Literacy, Media, and Education

Reading and writing have always been more than decoding words on a page, but the proliferation of screens, social platforms, and networked media has forced educators and theorists to fundamentally rethink what it means to be literate. Researchers in this area examine how people—especially young people—make and interpret meaning across text, image, sound, and interactive environments, asking how schools can prepare students not just to consume but to critically evaluate and produce media in all its forms. A central tension driving current work is whether participatory digital culture, where youth remix, comment, and publish with ease, genuinely democratizes expression or simply reproduces existing inequalities in new registers. Ongoing debates turn on how to define and assess these expanded literacies, and how teachers can integrate them into classrooms without flattening their complexity into checkbox skills.

Works

62,654

Total citations

380,387

Keywords

Multimodal LiteracyNew LiteraciesMedia LiteracyDigital LiteracyParticipatory CultureYouth Engagement