Ahead of NAMLE 2025
This month, educators, researchers, creators, and advocates from across the country and the world will gather virtually for the 2025 National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) Conference — the largest professional development conference in the U.S. dedicated to media literacy education, and a space for critical conversations about culture, education, and power. Our conference team has spent a lot of time reflecting on this moment we’re in, and as a co-chair of this year’s conference (s/o to co-chair Bill Selak @ billselak.com), I’ve had the chance to help shape the conversations we’ll hold together on July 11-12.
I’ve been lucky to learn from our incredible team (Donnell, Justine, Carson, Dan, Jenna, & Michelle) and NAMLE’s powerful work, both of which have shaped how I understand & approach media literacy. But, to be clear, I’m speaking only for myself in this blog, and all missteps are mine.
Media literacy has often been viewed as a skill: the ability to decode headlines, fact-check sources, identify bias, etc. And those skills matter — especially now. But if we stop there, we miss the deeper purpose. At its best, media literacy isn’t just about analyzing messages. It’s about challenging and creating them. It’s about understanding who creates meaning in our culture and who gets distorted or erased by those messages. It’s about building systems that are more honest, more inclusive, and more just.
That’s the work I care most about. And it’s the focus of my upcoming NAMLE session:
Empowering Voices: Fostering Agency Through Counternarratives and Student Storytelling in Historically Marginalized Communities.
In the session, I’ll share ways to support Black, Latine, and multicultural elementary learners as they move from passive consumers to active producers of media. We’ll look at how storytelling — particularly counternarratives — can disrupt the dominant stories that have long shaped our classrooms and curricula. We’ll ask: What stories are missing? Whose voices have been silenced? And, how can media creation become a tool for belonging, agency, and change?
But this work doesn’t begin or end with one session. It’s part of a much broader conversation about what media literacy is, and what it is not.
Too often, “neutrality” and “objectivity” are held up as ideals in journalism, education, and public discourse. But in practice, these terms often serve as shields. Shields that deflect discomfort, that sidestep questions of race, power, and justice, and that position all perspectives as equally valid — even those rooted in harm.
Objectivity, as it’s often practiced in these spaces, has meant centering whiteness, deferring to dominant institutions, and flattening complexity. It’s meant quoting “both sides” when only one side is rooted in truth and/or affirms people’s basic rights. That’s not balance. That’s distortion.
In classrooms, this plays out in seemingly small ways: a curriculum that avoids conversations about race in the name of being “apolitical;” a media assignment that treats lived experience and misinformation as two points on a spectrum; a school policy that silences student expression under the banner of order or decorum. Each of these choices communicates something to our learners and communities, and none of them are neutral.
Media literacy helps us name these dynamics. It helps us see how power operates through representation, through omission, through story. It gives learners the tools not only to critique the media they consume, but to reimagine the future of media. When students create their own podcasts, videos, or narratives that reflect their truths and lived experiences, they’re not just completing an assignment, they’re shifting the narrative landscape, and that is powerful.
So, in my session at NAMLE, I’m focusing on counternarratives: stories that challenge dominant assumptions and affirm and give voice to marginalized identities. But media literacy as a whole invites all students to tell their own stories. And, when we listen to those voices, we’re doing more than fostering engagement, we’re creating a space where agency, identity, and belonging can take root.
As the media landscape continues to grow noisier and more polarized, the work of media literacy grows more urgent, and also more promising. We have the chance to raise a generation of learners who see themselves as meaning-makers who understand how stories work and how to rewrite them.
And that’s what I’m most excited about at NAMLE 2025: not just the analysis, but the imagination; not just identifying what’s wrong, but building a future that’s better…and, there’s nothing neutral about that.
