Teaching the Black Power Movement, the Genre of Documentary Film and Critical Media Literacy

In: American studies journal, Heft 70

Abstract

In an age of digitalization and information overflow, it is of particular importance to offer students strategies to read and navigate the world they live in. The Information and Media Literacy project at the University of Passau intends to enable future teachers to become literate in the digital age by empowering pre-service teachers to collect, sort, critically evaluate, and subsequently produce and distribute information. Additionally, the awareness of and the reflection on the role of the media is just as essential, and thus, media-literacy education is a crucial part in this endeavor. This article discusses what information and media-literacy education can look like in practice. In one of our interdisciplinary and co-taught seminars, we investigated how documentaries can shape the perception of history by looking at the Black Power Movement in the US.