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Wu, Jiacheng

University of British Columbia

As digital media has become increasingly ubiquitous in our everyday lives, it is more important now than ever to be media literate. Children and teenagers, in particular, are especially susceptible to uncritical consumption of media. To combat this, governments have attempted to incorporate media literacy into public school curriculums for some time. While media literacy education has been a part of BC public schools’ official curriculum for more than two decades, the efficacy of its implementation has been scrutinized. The actual progress of this implementation has not been enforced by the Ministry of Education, and teachers have reported a lack of training and resources from the Ministry. With vague competency standards for media literacy as well as the issues mentioned above, only teachers who are interested in the subject are actively teaching this important curriculum. This thesis aims to review the past and current state of media education in BC public secondary schools, followed by a course guide that teachers can use to incorporate media literacy into their classroom activities. Existing scholarships on the topic are numerous, but only on national and international scales. Studies on the state of media education in BC, by comparison, are scarce and outdated. My work aims to expand this field to the current decade through archival research, policy review, and interviews with professionals. Building on both theoretical as well as sociological frameworks, this thesis identifies the issues plaguing the current implementation of media education in BC as well as provides examples on how those issues could be mitigated.

Text

2024-10-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89490

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/