ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts funded 17 demonstration projects across the country to integrate media literacy with the arts. Based at an elementary school in downtown Los Angeles, Project SMARTArt (Students using Media, Art, Reading, and Technology) was one of the largest grant recipients. For three years, students from kindergarten through fifth grade worked with teachers and artists to analyze media and create their own alternative representations of everything from violence, to advertising, to their community. Students produced animation, performed original plays, painted, wrote, photographed, and used numerous types of media to analyze and communicate, read and write their world. (A case study of this project can be accessed at the Center for Media Literacy’s Web site at: https://www.medialit.org/reading_room/ article659.html.) In 2006, approximately two years after the grant ended, 14 SMARTArt teachers were interviewed about their past and present experiences learning about and teaching media literacy. The ways and degrees to which these teachers are currently using what they learned from the grant vary across the board. All the teachers spoke about the importance of media literacy while also admitting to a sharp decrease in implementation since the grant ended.
