Education | Andragogy » Jenise Porter - Media Literacy, A Tool for Critical Thinking in Education

Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 1 Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking in Education Jenise Porter University of Arizona, Department of Language, Reading and Culture Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 2 Introduction A simple definition of colonization is that it takes peoples stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. (Loehr, 2005) Media is the plural form of a word borrowed directly from Latin. The singular, medium, originally meant “an intervening agency, means, or instrument” and was first applied to newspapers two centuries ago. This singular use is now common in the fields of mass communication and advertising, but it is not frequently found outside them. (media. (nd) Dictionarycom Unabridged (v 11)) For purposes of this paper, I will focus narrowly on the manner in which the media intervenes and mediates the real world in ways that

usurp students’ stories and cast the students in supportive roles. It is the intervention of advertisements into the narratives of young people which I characterize as colonization in this discussion. Marketers treat young people as a group to be exploited much as the British empire (and other imperial societies) behaved in the colonies over which they ruled. The methods for teaching technology in school settings are not part of my discussion; but rather, deconstructing the messages of corporate advertisers directed toward youth. The Tenets of Media Literacy The Media Awareness Network, a Canadian non-profit organization, states that “to be functionally literate in the world today-to be able to ‘read’ the messages that inform, entertain and [are sold] to us daily-young people need critical thinking skills (Media Awareness Network, 2007). Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 3 The National Telemedia Council, the Center for Media Literacy

and the Alliance for a Media Literate America also state that the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate in a variety of formats including print and non-print are integral to the core curriculum for media literacy. Each of these groups subscribes to the following key questions and concepts: Key Questions • Who created this message? • What creative techniques are used to attract my attention? • How might different people understand this message differently than me? • What values, lifestyles and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message? • Why is this message being sent? These five questions are followed by five core concepts: • All media messages are ‘constructed.’ • Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules. • Different people experience the same media message differently. • Media have embedded values and points of view. • Most media messages are organized to gain profit

and/or power. A twenty-first century educational system should include curriculum that encourages and assists students to read the layers of context of the advertising and Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 4 commercial 1 images with which they are surrounded from birth. Children are aware of media even before they are aware of print. By eighteen months of age, children can recognize brand logos and before they are two years old they are asking for brands by name (Schor, 2004). Most children know by age three that the golden arches represent McDonalds (Desmond, 2001). By the time a child in the United States begins school he or she can name 200 brands (Schor, 2004). A 2000 task force of the American Psychological Association estimated that advertisers spend more than $12 billion a year on advertising to the youth market. The study found that the average child viewed more than 40,000 television commercials a year, and stated that “children

under the age of eight are unable to critically comprehend televised advertising messages and are prone to accept advertiser messages as truthful, accurate and unbiased.” The Association recommends that advertising to children under the age of eight be restricted (Committee on Public Education, 2001). A Kaiser Family Foundation Report in 2003 found that typically 68% of babies under two years old view some screen media daily (Rideout, 2003). When education is privatized and becomes a capitalist enterprise the voices of educators and researchers can be drowned out by the corporations which stand to make money from their products. One example is the recent study conducted at the University of Washington which found an “association between early viewing of baby DVDs/videos [such as Baby Einstein] and poor language development” (Zimmerman, 2007). This study was widely reported in the popular media (Time magazine, National Public Radio, C/NetNews.org, among others) although it is not

clear whether they were 1 Advertisement is the word used for print and commercial is used for electronic media (Berger, 1998). Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 5 reporting from the five-page research study or the single page press release (Zimmerman, 2007). Julie Aigner-Clark founded the Baby Einstein company in 1997 It became a multi-million dollar franchise and she sold the majority of the company to the Walt Disney Company in 2001. The Disney Company has demanded that the University of Washington retract its press release regarding the study (see Appendix). Aigner-Clark was seated next to Laura Bush at the 2007 State of the Union address in which President Bush recognized her as “represent[ing] the great enterprising spirit of America” (Bush, 2007). Obviously, in the case of marketing to very young children, it is the adults who must be media literate but the same questions and concepts apply: who created Baby Einstein? What are the

messages conveyed? What profit or power is to be gained by its creators and owners? It is important to weigh the benefits of programs like Baby Einstein against the motives of the creators of such programs. “Reading” media messages requires more than recognizing letters and sounds through phonics and phonemic awareness, two of the five elements of reading (Valdes, 2004) listed on the US Department of Education web site. The contrast between the reductionist version of reading the Department of Education considers necessary and the highly complex version of reading that Paolo Freire believes is necessary is stark. “The act of learning to read and write has to start from a very comprehensive understanding of the act of reading the world, something which human beings do before reading the words” (Freire, 1987, p. xiii) and “Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world” (Freire,

1987, p. 29) Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 6 Other progressive educators express similar ideas: We read the world in order to make meaning of it (Smith, 1985); “literacy is the ability to encode or decode meaning in any of the forms of representation used in the culture to convey or express meaning” (Eisner, 1994, p. x); and “languagealways comes fully attached to ‘other stuff’: to social relations, cultural models, power and politics, perspectives on experience, values and attitudes, as well as things and places in the world” (Gee, 1996, p.vii) “[L]iteracies as communicative practices are inseparable from values, senses of self, and forms of regulation and power” (Collins, 2003, p.xviii) Each of these educators describes a process of literacy that is considerably more complex than becoming proficient in phonemic awareness. A real-life example from 1998 is useful for purposes of analyzing critical thinking and media messages

using the ideas of Freire, Smith, Eisner and Gee: Need further proof that bitter rivals Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola dont mix? An Evans, Ga. high school senior faced a one-day suspension Wednesday after wearing a Pepsi shirt to a Coke Day assembly, Mike Cameron, 19, says he never intended to show disrespect for Coke officials who had gathered at Greenbrier High School for an event designed to help the school win a contest run by the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. School Principal Gloria Hamilton acknowledged the suspension seemed out of line: "I know it sounds bad--"Child suspended for wearing Pepsi shirt on Coke Day." Cameron said he wore the Pepsi logo as a joke: "Thats my personality. I dont like to follow the trend of everyone else" Hamilton said Cameron also ruined a school picture, a violation that has drawn sixday suspensions in the past. The Coke contest offers a $500 award to the school that devises the best method of distributing promotional discount cards to

students. Coke executives traveled from their Atlanta headquarters 100 miles away to serve as speakers. Cameron said he wasnt asked to remove the offensive shirt and that he changed into the Coke shirt later in the day. The Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1998 I wondered how nineteen year old Cameron read the world the day that he was suspended for displeasing those adults who made a deal with corporate sponsors to Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 7 deliver their students on “Coke in Education Day.” He certainly had a lot of “other stuff” to consider. He did not need phonemic awareness or phonics which the US Department of Education website says are two of the five elements of reading (Valdes, 2004) in order to decipher the message which was presented to him. He was able to read and comprehend the context of the message, however, and it was his comprehension and his acting on it that caused him to be suspended from school. What were the

social and cultural relations which created a situation for the principal of Greenbrier High School to invite a multinational corporation to the school to interact with the students? What values and attitudes were present in the school and in the larger community which created an atmosphere where the 1,199 other students apparently complied with the directive to wear red or white tee shirts in order to spell out the word Coke in its signature colors? The parking lot photograph was the culmination of a day in which Coca-Cola executives had conducted lectures in economics and helped to bake a Coca-Cola cake, all of this in pursuit of a prize of $500.00 or about 41 cents per student, an amount less than the cost of a can of Coca-Cola. What are the consequences of being media literate? Coca-Cola in Education Day is no isolated incident. Alex Molnar (2005) describes numerous cases of commercial activities in schools from the “free” book covers adorned with advertising to the vending

machines full of snack foods to the Pizza Hut coupons distributed as rewards for reading a certain number of books. Molnar says that the industry group The Council on Corporate and School partnerships reports that in 2002 schools received $2.4 billion from corporations in what it characterizes as “business relationships.” Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 8 Economist Juliet Schor (2004) reports that more than $2 billion is spent annually on advertising directed at children and that the Coca-Cola Company was named as a PTA sponsor and its lobbyist John H. Downs, Jr was named to the board of the National Parent Teacher Association after the company made a gift of an undisclosed amount to the organization (Schor, 2004, p. 128) Between 1995 and 2002 Coca-Cola donated 23 million dollars in soft money mainly to Republicans (Schor, 2004, p. 29) These were not acts of altruism on the part of Coca-Cola but rather marketing decisions which would

directly affect the profits of the company. What is a stake here? Does it matter if Mike Cameron and millions of young people in the United States can “read” advertisements and commercials? Halliday says this about text: “it is language that is functionalliving language that is playing some part in a context of situation” (Halliday, 1989, p. 10) He continues, “It is a product of its environment, a product of a continuous process of choices in meaning that we can represent as multiple paths or passes through the networks that constitute the linguistic system” (Halliday, 1989, p. 11) Freire (1987) describes it in Literacy: Reading the Word and the World In the broadest political sense, literacy is best understood as a myriad of discursive forms and cultural competencies that construct and make available the various relations and experiences that exist between learners and the world. In a more specific sense, critical literacy is both a narrative for agency as well as a

referent for critique” (p.12) When students are not able to think critically about media messages they cease to be agents for constructing their own narratives, their own life stories. “Children’s social worlds are increasingly constructed around consuming, as brands and products have come to determine who is ‘in’ or ‘out’, who is hot or not, who deserves to have friends or Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 9 social status” (Schor, 2004, p. 11) For example, the Disney Corporation creates images which children throughout the world use to create narratives for their play (Mickey Mouse Monopoly, 2001). When I ask university pre-service teachers to reflect on the film Mickey Mouse Monopoly the majority of them are angry that time and money has been spent on a film critical of Disney products. They deny that the ubiquity of Disney films in their lives has affected them in any way and they are unwilling or unable to think critically

about the messages in the film. The narratives created by Disney films and the products they spawn cast young people in supportive roles in their own stories. This is the colonization which Loehr writes about. Corporate entities such as Coca-Cola and Disney empower themselves at the expense of those to whom they sell their products. The consequences of media advertising and commercials on our society are enormous. In 2000 Americans spent $110 billion on heavily-advertised fast food, more than on higher education, computers or cars (Schlosser, 2001). The Center for Disease Control reports that the prevalence of childhood overweight tripled between 1980 and 2000 (Ogden, 2002) correlating with the increase in fast food consumption. Consumerism as an ideology developed in the late 19th and early 20th century as a consequence of industrial abundance in the United States. Advertising as a profession developed in order to encourage consumers to move from making rational choices in purchasing

products to emotional and brand name choices (Spring, 2003). Children aren’t born consumers; neither do they become consumers when they complete a certain level of school. But they are born to be consumers, at least in the United States, and they begin their consumership early in life. According to my research, the consumer embryo begins to develop during the first year of existence, at first slowly, then very rapidly until it becomes a bona fide functioning consumer at around 8 or 9 years of age. At about this point, children begin to absorb an enormous amount of additional consumer competencies as their reasoning powers develop at Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 10 a higher plane. These consumer cadets, no doubt, learn more than half of their consumer attitudes and skills by the average age of 10 (McNeal, 1999, p. 37) One’s worth in a consumer society is measured by the accumulation of material goods. Those goods are also a sign of

virtue, that is, the rich have good character and the poor lack virtue and the consumption of products will change our lives (Spring, 2003). This belief has been internalized to the point that even poor people believe that other poor people are that way because they are lazy (Frank, 2004). The marriage of consumerism with education can be exemplified by Channel One. Whittle Communications, developer of the project in 1989, offered to provide, at no cost, satellite dishes, VCRs and television monitors to school classrooms in exchange for signed contracts guaranteeing that ninety percent of the students in a given school would be watching the Channel One broadcasts each day. “The ten minutes of ‘news’ and two minutes of commercials must be watched every school day for three to five years as part of the contractual agreement” (Apple, 1993, p. 97) Marketing as a profession is firmly entrenched in the academic world. Core curriculum includes “persuasion, negotiation, and customer

relationship management in interpersonal marketing communications; application of selling skills in business settings” and “Nature of the purchase decision process for goods and servicesfor use in management and public policy decision making” (Schedule of Classes, University of Arizona). Although the attitude of marketing professor McNeal, quoted above, callous as it may appear in characterizing children as embryonic consumers, it is not unlike Lave and Wenger‘s (1991) peripheral situated learning. Children participate in the socialization Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 11 process and learn to read the world of consumerism in the same way that children acquire language. I believe this applies to the language of media just as clearly Gee makes the distinction between acquisition and learning as it applies to media messages. Acquisition is a process of acquiring something subconsciously by exposure to models and a process of trial

and error, without a process of formal teaching. It happens in natural settings which are meaningful and fictional in the sense that the acquirer knows that he needs to acquire the thing he is exposed to in order to function and the acquirer in fact wants to so function. This is how most people come to control their first language Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching, though not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher. This teaching involves explanation and analysis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned into its analytic parts. It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of metaknowledge about the matter (Gee, 1987, p. 23) If students acquire knowledge about products through the constant bombardment of media messages but without the meta-knowledge to which Gee refers, they will be less likely to develop the ability to analyze the messages. Our goal as educators then is to help

students gain some degree of metaknowledge about the advertisements and commercials with which they are surrounded daily. The debate over exactly what this meta-knowledge would be mirrors the debate between traditional and progressive educators. Sut Jhally and Renee Hobbs represent differing points of view in the media literacy discussion. Jhally, professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts and founder of the Media Education Foundation is critical of Hobbs’ statement that “it is inappropriate to lump media activism together with media literacy” (Lewis, 1998, p. 109) Hobbs, a pioneer in the media literacy field in the United States, director of the Media Education Lab at Temple Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 12 University and a co-founder of Alliance for a Media Literate America, is also a paid consultant to Channel One (Manning, 1999). Jhally writes that advertising is the most influential institution of socialization

in modern societyit seems to play a key role in the construction of gender identity; it impacts upon the relation of children and parents in terms of the mediation and creation of needs. (Jhally, 1987, p 1) Media literacy without media activism is akin to reading the word without reading the world; an ability to decode the text without necessarily understanding the context. Becoming literate in both the text and the context of the message is further complicated by the notion that learning to be consumers is an act of democracy. Children who are encouraged to make choices about their own clothing, hygiene and entertainment programs and about family purchases could be said to be learning about participatory democracy (McNeal, 1999). This stance assumes that consumers and advertisers are equal and that purchasing decisions are rational. When consumerism and democracy are conflated, we find ourselves in a situation where the president of the United States exhorts the population to shop or

go to Disney World as a way to fight the terrorism attacks of September 11, 2001. Students at Greenbriar High School on Coke in Education Day could study the “grammar of visual design” (Kress, 1995). They could discuss the use of font and color in the Coca-Cola logo. They could critique the lessons presented by the Coke executives and they could cheer the possibility of winning $500.00 for the school and the opportunity to have a day of non-traditional classroom instruction. None of that would develop the critical thinking skills required to analyze the embedded values and points of view in the message. Nor would it require analysis of the power of the Coca Cola Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 13 Company. In addition, it is unlikely that a school administration which invited the Coca Cola Company to construct a media message using the students would encourage its students to deconstruct the Coke message in a critical way. It would be

encouraging to think that Mike Cameron was thinking critically about the Coke message when he said, “That’s my personality. I don’t like to follow the trend of everyone else.” But Cameron’s response to the Coke message was to wear a shirt with the logo of another corporate giant--Pepsi. Perhaps Cameron believed that he was constructing his own narrative that day but choosing Pepsi over Coke is a narrative which had been constructed for him long before he entered high school. The statement I quoted above by Davidson Loehr is from a sermon he delivered entitled Living Under Fascism. He suggests that fascism is a kind of colonization in which the choice is to live in a “reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite” (Loehr, 2004). That is the choice we face in teaching media literacy as a critical thinking skill: whether the narrative we construct for ourselves is our own or whether it is

simply cobbled together from choices presented to us by a ruling corporate elite. As McChesney points out, corporate advertisers do not present a choice between consuming and not consuming; rather, they present various commercial products from which to choose: It is the nature of the choice, and how the choices are laid out there, that is really the most striking feature of it. I think there that the issue is not really the amount of choice; it is the amount of sort of commercialism that permeates all the choices. So, on one hand, while it seems like you have a massive range of choice, they’re really underneath it girded by the same commercial logic. There’s very little diversity in a certain way It’s the appearance of diversity, but without it. (McChesney, Merchants of Cool, 2004). The choice between Coke and Pepsi or McDonalds and Burger King is a Hobson’s Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 14 choice. The belief that we have any choice

at all is what allows the corporate entities to exert power over us. The challenge in teaching media literacy in its economic, social and political context is that we cannot be sure of its outcome. As a progressive educator I may hope that my students would reject Coca-Cola or fast food or clothes with brand logos on them or that they would vote for politicians who are not beholden to the corporate elite, for that matter but there is no guarantee. I can only do my best to present as much of the context as possible and then make a space for students where they have the freedom to make their own story. Critical literacy skills cannot be measured very well with true/false or multiple-choice tests. Skills learned in a classroom may not be put to use until years afterward and in entirely other contexts. Media literacy provides the opportunity for alternative ways of knowing and that is often unpredictable (Eisner, 1998). Media literacy skills develop the ability to transmediate, making

connections from one kind of text to another (Semali, 2002). I will conclude with a story about my friend Virginia who, for many years, taught gifted third graders in Fremont California. The children came from families with educated and culturally sophisticated parents. Each year this teacher devoted several weeks of school time to studying breakfast cereal and the boxes they come in. The kids researched the nutritional content of their favorite cereal, analyzing the amount of sugar, sodium and fat each contained and how those amounts compared with the daily requirements recommended by the U.S Department of Agriculture They studied the words written on the box, along with the colors that were used and the size and type of lettering. They developed a meta-knowledge of the text of the cereal box, although as Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 15 third graders they did not delve deeply into the financial background of the cereal companies. They did

understand that the message on the cereal box was designed to sell them something. Each year the culminating activity was for every child to design his or her own cereal box and the product inside. Every year the majority of the third graders used bold colors, big letters and exciting pictures on the outside of the box to advertise the sugary cereal they had invented. They had learned about nutrition and health and cost per ounce but they also knew what they liked. Virginia, wonderful, democratic teacher that she was, allowed the children to make decisions for themselves based on the metaknowledge they had accrued. Many of those children are now in their twenties and thirties and with children of their own. I wonder what they think of when they make their way down the cereal aisle in the grocery store. Conclusion I see helping children to learn and to use critical literacy skills in analyzing media as a democratic process. By its very definition, a critical analysis model of media

makes room for individual responses, rather than right or wrong answers. The third graders who analyzed the media messages on their cereal boxes learned skills which they can use repeatedly in their school lives and in their personal lives. Reductionist methods of teaching are able to create easily measured outcomes. Critical literacy skills cannot be measured in the same way. We will probably never know if, or how, a third grade lesson in designing a cereal box influenced a child true learning is not measured by standardized tests. Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 16 Appendix Time Magazine: Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All Monday, August 6, 2007 University of Washington Press Release August 13, 2007 Disney Company Demand for Retraction August 13, 2007 UW President Rejects Disney Complaints August 16, 2007 Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 17 References Apple, M. (1993) Official knowledge:

Democratic education in a conservative age New York, London: Routledge. Berger, A. A (1998) The sign in the window: A semiotic analysis of advertising In R Kevelson (Ed.), High fives: A trip to semiotics (pp 13-27) New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Bush, G. W (2007) State of the union address Retrieved May 27, 2007, from http://www.whitehousegov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2html Collins, J., & Blot, R K (2003) Literacy and literacies: Texts, power, and identity New York: Cambridge University Press. Committee on Public Education. (2001) Children, adolescents, and television [Electronic version]. Pediatrics, 107(2), 423-426 Retrieved May 15, 2007, from Gale General Reference Center Gold database. Desmond, R. (2001) Free reading: Implications for child development In D G Singer, & J. L Singer (Eds), Handbook of children and the media (pp 29-45) Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc. Eisner, E. W, & Bird, L B (1998) The kind of schools we need: Personal

essays Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Eisner, E. W, & Eisner, E W (1994) Cognition and curriculum reconsidered (2nd ed) New York: Teachers College Press. Frank, T. (2004) Whats the matter with Kansas?: How conservatives won the heart of Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 18 America (1st ed.) New York: Metropolitan Books Freire, P., & Macedo, D P (1987) Literacy: Reading the word & the world South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey Publishers Gee, J. P (1987) "What is literacy?" Teaching and Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry, 2(1), 3-11. Gee, J. P (1996) Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (2nd ed) London: Routledge-Farmer. Halliday, M. A K, & Hasan, R (1989) Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective (2nd ed.) Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Kress, G. R, & van Leeuwen, T (1995) Reading images: The grammar of visual design London ; New York:

Routledge. Lave, J., & Wenger, E (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, J., & Jhally, S (1998) The struggle over media literacy Journal of Communication, 48(1), 109. Loehr, D. (2005) America, Fascism & God Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishers Manning, S. (1999) Channel one enters the media literacy movement [Electronic version]. Rethinking Schools, 15(2)Retrieved August 4, 2007, from http://www.rethinkingschoolsorg/archive/14 02/chan142shtml database Source: http://www.doksinet Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 19 McChesney, R. (2007) Merchants of cool: Interviews Retrieved January 16, 2006, from http://www.pbsorg/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/interviews/ McNeal, J. U (1999) The kids market: Myths and realities Ithaca, New York: Paramount Market Publishing, Inc. Media. (2007) Retrieved May 8, 2007, from http://dictionary.referencecom/browse/media Media awareness network.

(2007) Retrieved May 24, 2007, from http://www/mediaawarenessca/English/corporate/about us/indexcfm Molnar, A. (2005) School commercialism: From democratic ideal to market commodity New York: Routledge. Ogden, Cynthia L., et al (2002) Centers for disease control and prevention 2000 growth charts for the United States: Improvements to the 1977 national center for health statistics version. Pediatrics, 1091(January 2002), 45 Rideout, V. J, Vandewater, E A, & Wartella, E A (2003) Zero to six: Electronic media in the lives of infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation. (Zero to Six) Retrieved May 15, 2007, from http://www.kfforg/entmedia/upload/Zero-to-Six-Electronic-Media-in-the-Lives-ofInfants-Toddlers-and-Preschoolers-PDFpdf Schlosser, E. (2002) Fast food nation: The dark side of the all-American meal (1st Perennial ed.) New York, NY: Perennial Schor, J. (2004) Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer culture Source: http://www.doksinet

Media Literacy: A Tool for Critical Thinking 20 New York; London: Scribner. Semali, L. M (Ed) (2002) Transmediation in the classroom: A semiotics-based media literacy framework. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Smith, F. (1985) Reading Without Nonsense New York: Teachers College Press Sun, C., & Media Education Foundation (2001) Mickey Mouse monopoly Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. Underhill, P. (1999) Why we buy: The science of shopping New York: Simon & Schuster. Valdes, K. (2004) Framework for reading-phonemic awareness Retrieved May 17, 2007, from http://www.edgov/teachers/how/tools/initiative/summerworkshop/valdes/valdespd f Zimmerman, F. J; Christakis, D A, & Meltzhoff, A N (in press) Associations between media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years. [Electronic version]. Pediatrics, Retrieved September 1, 2007, from http://extras.mnginteractivecom/live/media/site36/2007/0817/20070817 071817 Zimmermanetal Associations JPed07.pdf