Gateway Media Literacy Partners honors three with Charles Klotzer Media Literacy Award

Gateway Media Literacy Partners (GMLP) will honor the following two individuals and one organization with the 2012 Charles Klotzer Media Literacy Award, 3-6 P.M., Oct. 28, at the Ethical Society, during GMLP’s sixth

ann

ual Media Literacy Week kickoff event:

Educator. St. Clement High School teacher, Mary Sturm, is being honored for her vision and leadership efforts to create and sustain media literacy education via students, teachers and parents, and for her creative visual literacy efforts as a longtime language and communication arts teacher.

Media Professional. Longtime St. Louis Public Radio KWMU radio producer, Mary Edwards of Webster Groves, is being honored for her continuing efforts to educate the public about media and media literacy, both in her broadcasting work and as an adjunct professor in the School of Communications, Webster University.

Institution. The 92-year-old Kirkwood Call is being honored for its tremendous community programming efforts, but particularly for its student-produced website, that has been under the direction of longtime award-winning journalism educator/adviser, Mitch Eden MJE. The Kirkwood Call provides readers and fans with photo galleries, blog posts, videos and even a Kirkwood High TV series produced through their own SchoolTube channel. All together, the Kirkwood Call is providing media literacy education to its creators/producers of messages, refining its audiences’ and media producers’ news literacy in the process. Moreover, the media consumer, logging on to THE CALL, gets a behind-the-scenes view to see “how they do it,” and better understands the decision-making that goes into the media messages produced.

GMLP’s board of directors selected this year’s awardees from submissions sent to the awards committee, beginning in March.

“We’re tremendously inspired by the work of our honorees because they represent the very best in both understanding and promoting media literacy as a necessary 21^st-century learning skill,” GMLP awards chair Anne Bader said. “Each year, we look forward to receiving nominations because, in the process, we discover wonderful media literacy education efforts that no doubt can help others as they contemplate media literacy initiatives in their own traditional and non-traditional classrooms,” Bader, a community volunteer and media literacy educator, added.

GMLP’s Charles Klotzer Media Literacy Award was first awarded to its namesake and his wife, Rose Klotzer, in St. Louis, at the National Association for Media Literacy Education’s (NAMLE’s) 2007 Media Literacy Education Conference, before an international audience. At that time, more than 400 attendees heard the remarkable story of the Klotzer duo, founders of the now 41-year-old St. Louis Journalism Review/Gateway Journalism Review, one of only several such publications remaining in the U.S.

For more information on the awards, please contact GMLP award chair, Anne Bader, anne@thebaders.com>, or GMLP president, Jessica Z. Brown, jessicazbrown@gmlpstl.org. Honoree profiles will appear on GMLP’s web site beginning in October. Details on GMLP’s opening event can be found at gmlpstl.org

Gateway Media Literacy Partners, Inc. is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization whose mission is to promote media literacy and media literacy education.