned The Center for Media Literacy's MediaLit Kit to be a curriculum both enjoyable and intellectually rewarding for elementary-aged students in an after-school setting. Equally important, the study also suggests it may playa crucial role in the skill-building initial steps necessary for students to begin understanding media with a critical perspective. Finally, future study will need to evaluate the effectiveness of this curriculum as a singular tool for teaching critical media literacy, for my research illustrates this as an area of challenge for many students