ISL (2020). Critical Literacy and the Media… ISL, 14, 181-196.
ISSN 2340-8685
literacy, Lewison et al. (2002) reviewed the treatment given to the construct during the last three
decades of the last century and, in order to guide teachers, they presented their synthesis in the
form of an operational proposal articulated in four dimensions: a) disturbing the common place,
b) questioning multiple points of view, c) focusing on socio-political issues, and d) taking action
and promoting social justice. Following this direction, critical literacy found successful
accommodation in the formulation of Beck (2005), who considered the theory in this regard as ‘an
attitude towards texts and discourses that questions the social, political and economic conditions
under which the texts were constructed’.
In recent years, in line with the critical studies of the discourse of Professor Teun Van Dijk
(2006, 2009, 2016), critical literacy has broadened the circumscribed framework to printed texts
and applies its principles ‘to practically all work media creative, including television, movies, web
pages, music, art and other means of expression’ (Draper & Reidel, 2011, cited by Maloy, 2016,
p.14). In general, minors lack higher-order thinking and communication skills (Vigotsky, 1988),
cognitive, linguistic and discursive, pragmatic and cultural, evaluative and affective skills
(Serrano, 2008), associative and critical skills, included in ‘critical literacy’ (Cassany, 2006,
2012). Due to this, ‘transmedia education needs that exchange between what happens with the
media outside the school and the teaching-learning processes that take place inside the classroom’
(Scolari et al., 2019, p. 10).
Media and information literacy (UNESCO, 2011) adopts the sociocultural and critical
paradigm from its own antecedents, such as the emancipatory critical literacy of Paulo Freire
(Freire & Macedo, 1989) or the study of the representation of reality in the media as a subject
teaching the audience proposed by Len Masterman since 1985 (Masterman, 1994). Both models
of inquiry about media content coincide with the definition of critical literacy made by Lewison
et al. (Op cit.). We anchor in this confluence the concept of media literacy (ML), with critical
action as a basal and transversal component (Kellner & Share, 2007); in short, in the knowledge
of the processes that are hidden behind production of meanings, those that inform and motivate
our criteria in the judgment, both of the speech of others and of our own, autonomous or collective
creation, and from their impact on the mind on our emotional and deliberative circuits (Ferrés,
2014).
The need for media literacy in the educational system must be reflected in the acquisition
of competence (Jiménez-Pérez & Villanueva, 2014) in the use of media and information, both in
its dimensions of understanding and analysis and in its expressive dimensions (Ferrés & Piscitelli,
2012). In this way, the knowledge, skills, and cognitive-emotional attitudes involved in searching,
selecting, evaluating, analysing, and storing information, in their treatment and their use with any
available code or technique are covered (Wilson et al., 2011).
One of the niches, just recently named, where words are housed and that most impacts the
mind, especially of minors, is hate speech and violence (DOV, hereinafter). In this educational
context of media literacy or literacy (media literacy in the English-speaking context), various
initiatives have emerged in Europe focused on the prevention of hateful attitudes and are also
interested in the prevention of cyberbullying: The guides for educators (2012 and 2007 ) edited by
the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR); the FRIDA Project on
Training for the prevention and detection of racism, xenophobia, and related forms of intolerance
in the classroom, developed in Spain in 2015; the Prevention of online hate speech training project,
European Wergeland Center, Norway; the pedagogical project NO HATE - Ce qui vous irrde,