Home

The MEDIA LITERACY CONFERENCE will be a major gathering for all teachers, teacher trainers, researchers, policy-makers and media professionals interested in teaching and learning about the media. It is jointly organised by the Media Education Association and the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media at the Institute of Education, London, in partnership with Ofcom.

The Conference programme is now nearly complete and you can see it at a glance here. There are four plenary sessions – one at the start and one at the finish of each day – where important issues for all media educators will be presented and discussed. In between, the six breakout sessions offer you a wealth of choices from which to construct your own programme.

The 26 workshops provide continuing professional development for teachers in all sectors of education from primary to post-16, some focusing on practical media production and others on approaches to critical understanding. Five Awarding Bodies will also provide introductions to their latest media specifications. Whether or not you have already registered for the conference, you can identify in advance your first and second choices of workshop for each break-out session, as part of your registration.

The latest evidence about media teaching and learning will be on offer in 18 research panels, running in parallel with the workshops. We have invited over 60 research papers from 23 different countries: the themes of these panels will be published on this website in late October. The delegate pack at the Conference will include a booklet of abstracts about the papers on offer so that you can choose which sessions to attend. The research papers will be published on the new Media Education Association website for a limited period after the conference.

Networking and informal discussion are an essential part of any conference. To foster this, the National Telemedia Council from the USA will be running a "Media Café" during the registration, lunch and tea periods each day. Focusing on their journal theme "School 2.0 with a Global Perspective", some of the conference speakers will be invited to initiate short informal debates over coffee, lunch or tea in the comfortable setting of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre's Mountbatten Lounge.

Also in the Mountbatten Lounge you can browse exhibition stands from a number of resource providers, and visit the Conference Bookshop, run by the BFI Film Store and offering a wide range of media literacy books, DVDs and teaching resources. At the close of the first day, following the Henry Jenkins keynote lecture, there will be a drinks and canapés reception in the Mountbatten Lounge, during which the NTC will present the Jessie McCanse Award for individual contributions to the field of media literacy over a sustained period of time.