Part 2 - cont.

media to include all "texts" that carry communicative meaning. Public service announcements, textbooks, billboards and packaging, the Internet, situation comedies, informational brochures, and direct mailings are all forms of mass media that should be part of the instructional context in media education but are often ignored.

While the discussion emphasized health issues in media literacy education, some participants believed that the basic research issues related to media literacy are the same regardless of the content area. Furthermore, a number of participants emphasized that health issues such as violence prevention, sexuality, substance abuse and nutrition may also be approached in language arts, social studies and the fine and performing arts curricula, not only in health.

Definitions of Media Literacy

The first important question that participants recognized as a central need was in narrowing a definition of media literacy within the larger context of the use of media and technology in education. Media literacy instruction is understood in different ways by various practitioners, with some emphasizing "access" issues, such as how to obtain needed information or to "read" the symbolic codes of messages, and others emphasizing "analysis" issues, like identifying point-of-view or subtext. Still others emphasize "creating" messages by emphasizing media production skills. Since all these approaches are part of the concept of media literacy, it is likely that there is misunderstanding about the concept