I was honored to be a contributor to a position statement for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) on Media Education in English Language Arts. The statement provides support on behalf of the national organization and its members for educators whose institutions do not recognize how technology, media, and multimodal composing parallel traditional English Language Arts curricula while offering culturally and technologically relevant skills and literacies to students who read and write in these digital spaces.
The statement can be read on NCTE's website: https://ncte.org/statement/media_education/
A Washington Post columnist took umbrage with a lack of practical suggestions in the statement, but the intended audience for the statement is English educators who know how to suitably incorporate media texts into their class, though may lack the institutional support to do so.
This statement affirms the innovative practices of educators who seek to address the literacy rates that the authors points to in the introduction as the problem that he feels is not being addressed in this statement that tells administrators and school board officials that they should trust their educators to engage their students in new ways that will positively impact their literacy scores.
