Exploring the potential of Media Literacy Education to question discrimination and promote civic participation

Today media education is widely recognized as a prominent approach to enable young people’s ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ of (digital) media texts and promote a critical understanding of their own experience as readers and writers in a media-saturated society. Media literacy indeed includes reading and writing, speaking and listening, accessing new digital media, critical viewing, and the ability to create one’s own messages through the use of a wide range of technologies. With its double focus on media awareness and media action, media education is also seen as a means for educators to develop young people’ citizenship skills and therefore as a form of citizenship education. In this context, this chapter investigates the potential of media education to question and discourage Othering strategies considering different types of media messages (e.g. news, political propaganda, videogame scenarios) and different forms of discrimination (e.g. racism, homophobia, sexism). At the same time, it examines the potential of media education to build inclusive and pluralistic citizenship where diversity is seen as a source of social and cultural vitality.