AASL Chapters Forum

Dear AASL Chapter Leaders,

We need your help and involvement in an exciting new partnership between AASL and the media literacy initiative, Project Look Sharp (PLS), in collaboration with the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

Since 1996, PLS, a mission-driven not-for-profit based at Ithaca College, has been published on its website over 850 free lessons for integrating question-based media analysis into the core curriculum at all levels and for diverse subjects.  PLS has codified a curriculum-driven, student-centered, and very engaging classroom methodology they call Constructivist Media Decoding.  Over the last 2 years PLS has partnered with the New York State School Library System Association to provide professional development workshops for over 1,500 school librarians in the ML3 initiative: Librarians as Leaders for Media Literacy.  This fall AASL and PLS received a 2-year planning grant from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services that will enable us to identify opportunities and challenges for scaling this successful program across the nation. 

We need your help to identify the systems, organizations, leaders, and possibilities for outreach and for providing PD to school librarians in your state.  In December we will send you an ML3 survey to gather this information.  We recognize that this will take some time on your part to find the information for your state (e.g., How is PD being provided? What are the best opportunities for outreach?) and we want to inspire you with this important mission and its potential impact on your students, teachers, schools, and on our democratic culture. 

The ML3 initiative proposes to have librarians become the school-based leader for collaboration with teachers to consistently teach all students the habits of critical thinking of all media messages through standards-driven curriculum integration in all grades and subject areas, including but not limited to our digital and information literacy work in our libraries.  ML3 will train all educators to repurpose the media we already use in our classrooms, from books and websites to posters and video clips, to also ask key questions for media analysis.  This inquiry-based protocol will help to transform the teaching and learning process to become more student-centered, engaging, and effective with all students.  As the information literacy specialists in our buildings, with expertise in inquiry and collaboration, connections to all students, staff and curricular areas, school librarians are the natural leaders for this work.

To introduce you to this work and the ML3 survey that will be due in mid-January, we are asking to you attend a special ML3 webinar for AASL Chapter Leaders on Tuesday Nov 28 from 7-8:30pm EST (4-5:30 Pacific time).  Please make sure your chapter is represented.