ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief description of Project Look Sharp’s curriculum-driven media literacy approach to K–12 education, focusing on how we came to claim fair use as essential to our ability to provide effective educational materials for teachers that incorporate a wide variety of media texts (including news, advertising, photographs, books, films, and interactive media). Fair use is of fundamental importance to the practice of democratic education in the 21st century. The pedagogical practice of constructivist media decoding is linked to U.S. national standards, including the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and the ELA Standards for Social Studies and Science, the new C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards, and the Next Generation Science Standards. We reflect on our experiences in applying fair use to the development and publication of online curriculum materials, as well as in offering professional development to teachers and librarians. Sadly, there are challenges for educators working in countries without fair use to implement the pedagogical practice of media analysis in educating a democratic citizenry.
