Understanding and Representing Diversity A Media Literacy Education Response to Discrimination in News Media Representations

This paper aims at presenting media literacy education (MLE) as a pedagogical strategy to support young people’s critical understanding of news media representations of minority groups, as well as a concrete opportunity to engage new generations with the production of media narratives that reflect and value diversity of voices in contemporary societies. From this perspective, media literacy education can serve the purpose of a potentially powerful tool to challenge the symbolic violence characterising some news media representations of the Other through the enactment of critical practices of news media reporting. These practices may be understood, in turn, as broader acts of democratic citizenship. In this article, we focus on classroom based interventions dealing with representations of discriminated groups. We start with an introduction to the theoretical insights that informed the design of media education activities, then we illustrate and discuss actual practices carried out in school. We conclude with some considerations about the potential of MLE to encourage young citizens to question discrimination in media representations as well as to foster their ability to represent diversity.