Defining and analyzing media literacy competence starting with the observation of media practices: an interpretive approach

Fastrez, Pierre;Jacques, Jerry
(2022) ReDMIL doctoral summer school 2022 (Research on Digital, Media and Information Literacy) — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (6.September.2022)

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With the advent of the digital turn in society, media have permeated every aspect of our lives. Contemporary media experiences commonly blend media production, distribution and reception on a variety of platforms and devices, in a wide range of social spaces, be they public or private, domestic or professional, friendship-based or interest driven, etc. This ever-expanding array of experiences call for new forms of media literacy, and the academic discourses seeking to understand these evolutions require new efforts to conceptualize them. The proposal we develop in this talk stems from the view that new theoretical categories (or revised versions of old categories) need to be built on the fine-grained analysis of what people do with and through new media. Our ambition is to propose a method to define new media literacy competencies based on the empirical study of new or emergent media practices. Our working hypothesis is that media literacy assessments could, and should, be grounded into qualitative analyses of media practices that adopt an interpretive perspective, integrating the actors’ understanding of their lived experience, as well as the motives and norms that orient their courses of action, into the process of theory building. In this talk, we begin by presenting our theoretical approach to media literacy, which is rooted in the concepts of competence and competent situated action. Next, we present how we seek to address (what we consider to be) the three major challenges related to the definition of media literacy competencies based on the analysis of media practices: the delineation of media practices as an object of study, the process of inferring competencies based on the analysis of practices, and the integration of the actors’ perspective into the definition of the normative judgment of what it means to be media literate. While these challenges are primarily methodological, they also come with epistemological and axiological implications, which we also introduce in this talk.
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Fastrez, P., & Jacques, J. (2022). Defining and analyzing media literacy competence starting with the observation of media practices: an interpretive approach. ReDMIL doctoral summer school 2022 (Research on Digital, Media and Information Literacy), Louvain-la-Neuve. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/29711