Middle Schoolers, Meet Media Literacy

In a world of media saturation, children today are not future consumers of information and goods, but targeted participants involved in a game in which they don’t know the rules or even that they are playing, yet one that will affect them throughout their lives. This book is a teaching manual that helps teachers not only explain the concepts of consumer economics and media literacy to middle schoolers but supplies lessons for students to get hands-on experience recognizing, deconstructing, evaluating, and choosing for themselves whether to accept the tangible product or intangible message offered. Teachers can use the lessons to help students build a toolbox of analytical skills that they can carry with them and develop further throughout the rest of their lives to distinguish information from persuasion, from what people tell them they should believe to what the students, through critical thinking, decide is worthy of their belief.

It’s about time that topics such as economics and media literacy find a place in the middle school curriculum. This engaging, witty, and informative book is truly a gift to teachers; each chapter is accompanied by sample lessons, discussion topics, and class activities.  The contemporary references will delight students, and parents and administrators will appreciate the authors’ keen insights into the “tween” years., An understanding of economics and media literacy are foundational to understanding how our economy and media intertwine to propel our everyday choices. With this book, Wasserman and Loveland have provided a wonderful service for classroom teachers everywhere to make these important ideas accessible and engaging.  Media literacy is the underpinning to understand how democracy and capitalism are represented to us, and how we can represent ourselves effectively within a free market economy.  Every student and every adult needs this understanding to be an informed and active citizen.

A former business litigation attorney, Jim Wasserman has spent the last 25 years teaching media literacy, economics, government and history. He currently resides in Granada, Spain with his wife and entourage of sycophantic cats.Dave Loveland’s liberal arts education of studying ancient language, culture, religion, and literature have been instrumental in understanding the effects of media literacy through time. A career educator living in Dallas, Texas, Dave teaches 8th grade Humanities with an emphasis on American history and language arts.