President’s Message: Wake-Up Call is Mandate for Media Literacy Education

Hello, Media Literacy Proponents and Enthusiasts,

Welcome to 2010 and to GMLP’s re-launched web site. We hope you visit our web site often for your media literacy education needs and interactions with others similarly focused.

No doubt, you’ve already heard or read about the Kaiser Family Foundation’s landmark study, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- 18-Year-Olds.”   Detailing youth’s use and hours spent with their numerous media, the findings are  mind-boggling, like the previous Kaiser studies, from 1999 and 2004, were, for their times.

While GMLP likes to mainly cover regional news about our field, we also like to link to resources that aid an understanding that local media habits can be inextricably tied to the rest of the nation’s, in various ways, including what the overall impact for the nation and the world might be.     I’m sure, once you see the Kaiser documentation and summaries, you’ll better understand the implications of youths’ immersion in their media (tv, cell phones, computers, video games, print ), and maybe even have an Ah Ha! moment regarding the economic-development implications of the study, here and around the country.   This study, in itself, is a mandate—a wake-up call and call for action– for working hard  to meet our communities’ need to achieve and sustain media literacy.

More specifically, it’s up to groups like GMLP to keep this information front-and-center, giving  that “wake-up call” every day, as loud and regularly as Revelie at bootcamp, for we know, all too well, the news of this report will have made headlines and saturated our media for only about a week or so, only to be supplanted by other news!

Toward that end, we are especially committed to continuing our work with Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), especially because it’s been working to revamp its media literacy education standards.  And we’ll hope to kindle a relationship with Illinois’s department, this year.  As you’re most likely aware,  it is an especially key time as both states vie for important national funding, and in the face of a national standards push.  Whether or not the these states win the funding, we are committed to working with them and school districts, given more-and-more of what we know about youth’s immersion in media.

As GMLP moves  forward with its strategic planning, we know we must be relentless media literacy ambassadors, advancing our field so more-and-more teachers in formal and informal education settings can learn how to teach our youths the critical-thinking skills necessary in a media-saturated world, without media-bashing and censorship.

As we witness and hear about the horrors of natural disaster, 24/7, brace ourselves for an H1N1 come-back, and absorb all the messages about our economic welfare in the face of terrorism and unemployment, how can we NOT be thinking about how all these messages affect us?  For those of us who choose the Internet for our news and possible philanthropy, we must, for sure, be vigilant about the trustworthiness of our media sources.  For those of us interested in healthcare,–and who’s not at some level?–we need to know the right questions to ask about the media we encounter; and we must also be mindful of and honor those who work to safeguard our ability to access numerous sources of information, all the time.

Normally at this time of the year, it’s about resolutions.    I will go “there” in just a moment.   But first,  I want to send a message of gratitude to ALL who have made GMLP successful in its early organizational life.  Thank you….for the GMLP board’s tireless efforts; for its rich and meaningful committee work; for our organizational members, sponsors, and local and national speakers, who contributed to the best GMLP Media Literacy Week, ever, in October ’09.  for our individual members who have chosen us as a membership organization worth their support; for our devoted interns and volunteers; to the community for being interested in us and wanting to collaborate in our programming efforts;. to those around the country  and internationally who are interested in us and have worked for us when we asked them to; and  to all those individuals and organizations we don’t even know, yet, whose paths we’ll cross because they believe media literacy is important.

Finally, you may recall In July I commented on computer-scientist/ inventor/ legend, Alan Kay, following his visit to St. Louis University,  and I can still remember one thing he said that especially  moves me, today, as I close with that resolution for GMLP.

In the context of what makes an inventor succeed or fail,   Kay pointed to positive outlooks and positive perspective as playing key roles toward an inventor’s success.  In the context of GMLP’s moving forward and refining its work,  I’d like to say, despite the slow pace at creating clarity  for folks about what  media literacy means, may we continue to be media literacy education ambassadors, bringing more understanding to the term, and  help GMLP to become an even greater  force in our community, in the process.  And, with that positive outlook and positive perspectives that have gotten us this far,  may we further pave the way to make on-going media literacy education a reality in our communities.    Please join us.

With gratitude,

Jessica Z. Brown