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I did a tiny bit of research around media literacy curriculums. This is a decent starting point cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/ml which links to this interesting site criticalmediaproject.org and this one, but most of the material is hidden behind a login commonsense.org/educati… and one more learningforjustice.org
There are a few more links there, but…
I did a tiny bit of research around media literacy curriculums. This is a decent starting point https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/ml/ which links to this interesting site https://criticalmediaproject.org and this one, but most of the material is hidden behind a login https://www.commonsense.org/education/digital-citizenship/curriculum and one more https://www.learningforjustice.org
There are a few more links there, but it doesn’t take a doctorate in media literacy to spot a few trends.
"Beyond “who am I?” these questions frame our individual identities in a broader social historical context and in relation to other groups. Part of understanding our identity, therefore, means understanding how we fit in (or don’t) with other groups of people. It also means being aware of the fact that some groups have more social, political, and economic power than others."
From the critical media site.
This is the core problem with the "media literacy" concept -- it necessarily entails a measure of indoctrination.
As a matter of simple psychological reality, the very idea of people relating to "groups" is absurd. Individuals relate to and communicate with individuals. It is impossible for any interactive communication to occur except between individuals, which immediately and permanently eviscerates the very notion of "group identification" (I am an American male of predominantly Scots and Irish ancestry, but being neurodivergent I don't fit into any group of any kind).
Children especially should not be indoctrinated into specific group identifications. They should have the freedom to figure out for themselves how their ancestry, physicality, and all the rest blend into that single most important pronoun "I".
That cannot happen if they are not encouraged to think for themselves, to question everything around them, and to challenge prevailing wisdoms. Only when we can celebrate the question "why?" are we on a path to understanding of anything.
These curricula, from what I can see of them, thwart that ambition absolutely.
I’m probably just restating what you’ve said, but the idea of group association means a lot when you zoom out, because groups are easily grouped again, until you just have one or two big groups of groups. If you can get one to associate with a smaller relational group in some way, and that group gets associated with a larger group (think lgbtqia+-2s...) and then adopted by an even larger group, indoctrination becomes easy, because the big group holds a lot of power and can market itself to the smaller groups just by (forced?) alignment, or pretend representation.
Elsewhere on that same critical media site it talks about how different groups have different levels of "power".
If all human relationships are simply a quest for more power, we're already doomed and living in one of the nine circles of Hell, as far as I'm concerned.
I can see that an alternative curriculum is needed for pushback.
100%. To be fair there are a few good ideas thrown into these curriculums like questioning the sources and narratives but any time I hear “through the lens of...”, I have to question the motive.
The essential point is that all narratives are, to some degree, illegitimate, even mine.
Narratives are built on a subset of facts, and it is next to impossible to include all the facts on a particular issue in a single article. Consequently, every narrative is biased and incomplete, practically by definition.