Abstract

This research project examines the hidden curriculum of current digital media literacy resources in Canadian secondary classrooms and focuses on a recent federally funded program for secondary students CTRL-F (pronounced control-f). Measuring the interventions against criteria for critical intermedia pedagogy, this project addresses three research questions:
(1) What digital media literacy interventions are available to secondary classroom teachers in Canada, and which organisations provide them? The term intervention is used here in a broad sense, covering any pedagogical activity that is designed specifically for digital literacy.
(2) What strategies are modelled or prescribed in the examples?
(3) Examining the content for its hidden curriculum, what ideological messages are presented? Do the interventions reinforce binary notions of credibility and fact that constitute what Michel Foucault calls a “regime of truth”?
My results show that current resources lack the necessary critical dimensions to support analytical thinking, while also amplifying the objectivity rhetorics of mainstream journalism.