Toward a Media Literate World: Exploring Secondary Educators' Challenges Incorporating Media Literacy Education

Classroom teachers can be instrumental in helping students develop media literacy skills. Studies indicate, however, that educators experience a variety of challenges (e.g., lack of time, administrative support, training) in their efforts to include media literacy education within their curriculum. These challenges have been shown to impede teachers’ inclusion of media literacy education, as well as limit teachers’ understanding of media literacy. The current study sought to investigate these types of challenges reported by teachers and librarians. The study obtained a sample of 69 secondary educators who were surveyed about their confidence integrating media literacy in classes, the challenges they face doing so, and their integration of media literacy education into their curriculum. An exploratory factor analysis indicated that challenges reported by educators grouped into three different factors: training challenges, internal challenges, and external challenges. The sample of educators reported experiencing all the challenges to varying degrees, however, only the training challenges and external challenges predicted educators’ confidence incorporating media literacy. The external challenges factor was the only factor that predicted a decrease in educators’ incorporation of media literacy within courses. Internal challenges were not significantly predictive of either outcome variable