Media literacy preparation in undergraduate teacher training: an American and Australian perspective

Twenty years ago, the Aspen Institute report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy described the media literacy components in the undergraduate teacher preparation program at North Carolina’s Appalachian State University as “perhaps the most sustained institutional effort at pre-service training within formal schooling” (Aufderheide & Firestone 1993, 4). Tellingly, it also described media literacy as “an especially diffi cult challenge in the United States” (2). While Australia and the United Kingdom long ago added media studies to the high school curriculum, along with externally graded state-wide exams, U.S. schools have no equivalent. In this chapter, we address one American university’s experience with media literacy in undergraduate teacher preparation, and the training of Media teachers in Victoria, Australia. As such, readers should not take our discussion to be representative of approaches throughout either country as a whole.