IInnttrroodduuccttiioonnThe world we live in today is very different than the world that most of us remember fromour childhood. The twenty-first century is a media saturated, technologically dependent,and globally connected world. However, most education in the United States has not keptup with advances in technology or educational research. In our global information soci-ety, it is insufficient to teach students to read and write only with letters and numbers. Welive in a multimedia age where the majority of information people receive comes less oftenfrom print sources and more typically from highly constructed visual images, complex soundarrangements, and multiple media formats. The influential role that broadcasting and emer-gent information and computer media play in organizing, shaping, and disseminatinginformation, ideas, and values is creating a powerful public pedagogy (Giroux, 1999; Luke,1997). These changes in technology, media, and society require the development of crit-ical media literacy to empower students and citizens to adequately read media messages andproduce media themselves in order to be active participants in a democratic society(Kellner, 1995; Kellner & Share, 2005).Critical Media Literacy,Democracy, and the Reconstruction of EducationDouglas Kellner and Jeff ShareChapter 1medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 3Even so, despite the ubiquity of media culture in contemporary society and everydaylife, and despite criticism of the distorted values, ideals, and representations of the worldin popular culture, media education in K-12 schooling in the United States has never reallybeen established and developed. The current technological revolution, however, brings tothe fore, more than ever, the role of media like television, popular music, film, and adver-tising, as the Internet rapidly absorbs these cultural forms and creates ever-evolving cyber-spaces and emergent forms of culture and pedagogy.It is highly irresponsible in the face of saturation by the Internet and media culture toignore these forms of socialization and education. Consequently, a critical reconstructionof education should produce pedagogies that provide media literacy and enable students,teachers, and citizens to discern the nature and effects of media culture. From this perspec-tive, media culture is a form of pedagogy that teaches proper and improper behavior, gen-der roles, values, and knowledge of the world. Individuals are often not aware that they arebeing educated and positioned by media culture, as its pedagogy is frequently invisible andis absorbed unconsciously. This situation calls for critical approaches that make us awareof how media construct meanings, influence and educate audiences, and impose theirmessages and values.Critical media literacy expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of masscommunication and popular culture as well as deepens the potential of education to crit-ically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. Itinvolves cultivating skills in analyzing media codes and conventions, abilities to criticizestereotypes, dominant values, and ideologies, and competencies to interpret the multiplemeanings and messages generated by media texts. Media literacy helps people to discrim-inate and evaluate media content, to critically dissect media forms, to investigate mediaeffects and uses, to use media intelligently, and to construct alternative media.In this chapter, we explore different approaches commonly used for teaching media edu-cation and propose a conception of critical media literacy that moves media education intothe sphere of twenty-first-century transformative pedagogy. We present competingapproaches to media education and, building on these conceptions, develop a criticalmedia literacy addressing issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and power to explore theinterconnections of media, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. We argue that alterna-tive media production can help engage students to challenge media texts and narratives thatappear natural and transparent. In the contemporary era of standardized high stakes test-ing and corporate structuring of public education, radical democracy depends on a Deweyanreconceptualization of literacy and the role of education in society. We argue that criticalmedia literacy must expand our understanding of literacy so that these ideas become inte-grated across the curriculum at all levels from pre-school to university, leading to a recon-struction and democratization of education and society.LLiitteerraacciieessLiteracy involves gaining the skills and knowledge to read, interpret, produce texts and arti-4 Critical Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Reconstruction of Education medialitinteriorpart1.qxd 3/2/2007 8:27 AM Page 4facts, and to gain the intellectual tools and capacities to fully participate in one’s cultureand society. Both traditionalists and reformists would probably agree that education andliteracy are intimately connected. “Literacy,” in our conception, comprises gaining com-petencies involved in effectively learning and using socially constructed forms of commu-nication and representation. Because literacies are socially constructed in variousinstitutional discourses and practices within educational and cultural sites, cultivating lit-eracies involves attaining competencies in practices in contexts that are governed byrules and conventions. Literacies evolve and shift in response to social and cultural changeand the interests of elites who control hegemonic institutions, as well as to the emergenceof new technologies.To the domains of reading, writing, and traditional print literacies, one could argue thatin an era of technological revolution educators must develop robust forms of media liter-acy, computer literacy, and multimedia literacies, thus cultivating “multiple literacies” inthe restructuring of education.1Computer and multimedia technologies demand novel skillsand competencies, and if education is to be relevant to the problems and challenges of con-temporary life, engaged teachers must expand the concept of literacy and develop new cur-ricula and pedagogies.We would resist, however, extreme claims that the era of the book and print literacyare over. Although there are new media and literacies in the current constellation, books,reading, and print literacy continue to be of utmost significance. Indeed, in the