As I conduct my content analysis of media literacy definitions, I think I’ll start with Richard Lanham. In The Electronic Word, he points to rhetoric as the appropriate field of study in this era of the network: “This revival of our traditional paideia includes those parts of contemporary literary criticism and cultural studies which have rediscovered that all arguments are constructed with a purpose, to serve an interest–a rediscovery symbolized by Terry Eagleton’s reflection, at the end of his literary-theory survey, that we might as well call the whole subject ‘Rhetoric.'”
Daily Archives: September 30, 2006
Scholastic Withdraws The Path to 9/11
Finally got around to reading Education Week for September 20 and found this article concerning Scholastic’s decision to pull the classroom materials they had created to accompany the controversial ABC TV drama, The Path to 9/11.
Here’s the intersection of media literacy and documentary film: ABC maintained that their film was a fictionalized version and had already taken a lot of criticism about evident bias against the Clinton administration. Scholastic created materials that furthered inaccuracies. So, Scholastic turned it into a media literacy lesson and, according to Education Week, “replaced the disputed materials with an online discussion guide that took a much different approach to the ABC movie–one that aims to help students dissect the ways the news media convey various messages” (p. 9, September 20, 2006). The article quotes Diane Ravitch who says that creating classroom materials based on “partially fictional accounts of history” is problematic.