When a librarian says a school is adopting media-literacy standards, most parents hear a narrow skill: can the child tell an ad from a news story, a rumor from a source, a deepfake from a camera?
That skill is real. It is not all they are buying.
Paulo Freire’s method—problem-posing instead of “banking” facts, a teacher-prepared “code,” student dialogue, consciousness of power and identity—is being added onto media literacy.1 You can see the add-on in three places that already touch real schools:
- AASL’s National School Library Standards—ALA’s school-library division does not stop at “evaluate a source.” It makes diversity a co-equal foundation and tells learners to judge information by social and cultural context.2
- Oklahoma’s information-literacy rule—the old code copied AASL by name; the 2024 rewrite dropped the caption but kept the student-generated topic and “relevant” question as the start of research.3
- Project Look Sharp’s librarian training—Constructivist Media Decoding. The flyer says media literacy. The journal articles name Paulo Freire.4
Faith Rogow, founding president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), is sending librarians to that training on Bluesky (pictured top right): Ithaca College, October 6–December 15, 2026, $190, 15 hours, letter to an administrator.5 The post says student-centered inquiry that builds media literacy and information literacy while supporting core content. It does not say Freire. The method papers do.
What Freire added, in plain English
Freire opposed the teacher who deposits facts. He wanted a code (a picture, a scene) that holds a contradiction in the learner’s world, then a dialogue that moves from “what do you see?” to “why is it this way?” The point was not better footnotes. It was political literacy—conscientização.1
He did not sit in the back while children wrote the syllabus. He chose the code and the questions. “Student-centered” meant the child talks. It did not mean the child sets the destination.
Media literacy, stripped down, asks: Who made this? What’s the purpose? What’s missing? Is it accurate?
Freirean decoding asks those questions and additionally treats the answer as a lesson about systems, identity, and who holds power. That second move is the add-on. Watch for it in the standards language, in the state rule, and in the PD, where PD means professional development—the training sessions, courses, and workshops to which districts send librarians and teachers.
1. AASL: media literacy plus Include, plus “social and cultural context”
AASL does not publish a separate book called “Media Literacy Standards” for every state to rubber-stamp. It publishes the 2018 National School Library Standards (second edition announced 2025; the six Shared Foundations stayed).2 AASL’s own Knowledge Quest piece, “Media Literacy & the AASL Standards,” says media literacy is interwoven throughout those frameworks—not a standalone skill.6
If media literacy were only source criticism, AASL could have stopped at Curate and Engage: pick sources, cite them, don’t steal, check accuracy.
It did not stop.
Include is a Shared Foundation on the same level as Inquire. Key commitment: “Demonstrate an understanding of and commitment to inclusiveness and respect for diversity in the learning community.” Learners are to take a “discerning stance toward points of view and opinions” in resources.7 That is already more than “is this article true?”
Engage tells learners to evaluate information for “accuracy, validity, social and cultural context, and appropriateness for need,” and to apply “information, technology, and media” ethically.8
“Social and cultural context” is the hinge. A parent can read it as: know the date, the country, the audience. A Freirean facilitator reads it as: whose identity does this text serve, whose does it harm, what system produced it?
AASL’s 2018 competency chart does not cite Freire. That matters. The official boxes came out of AASL research, older library-inquiry work (Information Power, the 2007 Standards for the 21st-Century Learner), and member process. Calling the pamphlet Pedagogy of the Oppressed is sloppy.
Calling the pamphlet larger than media literacy is accurate. Diversity is not an appendix. Evaluation includes social and cultural context by design. The 2025–26 second edition’s supporting text leans into “equity and culturally responsive practice.”9 The AASL companion book on Include tells librarians that living the standard means unlearning “false narratives” and names white supremacy, institutionalized racism, and “anti-cishet supremacy.”10 That is the profession’s own implementation layer, not a critic’s paraphrase.
So the AASL package parents are told is “library and media literacy” already contains more than source criticism:
| Narrow media literacy | What AASL adds |
|---|---|
| Who made this? Is it accurate? | Include as a core foundation |
| Cite and don’t plagiarize | Evaluate social and cultural context |
| Use technology ethically | Learner “agency,” inquiry as identity-in-community |
| Implementation texts that name supremacy systems |
That add-on is what Freirean PD walks through the door.
2. Oklahoma: AASL on the books, then the same shape without the caption
Old OAC 210:15-3-173 did not hint. It cited AASL in the rule (pictured below):
Standard 1: Inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge. (American Association of School Librarians [AASL], STANDARDS FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY LEARNER)11
The 2007 AASL dispositions were copied into Oklahoma law. Two of them:
Display initiative and engagement by posing questions and investigating the answers beyond the collection of superficial facts.
Maintain a critical stance by questioning the validity and accuracy of all information.11
“Beyond superficial facts” is the tell. Media literacy can mean: get the facts right. That sentence tells the child the facts are not the point. Freire’s generative theme works the same way. A lesson still looks like research. The real assignment is the conversation the facts are supposed to generate.12
A photograph of that printed page is dated February 19, 2024—the same month the Oklahoma State Board approved the replacement standards.
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| Old OAC 210:15-3-173 cited AASL. |
New OAC 210:15-3-173 (Oklahoma Register Vol. 42, Issue 1; effective September 26, 2024) is a rewrite.13 Oklahoma’s own 2024 Information Literacy PDF says so: an update to the 2007 standards “as currently found in” this code section.14 The AASL name is gone. So are “intellectual freedom” and “divergent perspectives” from the old block. Grade bands and five process labels take their place: Read & Grow, Question & Plan, Research & Explore, Collect & Organize, Share & Reflect. The new text adds misinformation and ethical use of generative AI. Those are media-literacy items.
What did not go away is the Freire-shaped opening move: the topic is not simply assigned.
Grades PK–2, Question & Plan:
- With guidance, discuss reasons and ways to locate information.
- Brainstorm and choose a topic.
- With guidance, generate and discuss possible research questions.13
Grades 3–5: explain why a research topic or problem is “important or relevant”; choose which parts will be researched.
Grades 6–8: open-ended questions about a “relevant topic or problem.”
Grades 9–12: compose effective questions about a topic or problem.
“Brainstorm and choose a topic” is ordinary elementary research language. It is not a secret Freire statute. It is a rule that starts inquiry from the child’s choice and the adult’s “guidance,” not from a closed prompt. That is the form Freire used and the form Constructivist Media Decoding uses. Fill it with “how does a newspaper check a quote” and you have media literacy. Fill it with a Look Sharp identity or climate-justice kit and you have the add-on.
The new high-school band also tells students to identify, analyze, and counter misinformation, and to employ ethical generative AI.13 Countering misinformation is a content fight, not only a sourcing skill. Who defines the “mis-” is the whole argument. A Freire-trained facilitator will not treat that as neutral.
Oklahoma therefore shows the pipeline in one state:
- Then: AASL 2007 text, including “beyond superficial facts,” enacted as law.
- Now: AASL caption removed; student-generated “relevant” topics kept; media-literacy words (misinformation, AI) added on top of that inquiry form.
3. Project Look Sharp: the intensive course that names Freire
This is the piece that does not require a close reading of standards-committee minutes. The trainers published it.
Constructivist Media Decoding is a 10-week hybrid course for K–12 librarians and teachers. Live Zoom open and close (October 6 and December 15, 2026, 7:00–8:30 p.m. EST), four modules of self-paced work, optional coaching by Chris Sperry. Hosts: Sperry and Cyndy Scheibe.15 Rogow has been inside the project since before it had a name. She evaluated the librarian pilots. She is promoting the 2026 national section.
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| Project Look Sharp's Constructivist Media Decoding brochure. |
What they say in journals, not on Bluesky:
- Rogow et al., Journal of Media Literacy Education 17(2) (2025), on the elementary librarian pilot: CMD draws from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy (1985) and Len Masterman; the teacher does not “fill them up with knowledge.”4
- Sezgin Büyükalaca, Sperry & Scheibe, same issue: CMD was built against the instruction Freire called the banking method.16
Same skeleton as Freire’s culture circle: hold up a document (the code), question it, let the group construct meaning, treat interpretation as shaped by identity and experience.
What they add beyond “who produced this clip?”:
- Staff page: Sox Sperry, lead lesson writer, keeps Look Sharp focused on social justice, identity and climate disruption.17
- Flyer “Why CMD?”: integrates with SEL, DEI, PBL (project-based learning (sometimes problem-based learning): students work on an extended project or real-world problem instead of a short, teacher-led lesson); “reaches traditionally disenfranchised & marginalized students”; “shifts polarized thinking.”15
- Lesson catalog: Media Construction of Social Justice, Media Construction of Global Warming, Black Lives Matter and Climate Change, identity units, “challenging topics.”18
- ML3—Librarians as Leaders for Media Literacy—with AASL, NAMLE, and an IMLS planning grant: the librarian becomes the person who spreads the method through the building.19
Federal money. In FY 2023 the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded Ithaca College / Project Look Sharp $149,748 under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, award RE-254855-OLS-23, to plan taking ML3 to all 50 states. AASL is named as partner; NAMLE as collaborator. IMLS’s public abstract says “media literacy” and “habits of inquiry.” Look Sharp’s posted proposal includes “a plan for implementing the CMD course online and in schools across the U.S.” and a subaward to AASL. So this is an example of a direct grant of federal money to ALA. During that planning period they say they ran hybrid CMD courses through state library associations and education departments. They later reported IMLS asked for a full implementation proposal. The government’s label is media-literacy training for librarians. The method named in the proposal is CMD—the method whose journal articles cite Freire.20
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| IMLS awarded Ithaca College / Project Look Sharp $149,748. |
That federal planning grant sat on top of earlier private money: about $270,000 from the Booth Ferris Foundation (2021) to build ML3 in New York with the State School Library Systems Association. IMLS paid to nationalize a model a foundation had already paid to invent.20
Fifteen hours, a badge, a letter an administrator can file under “we trained staff in media literacy.” The journal citation file is Freire. The kit list is climate justice and identity. The standards crosswalk is AASL. Part of the scaling plan was on the federal ledger.
That is the add-on in operational form.
How the three pieces fit
Parents are told a single story: kids drown in phones; teach media literacy.
The documents say something longer:
AASL made “media literacy” a thread through a six-foundation library standard that already includes diversity and social-cultural evaluation.
Oklahoma put the 2007 AASL learner standards in the Administrative Code, then rewrote the code in 2024 so the AASL name dropped out while student-chosen “relevant” topics and an inquiry sequence stayed.
Look Sharp trains the librarian who will live in that sequence, cites Freire for the method, and stocks the codes (the clips and kits) with social-justice and identity themes.
Media literacy proper—authorship, purpose, accuracy, missing information—can be taught without that stack. The stack is how “media literacy standards” become a vehicle for Freire’s problem-posing classroom: the child speaks, the adult chose the code, the destination is not a bibliography.
Questions that keep the distinction honest
- Does this lesson stop when the student can source and verify, or does it continue into who is oppressed by the message?
- When PK–2 “brainstorms a topic,” who writes the next three questions?
- Are Look Sharp / CMD / ML3 on the PD calendar? May the public read the kits?
- In Oklahoma, is staff being trained off the 2007 AASL dispositions that are no longer the code?
- When AASL Engage says “social and cultural context,” what does the rubric actually score?
If the answer to the first question is “it continues,” you are not looking at media literacy alone. You are looking at Freire’s method wearing a library-standards badge.
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| ALA's AASL National School Library Standards. Freire’s method wearing a library-standards badge. |
More evidence from the past
About three years ago I provided evidence of the above use of media literacy as political literacy. It comes directly from school librarians themselves saying it themselves on a podcast called School Librarians United. So listen and learn, and notice she came to an ALA school librarian conference specifically to get training on how to indoctrinate kids using political literacy. ALA has been teaching this for years:
What is “media literacy”? For school #librarians at #AASL23 who have the mind virus 🦠 it’s racism/Marxism training for kids. They say it in the open. Listen 👂.
— Dan Kleinman @OccupyLibraries (@OccupyLibraries) October 30, 2023
DO NOT FOLLOW @ALALibrary AASL “STANDARDS.”#parenting #moms #dads #k12 @ConceptualJames @XVanFleet pic.twitter.com/M83RrAYFfF
Endnotes
- ↑ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970/2000), on banking education, problem-posing, codification, and conscientização. The 1985 work cited by Look Sharp authors is Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985).
- ↑ American Association of School Librarians, National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries (Chicago: ALA Editions, 2018), https://standards.aasl.org/. Second edition announced 2025; Shared Foundations unchanged.
- ↑ Compare prior Okla. Admin. Code § 210:15-3-173 (AASL 2007 text) with current § 210:15-3-173, as amended by Oklahoma Register, Vol. 42, Issue 1 (Sept. 16, 2024), effective Sept. 26, 2024, https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/oklahoma/OAC-210-15-3-173.
- ↑ Faith Rogow, Barbara Crossman, Michele Coolbeth, and Jennifer Balk, “Constructivist Media Decoding in Elementary School: Media Literacy Instruction Across a School Year,” Journal of Media Literacy Education 17, no. 2 (2025): 125–139 (CMD “drawing from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy (1985)”).
- ↑ Faith Rogow (@insightersed.bsky.social), Bluesky post promoting the Project Look Sharp national CMD course; course dates and price from Project Look Sharp, “Our PD Offerings,” https://www.projectlooksharp.org/our-offerings.php, and the October 6–December 15, 2026 course flyer (looksharp@ithaca.edu; inquiry deadline Sept. 29, 2026).
- ↑ Len Bryan, “Media Literacy & the AASL Standards,” Knowledge Quest 47, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 2018): 39–44, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1190637.
- ↑ AASL, Standards Framework for Learners, Shared Foundation II, Include (Think domain: discerning stance toward points of view), https://standards.aasl.org/framework/.
- ↑ AASL, Standards Framework for Learners, Shared Foundation VI, Engage (Think domain: evaluate information for accuracy, validity, social and cultural context, and appropriateness for need).
- ↑ AASL, “Evolving Standards for an Evolving Profession: Introducing the Second Edition of the National School Library Standards,” Knowledge Quest, Sept. 29, 2025, https://knowledgequest.aasl.org/evolving-standards-for-an-evolving-profession-introducing-the-second-edition-of-the-national-school-library-standards/.
- ↑ Sample from AASL Shared Foundations series on Include (ALA Editions), discussing unlearning “false narratives” and naming white supremacy, institutionalized racism, and anti-cishet supremacy as part of implementing Include, https://alastore.ala.org/sites/default/files/book_samples/9780838919170_sample.pdf.
- ↑ Okla. Admin. Code § 210:15-3-173 (text in force until the Sept. 26, 2024 amendment), “Standard 1: Inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge (American Association of School Librarians [AASL], STANDARDS FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY LEARNER).” The commercial page okrules.elaws.us/oac/210:15-3-173 is unstable. Use instead: neighboring OAC 210:15-3-172 (Oklahoma adopted AASL’s 2007 Standards for the 21st-Century Learner as the Information Literacy PASS); Justia Part 21 index, https://regulations.justia.com/states/oklahoma/title-210/chapter-15/subchapter-3/part-21/; the pre-2024 OSDE compilation of Title 210 Part 21, OSDE Title 210 Part 21 PDF; and the author’s February 19, 2024 photograph of the printed AASL-citing page. Current text only: Cornell LII § 210:15-3-173.
- ↑ For the generative-theme classroom sequence (ordinary lesson as vehicle for political dialogue), see James Lindsay, The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (Orlando: New Discourses, 2022), and New Discourses, “The Theft of Education,” Nov. 9, 2022, https://newdiscourses.com/2022/11/the-theft-of-education/, crediting SEL expert Jennifer McWilliams. Cited here for the method description, not as evidence of AASL’s drafting history. See video after Endnotes.
- ↑ Okla. Admin. Code § 210:15-3-173 (current), Grades PK–2 through 9–12, https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/oklahoma/OAC-210-15-3-173.
- ↑ Oklahoma State Department of Education, Oklahoma Academic Standards for Information Literacy (2024), stating the 2024 standards update the 2007 standards previously found in OAC 210:15-3-173, https://oklahoma.gov/content/dam/ok/en/osde/documents/resources/educators/OAS%20Information%20Literacy%202024.pdf.
- ↑ Project Look Sharp, National CMD Course flyer and “Our PD Offerings,” https://www.projectlooksharp.org/our-offerings.php.
- ↑ Ayşe Aslı Sezgin Büyükalaca, Chris Sperry, and Cyndy Scheibe, “Using Media as a Source in Lessons: Media Literacy Methodology and Constructivist Media Decoding,” Journal of Media Literacy Education 17, no. 2 (2025): 140–146 (CMD contrasted with Freire’s banking method).
- ↑ Project Look Sharp, staff biography for Sox Sperry (curriculum writer; focus on social justice, identity, and climate disruption), https://www.ithaca.edu/looksharp?action=about.
- ↑ Project Look Sharp lesson and kit lists, including Media Construction of Social Justice, Media Construction of Global Warming, and “Black Lives Matter and Climate Change: What’s the Connection?,” https://www.projectlooksharp.org/ and https://www.projectlooksharp.org/featured-topics.php.
- ↑ Project Look Sharp, “ML3: Librarians as Leaders for Media Literacy” (AASL, NAMLE, IMLS planning grant), https://www.projectlooksharp.org/?action=ml3.
- ↑ Institute of Museum and Library Services, award RE-254855-OLS-23, Ithaca College (Project Look Sharp), Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, FY 2023, $149,748, https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-254855-ols-23. Full proposal as posted by IMLS: https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/project-proposals/re-254855-ols-23-full-proposal.pdf. Award record: https://www.highergov.com/grant/RE-254855-OLS-23/. Ithaca College announcement: https://www.ithaca.edu/news/expanding-media-literacy. Booth Ferris Foundation funding for the 2021–23 New York ML3 pilot (about $270,000) is described in The Ithacan, Nov. 13, 2023, https://theithacan.org/51337/news/project-look-sharp-uses-grant-to-expand-media-literacy-initiative-nationwide/, and on Look Sharp’s ML3 page. Look Sharp’s January 2025 ML3 newsletter describes the IMLS planning period and a requested implementation proposal: https://www.projectlooksharp.org/newsletters/ML3_national_2.pdf.
After this post went up, read the field’s own handbook next to it. Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share, The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education (Leiden: Brill/Sense, 2019), especially pages 11–17, shown below, treat Paulo Freire as a foundation of “critical media literacy,” not as an outside smear. They tie the method to Freire’s conscientização and to reading and writing “the word and the world.” The aim is not only whether a clip is accurate, but power, ideology, identity, and action. That is the add-on this post distinguishes from ordinary source criticism.
Buy or borrow the book from Brill. For a short public statement of the same claim, see Jeff Share’s UCLA slides: critical media literacy is “a dialogical process for social and environmental justice that incorporates Paulo Freire’s (1970) notion of praxis.” (PDF)
If a school board is told media literacy is only “spot the fake,” that is what the critical-media-literacy authors say they are adding.
It's even easy to see what they are adding, with Paulo Freire promoted like a religious deity:
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| Source: https://criticalmediaproject.org/conferences/?wvideo=rjjqfp1trn |
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| Critical media literacy is
a dialogical process for social and environmental justice that incorporates Paulo Freire's (1970) notion of praxis, "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it" (p. 36). Source: https://media-and-learning.eu/files/2022/04/JeffShare_UCLA_220420.pdf |
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| The Critical Media Literacy Guide: pp. 11-12 |
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| The Critical Media Literacy Guide: pp. 13-14 |
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| The Critical Media Literacy Guide: pp. 15-16 |
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| The Critical Media Literacy Guide: p. 17 |
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