MLE + ThEd Standards=BFF

The Media Literacy Education standards would be useful for theatre educators because many of the aims of MLE are the same or are closely related to the national theatre education standards. Any theatre education lesson plan based on one of the national standards could be benefited from using MLE inside of the teaching because theatre is a form of media. Theatre practitioners/consumers (which is what we are helping to students to become in one way or another) need to be visually and aurally literate as well as script literate (because it is a different kind of reading when you’re reading a script) they also need to be literate in “non-traditional” texts, such as the human body and non-verbal communications. These all coincide with an idea of MLE because they are found in all sorts of media. If the students learn to be literate in these different facets in theatre then they are also being taught how to read these things in film or radio or on a web-page. It’s more about then helping your students explicitly link what they’re learning to read in theatre to what they read in their moment-to-moment lives as they interact with different media.

One very important standard overlap between theatre education and MLE deals with meaning making. The National Theatre Education Standard 7 for 9-12 proficient is “Analyzing, critiquing, and constructing meanings from informal and formal theatre, film, television and electronic media productions.” This coincides with MLE standard 6: “Media Literacy Education affirms that people use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.” As a theatre educator helps to teach his/her students about how to analyze a piece of theatre they’ve seen and how to articulate what they see, it would also be important to emphasize or at least talk about where we decide the meaning comes from. This brings in MLE standard 6. An example of this could be that a drama 3 class may have a discussion about a filmed version of Hamlet they viewed as a class. As students share their critiques and analysis a conversation could be started about why the students think what they think. After the students defend their answers, perhaps with evidence from the visual (which includes camera angles as well as lighting, costuming and set which are all aspects of both theatre and media literacy) and spoken text, the teacher may bring up that we have different opinions because we all come from a different paradigm. That part of meaning making in theatre or any other media is acknowledging that what we think is based in what we ourselves know and have experienced, either in our lives or vicariously through another medium (novels, films, play etc.). The discussion could include the idea that the fact everyone makes meaning based on his/her own experiences is fine but it sometimes needs to be explained in order to make yourself understood to others who do not have your same experience. The whole analysis of a filmed version of Hamlet also should be taken back to the fact that the students’ skills in analyzing this particular piece can be applied to both theatre and other types of media because it straddles that line. It is a film adaptation of a play script.