Mapping media literacy impact in the U.S.: a review of literature and call for equity

ABSTRACT

While media literacy has grown to encompass many topics to provide learners with the skills required to be active citizens and savvy media consumers, there is no clear conceptual framework to define ‘impact.’ This review of literature aims to understand how recent U.S.-based media literacy scholarship defines impact. We analyzed 300 articles published from 2010 to 2020 on the impact of media literacy initiatives in the U.S. We propose the 6 E’s as a framework that captures six categories that media literacy researchers use to describe the impact of media literacy interventions: Evaluation Outcomes, Enquiry, Expression, Experiential Learning, Engaged Citizenship, and Equity. We argue for a need to center equity and community-level outcomes in definitions of media literacy impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Media literacy
• impact
• equity
• critical pedagogy
• media education

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Ashley Hay and Raiana de Carvalho for their help with proof-reading this manuscript, and to Sydney Angrove for her assistance in the early stages of gathering and coding articles in this study. This paper emerges from a 2020-21 research study titled ‘Equity and Impact in Media Literacy Practice: Mapping the Field in the United States.’ That report, and other output, can be found at: https://mappingimpactfulml.org/. Parts of this research are excerpted from the report shared on the project web site.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For consistency and alliteration purposes, we use “enquiry” instead of “inquiry.” However, inquiry is the common spelling utilized by media literacy scholars using U.S. English. We took this distinction into account while conducting our literature search. Enquiry is common in British English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Association for Media Literacy Education.