Abstract

The implementation of critical media literacy in the curriculum has been advocated mainly to construct and deconstruct knowledge, to empower students to counter the threat of pleasurable but insidious hegemonic messages, ideological misrepresentation of reality, racist portrayals of minorities, and so forth. The purpose of this study is to promote a new approach to critical media literacy in adult education. It examines the proposition that critical media literacy, particularly through the use of films, can be a vehicle for transformative learning towards social and emotional competence in everyday relationships, in the workplace, in the family and in the communities where we live. Therefore, the thesis explores the theory of Transformative Learning, the construct of social and emotional intelligence and the literature on critical media literacy to set the theoretical and practical background for this study. Based on the review of the literature, intersections among these three educational domains are delineated. The study ends with a discussion of scenes from the movies Crash (Haggis, 2005) and Revolutionary Road (Mendes, 2008) as exemplars for the implementation of the proposed approach to critical media literacy in adult learning contexts, including classrooms.