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Amy Petersen Jensen

Francis E. Kazemek

Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English

Renee Hobbs. 2007. New York: Teachers College Press; Newark, DE: International Reading Association. 208 pp. US$23.95.

iPods, cellular technology, social networking websites, and other forms of interactive technology shape educational settings in the 21st century. Contemporary public policy, community interactions, pedagogical models, and curriculum design often reflect our interest in and engagement with interactive participatory technologies. The nature of our world requires that we all develop a degree of media literacy, but the increased focus on the personal need for media literacy has also allowed for a maturing in the conversation about Media Literacy Education. As the field of Media Literacy Education grows up, its focus has shifted from defining media literacy to reenvisioning how media literacy is taught in educational settings.

For example, in 2006, the MacArthur Foundation launched a five-year, $50 million grant to determine how digital technologies influence learning. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (formerly AMLA) also introduced Core Principles of Media Literacy Education in the United States (Bergsma et al., 2007) “a first step in the development of clear, measurable outcomes and benchmarks [for media literacy education in]…U.S. schools” (p. 2). Bloggers like Henry Jenkins (2007), have also inserted academy-driven questions about new media and learning into the realm of popular culture through weblogs like his Confessions of an Aca-Fan, found at henryjenkins.org/media_literacy.

Into this climate Renee Hobbs inserts Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English. Hobbs's book is the first design-based, long-term study that investigates the impact media literacy has on the academic achievement of young people. The study follows a team of seven English teachers from Concord High School in New Hampshire as they implement a new course focused on media and communications. Hobbs follows the teachers during the school year as they determine educational objectives and implement the new media literacy-infused curriculum, and she examines what their students actually learned.

Through her data collection and analysis that includes both qualitative and quantitative data Hobbs presents a compelling study of the integration of media literacy education into this high school language arts program. She demonstrates that over the course of the intervention students “measurably strengthened their comprehension skills as readers, listeners, and viewers in responding to print, audio, visual, and video texts” (p. 148) and that “over all students had a more sophisticated understanding of how authors compose messages to convey meaning through their use of language, image and sound and how readers respond with their own meaning making processes as they interpret messages” (p. 148).

Hobbs weaves a strong narrative throughout the book that is effective because it both contextualizes Media Literacy Education within the larger multimodal literacy movement and also presents case studies of teacher practice that demonstrate the employment of media literacy in practical settings. Because of this, the book would be appropriate reading for another researcher but would be equally useful for a practicing teacher who is interested in implementing media literacy into his or her own educational environment. Hobbs's vivid narration strengthens her use and analysis of a vast amount of qualitative data including 700 pages of interview transcripts, large volumes of field notes, and 200 student work artifacts (including writing samples, lesson plans, video footage of the classroom interactions, and assignments).

Although other media literacy scholarship has been criticized for only describing what media literacy might looks like in a school setting, Hobbs's book answers these concerns by systematically addressing the need for media literacy in contemporary school settings and then demonstrating a variety of ways that can be accomplished through her discussion of the teaching and learning that occurred in the Concord English 11 classrooms. Through her investigation of the teachers' work, the author speaks to the pedagogical soundness of the media literacy methods used in Concord and also introduces possible best practices for the pedagogy of media literacy in a general high school setting.

The book is broken up into three sections. In Part I, Hobbs introduces us to the research participants (teachers, students, parents, and school district officials) and situates their media literacy efforts critically and historically within the field of media literacy. In this section, I was particularly interested in the descriptions of English teachers working to enlarge their definition of text to include “all forms of symbolic representation” (p. 7) in the early stages of the curriculum development.