ABSTRACT

Media education expands literacy to include reading and writing through the use of new and emerging communication tools. Len Masterman stresses that analysis alone, uncoupled from experiential student use of tools, is half a program at best. Mass technologies that continue to promote the type of literacy that hearkens back to the Industrial Age are destined to promote the same social inequities that were seen in schooling of the past. American education is essentially pragmatic, perceived as a means to train a productive workforce that will serve the needs of each community. Constructivist education recognizes that meaning is not fixed, but that people produce their own meaning from a wide range of contexts, a form of knowledge construction. Inquiry may come under the guise of problem-solving, or project-based work, or Socratic dialogic investigations. Educational strategies that blend critical literacy, experiential education, and critical pedagogy can do much to explain the relationship of literacy, technology, and society.