ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a framework of critical media literacy that teachers and students might pursue in classroom practice to understand representation of people and events. It aims to be a model for teachers contemplating the use of such analytical elements in their own classrooms to teach critical viewing, critical thinking, and critical reading skills. In the study of visual communication and media literacy, critical viewing is not used widely in American classrooms as a tool for deconstructing media images, particularly those images that represent people's culture, identity, or ethnicity. Critical literacy is a contested educational ideal. Even though "critical" pedagogy has been en vogue for the past fifteen years, scholars continue to question what it means to be critical and how such a concept can be implemented across the curriculum. With critical literacy, students learn to become critical consumers of texts and other media products, as well as aware of visual manipulation of stereotyping as an important project of education.
