AMLA Research Summit and Conference

This Friday in St Louis the Alliance for a Media Literate America kicks off its inaugural Research Summit to coincide with its biannual conference. Wish I was going... Research based media literacy conferences are rare, so it is an exciting opportunity to draw attention to what is still very much an under-researched field. Hopefully conference proceedings, or some other form of publication, will result.

Recently the AMLA also released its "Core Principles" for media literacy education. These suggest that media literacy education should be underpinned by a respect for young people's media and popular culture; that both theory and practice should feature, in an interrelated sense, in any media literacy curriculum; that media are diverse and varied and that judging some media as inferior places unnecessary limits on education about media; and that media education aims to help young people to participate in media culture. Within this there is also the adoption of the familiar key concepts of media education, with variations on the media languages, institutions, audiences, representations and technologies concepts used in several countries around the world.