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VOH: What about media literacy first piqued your interest? What made you become interested in Media Literacy and become a frontierswoman for the field?
RH: I first got interested in media literacy when I began teaching, Wow, it actually goes back quite a long time, way, way back. I first got interested in media literacy when I was an English Literature major at the University of Michigan way back in the 1970’s. At that time we were learning a range of literary techniques and processes for interpretation and analysis. It always seemed to me that those same techniques could apply to the television programs that I grew up with, shows like: Gilligan’s Island and Petticoat Junction and Hogan’s Heroes, and at that time popular culture was not really a part of the university culture, yet it was intriguing to me to think of popular culture as a kind of literature. I had heard of the term ‘media literacy’, when I began studying children and television. I was aware that there was a group of people who were trying to teach critical viewing skills, but I wasn’t able to write my dissertation about that topic at Harvard Ed School because it was considered too new of an area and not worthy of graduate study. So, when I became a young assistant professor in Boston, in the 1980’s, I made a speech at an event in the city where I said: “You shouldn’t have to wait until you go to college to learn how to critically analyze the media. You should be able to start learning that in fourth grade, or seventh grade or tenth grade”, and I promptly got a call from someone at a public school that said “Oh Yeah? Come show us how to do that.” So I spent three years in the Boston public schools working three days a week working with a team of seventh and eighth graders where we were integrating media literacy into the Language Arts and Social Studies curriculum. That hooked me. I learned everything about teaching from those kids, and discovered how powerful media literacy is as a learning and a teaching tool.

VOH: Why do you feel it’s important to stress Media Literacy in today’s society?
RH: Students are swimming in a media sea and technology is more a part of their cultural experience, so media literacy is important because the texts that students consume, and interpret, and read are film texts, and audio-visual texts, and media texts, and technology texts. Another reason that media literacy is important is because more and more information comes to us from so many different sources, that the gate-keeping function has long since disappeared. As we receive all different kinds of messages, people really need a set of critical thinking skills to make sense of it all. We are all suffering from ‘Information Overload’. Media Literacy helps sort out the wide range of messages we get in our culture, and finally, the concept that is becoming really important to me, now that I am really beginning to understand, is that media literacy is really just an extended conceptualization of literacy. Literacy is a very powerful function for people. It enables us to be truly human: to share and express meanings using a wide range of tools and technologies. Really, to be literate in an age of multi-media messages, one has to be able to read the language and images of media in addition to the printed word.

VOH: How can media help educators teach to the core curriculum standards?
RH: Media is a powerful teaching tool. We often get the opportunity to visualize important concepts in Biology or in Physics or in History, as we see it enacted on the screen, and media have always been tremendously valuable teaching tools, so educational multi-media is alive and well in the American classroom, and is certainly a valuable tool for teaching the Core Subject Areas. At the same time, however, there’s a real dangerous phenomenon that exists in American public schools, and that is a powerful misuse of media in the classrooms. Just as we sometimes use television in the home as a babysitter, as a break, as a reward for when students have been good, too often in American classrooms, teachers use media ‘not for real work’, not where you really need to invest your energy, but as this reward, break or entertainment. That actually creates a message to students that cuts against what we are trying to do in Media Literacy, where we are trying to say: “Treat these texts seriously. Look at these things. Analyze them. Study them. Respect them as forms of communication.” But when TV is used as a babysitter in schools, then that sends kids the wrong message, that TV shouldn’t be taken seriously, or is less serious than texts. Media Literacy can’t really succeed in public schools until that practice, which is so unquestioned, and so normal in so many public schools—that practice needs to be questioned, and transformed.

VOH: How do you feel about the current media climate?
RH: Media is a powerful teaching tool. We often get the opportunity to visualize important concepts in Biology or in Physics or in History, as we see it enacted on the screen, and media have always been tremendously valuable teaching tools. Educational multi-media is alive and well in the American classroom, and is certainly a valuable tool for teaching the Core Subject Areas. At the same time, however, there’s a real dangerous phenomenon that exists in American public schools, and that is a powerful misuse of media in the classrooms. Just as we sometimes use television in the home as a babysitter, as a break, as a reward for when students have been good, too often in American classrooms, teachers use media as ‘not for real work’, not where you really need to invest your energy, but as this reward, break or entertainment. That actually creates a message to students that cuts against what we are trying to do in Media Literacy, where we are trying to say: “Treat these texts seriously. Look at these things. Analyze them. Study them. Respect them as forms of communication.” But when TV is used as a babysitter in schools, then that sends kids the wrong message, that TV shouldn’t be taken seriously, or is less serious than texts. Media Literacy can’t really succeed in public schools until that practice, which is so unquestioned, and so normal in so many public schools is questioned, and transformed.

VOH: Can you speak a little bit more about the vulnerability?
RH: Well, the vulnerability you see most often is the perception among lots and lots of people, adult and children alike are: “That media are just entertainment. Oh it doesn’t matter if I watch World Wrestling. It’s just entertainment. It doesn’t matter if I play Grand Theft Auto. It’s just entertainment.” And yet, we know so much about how media messages influence us, and to send the message that “it’s ‘just entertainment” is a screen. It’s a mask, and it creates a tremendous amount of denial in our culture about the ways in which the messages reflect and shape our culture and our cultural values.

VOH: How do you think the media has changed throughout time?
RH: WOW. Throughout time? That’s inviting me to go all the way back. OK, so let’s see, I like doing the History of Communications lecture where I pull out the accountant’s tape and stretch it out for a million years and see how the rate of change in our society is tremendously stressful for all of us, adults and children alike. This continual pressure, to learn new software, to learn new hardware, to learn new tools, and to be on this continuous treadmill, navigating all these new forms of communications. Each new form of communication introduces new challenges and opportunities. Really, we can be both exhilarated and exhausted. I think that Media Literacy opens up some opportunities to reflect on our complex love/hate relationship with media and technology in our culture. It invites us to step back from our day-to-day forms of communication and really reflect on them, and I think that’s a healthy experience for everyone living in contemporary culture.

VOH: How can Science and Math teachers incorporate media literacy into their existing curriculum?
RH: I’ve seen Science teachers do amazing things with media literacy in the classroom. One of the most powerful examples that I observed was a teacher who incorporated media literacy into a unit on Environmental Science. The first thing that the teacher did was share with the students two different documentaries, each with a very distinct position on the environment. One was a Jacques Cousteau documentary about the Exxon/Valdez oil spill up in Alaska, and the other was a documentary created for Exxon, about the oil spill. Each of these used some of the same footage, certainly the same fact pattern was essentially the same, but through the editing process and the music, and the emotional involvement that the filmmakers created through their production, each had very different messages. Students got the opportunity to see how the structure of a documentary is designed; not just to communicate a set of facts, but to also to communicate a set of values, opinions or points of view about those facts. After this assignment, the teacher then invited students to work in teams to make their own documentaries about a local environmental pollution problem in their own communities. One of the most amazing stories this teacher told, as he described the unit, was when a team of students went out to go film the pollution in the pond, an lo and behold, that day there must have been a wind, but for some reason there was no pollution in the pond. The students had very limited access to equipment, and they had to make their documentary, so they had a big debate: “Should they go get some garbage and sprinkle it around to create the pollution that they knew was normally there or would that be violating the essential journalistic truth of the documentary?” The teacher’s unpacking of that very complicated, rich discussion demonstrated how this teacher saw this teachable moment imbedded and the kids questioning what is truth? What is the purpose of a documentary, and what does it mean to create one? This whole idea of representing reality just moved to a much richer, deeper and complex level of personal responsibility, and I thought: “What a terrific way for a teacher to integrate media literacy into the study of Environmental Science.” Won’t you know those students will never watch a science documentary the same way ever again! That’s an opportunity that I think every kid in America is entitled to.

VOH: Is there a way to integrate Media Literacy into Math?
RH: That’s a very interesting question. My colleague up at Ithaca College likes to talk about how she thinks the media integrates math through the way statistics are represented in polls, and how numbers are presented in news media reveals a lot of patterns around statistical assumptions about normality, about ratios, and the way that ratios can be misleading or can represent numbers fairly, so essentially, the idea is that applied math concepts of how News media uses numbers to develop ideas, but when in fact that as News readers we need to recognize the manipulative power, you know, how the News can lie with statistics, and recognize the misuse of numbers as they exist the way that politicians and others manipulate numbers to make a point, or to develop an argument, or to sell a policy.

VOH: The Star Ledger recently published an article referencing the survey “Reading at Risk: a Survey of Literary Reading in America”. It speaks of the disparity between the sexes. How do you see Media Literacy fitting into the classroom curriculum enhancing students reading and comprehension skills?
RH: I’m actually very interested in the role that media literacy can play in enhancing student’s reading, comprehension and writing skills. It’s obvious to me that students have a lot of interest and a lot of motivation to read about topics that they care about. English teachers have always tried to find high interest materials for students. People Magazine and biographies of celebrities and athletes represent opportunities to integrate media literacy into a reading program that really capitalizes on kids’ interest in the media. But there’s another way that media literacy can support reading comprehension. For the kids here [Temple University] that I am working with, in a poor urban community in Philadelphia, most of the kids are reading at levels significantly below their grade level, so the middle school kids, they’re not reading at the sixth grade level, they might be reading at the third grade level, yet their thinking skills are at the sixth grade level. So what I see happening is that teachers who are able to really cultivate the critical thinking and analysis skills, who talk about television and talk about media in ways that are really engaging the kids at their intellectual level, while providing them with support materials and reading materials that are targeted in a grade appropriate way. So you’re continuing to develop kids critical thinking skills where they’re at, in developmentally appropriate ways, and you’re supporting their reading level in ability appropriate ways. There’s one more point I want to make about reading comprehension and media literacy; one of the things we try to do in English education is we try to introduce the students to the structures of storytelling; the structures of genres shape the way you read. So, we teach kids how to read non-fiction differently than we teach them to read fiction. We teach them how to read a newspaper differently than say, we teach them how to read a poem. Sometimes it’s easier to introduce literary concepts through media, which after all is their first medium, right? Introduce those concepts through the medium they’re most familiar with, and then apply them to the medium they are less familiar with. So, for example, if a teacher is trying to introduce the concept of ‘characters’ to help the students understand how authors create characters through dialogue, through setting, through a physical description of the characters, and so forth, you can take a piece of film and see how a Hollywood director communicates ‘character’ through those same tools in 45 seconds or a minute, and then you can look at how an author uses those same devices in a paragraph or two with the written word. The ability of a student to recognize how that concept plays out in one medium, the familiar medium of film, and then be able to spot how those same kinds of concepts are applied in the less familiar medium, the printed word, really helps kids with the ability to transfer, and engages kids to recognize the connectedness of all the forms of storytelling in our culture.

VOH: Do you find schools resistant to the integration of media literacy?
RH: No. Nobody seems to resist it. Essentially, the challenge that educators face is the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much; too many choices, too much to do. Sometimes in Media Literacy we tend to perpetuate that too. If a teacher gets a book that has all kinds of stuff about advertising, about news, about media ownership, about this, that, and the other thing, a teacher can feel overwhelmed, and say “Oh I don’t have time for this… This is too much.” But when a teacher has a chance to have a professional development experience and see how Media Literacy can be woven in to the existing curriculum, that it doesn’t need to be a separate course, it doesn’t need to be a stand alone thing, it doesn’t have to be different from what the teacher is already doing. It can essentially be layered into the way the teacher is already using media: the text book, the print media, the video media, then teachers really see it as a gift that really enables them to get closer to their kids, and really hear and understand how their kids identify with the world around them. That usually makes teachers feel closer to their kids, and so for mid-career teachers media literacy is a real opportunity to feel more connected to students, and to understand their experience that so much comes from the hours and hours a day that students spend online, watching television, and film and with other media.

VOH: With all that being said, can we assume you would prefer media literacy to be integrated into existing curriculum as opposed to a stand-alone course?
RH: Back in the old days, I like to think that I could offer advice like that, but I no longer like to be proscriptive. What I have found in working in school districts is that there is a lot of ways that media literacy can be successfully implemented in different schools. In some communities, the best approach is as a stand-alone separate course. I’ve gone into school districts where that approach is taken, and it’s been done beautifully, and it’s the unique configuration of the needs of that community that makes that the right approach. So I think it’s important to not be proscriptive about if this is better than that. The reality of it is, the staff will have to work through those issues, and it’s not really appropriate for us to set up hierarchies about which is good and better and best. There is a lot of ways to be a good teacher, and there’s a lot of ways to do Media Literacy well in K-12.

VOH: How do you find kids’ attitudes with regards to discussing media and technology? What about parents, teachers and adults?
RH: It’s very interesting that many parents think their kids know everything there is to know about technology, and it’s often common for parents to say “Oh, My kid doesn’t need a class in this. They know everything there is already.” I think that’s a fascinating phenomenon. Even some teachers fall into that trap, and it is a trap, because kids have some understanding of technology, but the minute you sit down and watch a kid work, whether he is making a web site, or editing a PowerPoint presentation or editing a document, you see what a child knows, and what they don’t know, what they’re piecing together, and where there are opportunities for learning. So I think it’s important not to overestimate the kinds of skills that our young people have. Just because they have a video camera in the home to tape birthday parties does not mean they really understand how a production gets created. How it gets composed, and edited and how it gets assembled in a way that’s attractive and meaningful and reaches an audience. So it’s important not to overestimate what kids know.

Kids do like to talk about media and technology so much that it can be intimidating to teachers. When a teacher is used to being the dominant voice in the classroom, it can be a little unnerving on the day that you decide to talk about advertising or news or propaganda, issues of representation of racism or gender stereo typing, it can be disconcerting for a teacher to have a roomful of kids all who have something to say. Teachers need to confront their own anxieties about when kids actually do have a lot to say, and how to really use that energy in productive ways. Too often a teacher can be unnerved by that, and clamp it down, or otherwise signal that the cacophony of outbursts is somehow inappropriate. I think teachers need to practice the skills of managing the way kids talk, so that we listen respectfully, so that we honor each others opinions, even though I like the Simpsons, and maybe you don’t. It’s okay for us to have a conversation, even though we may disagree about different shows, about different issues in the media. So teachers have a great learning opportunity to model that respective dialogue that everyone in education recognizes the single best predictor of a high functioning high school is the number of minutes spent in authentic dialogue, where the kids are talking to each other and listening to each other. High functioning high schools are where kids go on to college, they have great S.A.T. scores, they have classrooms rich in discussion and low functioning high schools, where nobody goes to college, and nobody graduates, there are no minutes of discussion. Media Literacy provides an opportunity to create learning environments where kids can have that experience of engaging with each other, in that exciting give and take where we learn from each other by talking.

VOH: What do you see in the future for Media Literacy? Do you think it, like other disciplines, it will become standardized? Or do you envision it remaining as a supplementary teaching tool?
RH: The future of media literacy depends on the next generation of teachers, who will, by the choices they make, influence how students experience this opportunity to analyze and create media. This young generation of folks are going to have a huge impact on education as a whole, as 2010 brings the tremendous retirement in American public education and the opportunity that the young cohort that are comfortable with video cameras, and comfortable with browsers, and comfortable with search engines, and comfortable with media technology; those educators are really going to make or break media literacy in the United States. But sadly, what we have right now, is a culture of people who are really distrustful of teachers, and distrustful of the authenticity of the classroom dynamic, and so the whole testing mandate that has swept the nation for the last several years puts pressures on teachers to have students perform well on standardized tests will make it very difficult for media literacy to be anything more than ancillary to instruction. I believe when educators reclaim their authority in recognizing what is best for students as learners, only when parents demand that teachers regain the authority of teachers knowing how to teach their students best, only then will we be able to see teachers take media literacy to where it needs to be in the twenty-first century.

VOH: How can teachers reclaim that authority?
RH: They can organize. We see in many communities and states as diverse as Connecticut and Utah where teachers are organizing where they are, for example, asking to be exempted from the “No Child Left Behind” Act. When teachers do that, they send a signal to the community that says: “We know best how to educate our students. Let us create assessment tools that reflect our communities and our values, not those set in Washington D.C.