Deconstructing Media and Decentering Perspectives: Teaching Media Literacy in the EAP Classroom

The professional development Committee of The English Language Centre at the UTAS-Ibri, hosted a webinar on Deconstructing Media and Decentering Perspectives: Teaching Media Literacy in the EAP Classroom.

The speaker, Professor Anastasia Jean, shared perspectives on teaching media literacy in the EAP classroom.

Professor Anastasia Khawaja (she/her) is an ESL senior instructor at INTO USF and an adjunct professor in the humanities and English departments at The University of South Florida. Her research engages with global peace education and breaks the binary understanding of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict by exploring language use and language representation.

Professor Anastasia Jean made the audience conversant with different teaching media literacy methods for EAP (English for Academic Purposes) students. Her talk underlined the techniques of challenging students to deconstruct various media pieces from all over the world. She also explained how practicing this deconstruction can also help to decenter one side of a story and encourage students to understand multiple perspectives from intellectual and cultural standpoints.

She emphasized that the approaches mentioned are helpful in classrooms with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Prof Anastasia’s talk was novel and was a new platform for the interested. Her interaction with the audience was fruitful, engaging and brought many new aspects of media literacy to limelight.

The English Language Centre thanked Prof Anastasia for her commendable efforts for her interesting talk.