ANTONIO LÓPEZ

Bridging ecojustice and media education

Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education

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Read the preface

Ecomedia is an emerging framework that views all media technologies and communications as embedded within a material and environmental reality.

Ecomedia Literacy offers a focused and practical guide to integrate the relationship between media and the environment—ecomedia—into media education. It enables media teachers to ‘green’ their pedagogy by providing essential tools and approaches that can be applied in the classroom. 

Media are an essential feature of our planetary ecosystem emergency, contributing to both the problem and solution to climate chaos, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, water contamination, and so on. Offering a clear theoretical framework and suggested curriculum guide, Antonio Lopez provides key resources that will enable media educators to apply ecomedia concepts into their curricula. By reconceptualizing media education, this book connects ecology, environmental communication, ecomedia studies, environmental humanities, and ecoliteracy to bridge media literacy and education for sustainability.

Ecomedia Literacy is an essential read for educators and scholars in the areas of media literacy, media and communication, media and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and environmental studies.

Ecomedia Literacy is designed to be proactive, providing tools and approaches that can be applied in a variety of learning environments.

  • A practical guide for educators of media studies, cultural studies and digital humanities to incorporate ecomedia concepts into their curriculum and teaching methods.
  • Provides in-depth discussion of “ecomedia” (the relationship between media and environment).
  • Features a theoretical framework, curriculum structure, and lesson guides for specific activities and curriculum design.
  • Makes meaningful connections to develop a sense of purpose by synthesizing the domains of digital and living systems through an experiential approach to learning.
  • Promotes skills necessary for environmental challenges, include self-reflection, critical analysis, systems thinking, creativity, and visualization; and more traditional skills like literacy of media, information and technology.
  • Integrates concepts from education for sustainability, such as cultural preservation and transformation; responsible green citizenship; the dynamics of systems and change; sustainable economics; healthy commons natural laws and ecological principles; inventing and affecting the future; a sense of place.
  • Develops a theoretical approach that reimagines communication and media theories.
  • Explores an ecomedia literacy curriculum heuristic called the “ecomediasphere.”

Testimonials

“Dr. Lopez’ work is possibly one of the most important works in this century, merging fields of study and enabling readers to see the tangible connections between ecology and media while inviting them to ditch old ways of thinking about media and media education

Pamela Pereyra, Media Savvy Citizens

“Antonio Lopez’s excellent book on ecomedia literacy makes major contributions to a growing literature on the topic that is important for making education relevant for key issues and problems of the day, and is important as well that citizens become aware of the growing ecological crises and challenges to a sustainable future.”

Douglas Kellner, UCLA

“Antonio Lopez is one of the remarkable media educators who has been working for years on developing a holistic and systemic framework for understanding media—a framework that incorporates a deep understanding not only of the politics and economics of media technologies, but of the ways they ethically implicate us as citizens active within expanding circles of social responsibility. Lopez’s ‘ecomediasphere’ model presents an admirable synthesis of insights from popular education, media and cultural studies, and the rapidly growing field of ecomedia theory and practice. This is cutting-edge work on a topic that couldn’t be more important.”

Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont

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