Reading the Media —
Abstract of

Chapter 1
Reading the Media in High School

Renee Hobbs

Adolescents today grow up in a culture where they are participate actively with media, popular culture, and technology. Media messages present complex ideas about identity, values, reality, and fantasy in ways that resonate, contradict, and compete with lived experience. When asked about the media that compel their attention, most teens are hungry for the opportunity to make sense of the continually changing array of stories, images, characters, and experience that entertain, inform, and persuade them.

At one high school in New Hampshire, USA, a team of English teachers decided to reinvent their grade 11 curriculum to give students the opportunity to building their critical thinking and communication skills through an intensive, year-long program in media literacy. Teachers expanded the concept of literacy to include the texts of mass media and popular culture through a thematic focus on journalism and informational texts, advertising and persuasion, issues of representation, and the practices and conventions of storytelling.

Hobbs, R. (2007). Reading the Media in High School. In Reading the Media (pp. 3-18). New York and Newark, DE: International Reading Association.