About Us

About Us

The Association for Media Literacy is made up of teachers, librarians, consultants, parents, cultural workers, and media professionals concerned about the impact of the mass media on contemporary culture.

Media literacy is an educational initiative that aims to increase students' understanding and enjoyment of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how the media construct reality. AML is concerned with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used by media industries, and the impact of these techniques. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create their own media products.

The AML has members from across Canada, throughout the United States, and from around the world. Our international membership is particularly strong in those English-speaking countries where the educational system has given some priority to media literacy, notably England, Australia and Scotland as well as the U.S. Our members and guest speakers at AML events include internationally renowned media educators such as John Pungente, SJ, of Canada, Len Masterman and David Buckingham of Great Britain, and Robyn Quin and Barrie McMahon of Australia.

Founded in 1978, The Association for Media Literacy was the first comprehensive organization for media literacy teachers in Canada. AML Ontario has helped establish several other provincial media literacy organizations, all members of the CAMEO national network (Canadian Association of Media Education Organizations).

The AML serves the needs of its members through a variety of services:

  • AML provides a network for media literacy teachers throughout the world.   Our founder, Barry Duncan, is an internationally recognized leader in the media literacy movement. Several of our executive members have also published student textbooks widely used in Ontario and throughout Canada.
  • AML publishes an online newsletter for its members.
  • AML organizes workshops and conferences. Our most recent conference, Summit 2000: Children, Youth and the Media: Beyond the Millennium, was held in Toronto and attracted over 1500 participants from 54 countries.  Previously, two international conferences were held in Guelph, Ontario and we co-sponsored the Media Literacy Summer Institutes with Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto. We also organize workshops in the Toronto area, as well as Ottawa and Vancouver, and throughout southwestern Ontario, including London, Stratford, and Windsor.
  • AML publishes curriculum anthologies and other support material for media teachers.
  • AML lobbies and communicates with government, school boards and the media industry about mutual concerns.

Among its initiatives, the AML:
  • was involved in planning the first ever National Media Literacy Week, along with the Canadian Teachers Federation, Media Awareness Network and CAMEO.  National Media Literacy week is a follow-up initiative to the CTF 2003 survey Kids' Take on Media.
  • offers Additional Qualifications courses in Media at York University and OISE/University of Toronto.
  • supported the genesis of sister organizations in most Canadian provinces and their umbrella organization, CAMEO (http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/CAMEO/).
  • originated the concept and purpose of the Media Awareness Network (http://www.media-awareness.ca)
  • hosted national and international media education conferences (most recently, Summit 2000 in Toronto) and created several resources, including the seminal Media Literacy Resource Guide, which has been translated into Japanese and Spanish
  • developed Think Literacy documents for the Ministry of Education, which provide teachers with strategies for teaching media literacy in Language Arts and English classrooms.
  • consults with the Ministry of Education on curriculum development and revision for the elementary and secondary panels.

Ontario was the first educational jurisdiction in the world to mandate media literacy as part of the English curriculum, largely as a result of AML lobbying.

In the back-to-basics climate of educational reform in Ontario, the AML has successfully lobbied for a media studies component in the elementary language curriculum, as well as a media studies strand in every English course at the secondary level. Our president, Carolyn Wilson, chaired the team responsible for creating a new stand-alone Media Studies credit at the grade 11 level.

The AML has also been involved in lobbying against draconian copyright legislation being proposed by the federal government that would have a chilling effect on teacher and student access to media texts in the classroom.

The AML and its affiliates successfully marshalled public opinion against the "Youth News Network," a proposed Canadian version of the U.S.'s "Channel One."