Global Initiatives

The Media Education Lab has some ongoing research partnerships around the world. Since 2012, Professor Renee Hobbs has offered 32 invited keynote addresses, workshop presentations or academic seminars in many countries in Europe and Asia. Formal global initiatives include:

International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy

With her colleague Paul Mihailidis from Emerson College, Renee Hobbs is editing the International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy, to be published by Wiley in 2017 in collaboration with the International Communication Association (ICA). This ambitious project features 280 global authors from 30 countries in a work designed to establish media literacy as a subdiscipline that stands at the intersection of the fields of communication and education. Associate editors include: Benjamin Thevenin (Brigham Young University), Maria Ranieri (University of Florence Italy), Gianna Cappello (University of Palermo, Italy).

Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda

The Media Education Lab is partnering with five non-profit media literacy organizations in Western and Eastern Europe (France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Romania) to translate and make cultural adaptations to Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda (http://www.mindovermedia.tv), an educational website created by the Media Education Lab that offers a crowdsourced gallery of the new forms of propaganda including viral marketing, sponsored content and other new forms of propaganda. The initiative is designed to help educators in the formal and informal education sector address issues including discrimination, Islamophobia and political polarization, among other topics. On November 4, 3 – 4 p.m. EST, we offer a free webinar where we will discuss the platform and its uses to promote intercultural understanding.  

Research on Media Literacy Pedagogy

Renee Hobbs is collaborating with academic partners in Western and Eastern Europe and Asia on research about new instructional approaches to teaching media literacy. In 2015, Renee Hobbs collaborated with Professor Igor Kanizaj from the Journalism Department at the University of Croatia to offer media literacy education to 22 elementary educators from that country. Other collaborators include Professor Silke Grafe from the University of Wurzburg (Germany), Maria Ranieri from the University of Florence (Italy), and Jun Sakamoto and Kyoko Murakami of Hosei University (Japan), who participated in translating two of Renee Hobbs’ books, which were published by in Japan in 2016.

Hobbs, R. and Moore, D.C. (2016). メディア・リテラシー教育と出会う―小学生がデジタルメディアとポップカルチャーに向き合うために. Hirosaki University Press. Translation by Yosuke Morimoto. [Book Translation: Discovering Media Literacy.

Hobbs, R. (2016). デジタル時代のメディア・リテラシー教育 – 中高生の日常のメディアと授業の融合. Tokyo Gakugei University Press. Translation by Yosuke Morimoto. [Book Translation: Digital and Media Literacy.]

Yonty Friesem is collaborating with media literacy scholars to explore the use of media production in global contexts. One of these collaborations with Dr. M.L. White from the University of East London (UK), focuses on media production as a research tool in high poverty schools. Since 2015, Yonty has been working with Dr. Ornat Turin the Head of Media Literacy Program at Gordon College of Education (Israel), on media literacy boundaries and jurisdictions. Recently, Yonty started to work with two colleagues, Dr. Cheryl Wei-Yu Chen, from the National Taipei University of Business and Dr. Hung-Chun Wang, from the National Taiwan Normal University (Taiwan) on a new scale to measure digital empathy in undergraduate level classes

Center for Educational Technology, Tel Aviv, Israel

Renee Hobbs of six international advisors for the largest educational publishing house in Israel, focusing on the development of e-textbooks and other interactive learning resources. She is collaborating on research with Professor Baha Makhool to identify the needs for digital learning and professional development among the minority population of Arab Israelis through survey research, observations and interviews. Hobbs provides professional development to the staff of the organization and has contributed articles to a special initiative on virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) in education.

Friends Forever: Promoting Cultural Understanding through Filmmaking

Over two summers, the Media Education Lab offered training and support for 10 Jewish and Arab teens from Israel who participated in the Friends Forever USA program, designed to promote cultural understanding through intergroup dialogue.  This program was held in conjunction with the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy on the CEPS campus in Providence. Teens learned how to create short videos about the importance of relationships as a means of peace-building, under supervision of Associate Director Professor Yonty Friesem and Dr. Evanna Ratner of the Gordon College of Education in Haifa, Israel, who serves as the Communication Coordinator at the Israeli Ministry for Education.

Visiting Scholars

The Media Education hosts international scholars with a particular interest in digital and media literacy.

• In October 2016, Professor Hongyan Liu, a specialist in English language learning and digital media, will be a Visiting Scholar at the Media Education Lab. She comes from the University of Ningxia, China for a 12-month visit.
• Professor Sait Tuzel of Canakkale Onsekkeiz Mart University in Turkey spent 24 months in Rhode Island at the Media Education Lab, working in collaboration with Renee Hobbs on research exploring the motivations of teachers to implement digital and media literacy programs in schools, and their research was published in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET). Unfortunately, since his recent return from Rhode Island in Fall, 2015, Sait has been arrested in the post-putsch academic purge that has led to the detention and arrest of thousands of academics in Turkey. We have reached out to Senator Jack Reed and the U.S. State Department concerning his dire situation as his arrest has had a deep negative effect on his wife and two young children.
• During the academic year 2014-2015, Professor Carla Coscarelli came from The Federal University of Minas Gerais to study digital literacy with Renee Hobbs and Julie Coiro. During her time in Rhode Island, she offered two workshops to parents and teens in the Portuguese-speaking communities of Rhode Island on the subject of digital and media literacy.
• Other scholars have come to to Rhode Island to join the Media Education Lab for shorter visits, from countries including Joao Guimares from Brazil; Marketa Zezulkova of the Czech Republic; Sarhana Sarkar of India; Stefania Carioli and Maria Ranieri of Italy; Keong Ku of South Korea;  and Diane Watt of Canada.

For more information about how you can become involved in the global initiatives of the Media Education Lab, contact Professor Yonty Friesem at friesem@ccsu.edu