Media literacy as pedagogical practice: preparing secondary teachers to foster critical engagement with aggressive media portrayals

Introduction

Teacher education has been found wanting in preparing teachers to help adolescents evaluate aggressive media portrayals critically within disciplinary settings. As preservice teachers are exposed to more and more complicated media landscapes themselves, minimal pedagogical preparation to lead students through critical questioning of media representations is provided to them (McAnulty, 2020). This lack of preparation means that educators are not ready to deal with misinformation and challenged accounts emerging in the classroom discussion of media texts (Owen, 2026). Empirical studies also indicate that learning in pedagogical media competencies is not consistent across teacher education systems and that preservice teachers are frequently not provided with guide frameworks to implement media literacy theory into classroom-based strategies (Tiede et al., 2015). Therefore, high school teachers often revert to the defense of protectionism, i.e., insulating the students against information instead of teaching them some of the disciplinary literacy skills of analyzing media rhetoric, as this has been found to be the case with adolescents.

Media literacy can only be re-framed as a situated pedagogical practice and not content avoidance based on grounding the instruction in sociocultural theories of literacy that situates the processes of meaning-making as being context-specific and ideologically grounded. Domine, 2011 suggests conscious pedagogy that sees media literacy as complementary but not as an addition to the skill set and teacher identity formation of the 21st century. The approach is consistent with the more expansive ideas in teacher education as culturally responsive practice in which pedagogy is the result of dynamic relationships between teachers, learners, and texts (Soetaert et al., 2004). Media engagement is a disciplinary practice in English language and social studies classrooms when students examine the multimodal narratives to question patterns of representational as well as ideological positioning (Nash et al., 2026). This is analytical beyond mere surface critique in building the critical language awareness through the use of multimodal composing practices that put the learners in the role of competent meaning-makers, as opposed to the role of passive consumer (Turner and Tour, 2026). This asset-based orientation does not assume deficiencies in media consumption of the adolescents but rather on the key role played by the teachers in scaffolding complex analytical moves in the context of real disciplinary work.

Media literacy pedagogy based on equity requires direct reference to the workings of power, gender and identity through media representations. Culturally sustainable practices allow the teacher to enable students to analyze the sources of whose stories are more visible and whose stories are less visible in the visual narrative (Malgoubri, 2026). By teaching media analysis through the frameworks of culturally relevant pedagogy and multiliteracies, educators can provide space to challenge the politics of representation and affirm their cultural knowledge as a tool to analyze (Breland, 2026). Critical analysis of aggressive representations should, therefore, transcend the naive cause-and-effect propositions on the role of visual techniques in creating the effect of verisimilitude and the normalization of specific power relations and allow the viewer to engage with characters (Villamañan Alba, 2025). Such an analytical position would allow teachers to help students understand how representations in the media reflect and constitute social realities- an ability critical to participation in democracy but seldom taught using existing teacher preparation paradigms. Professional learning serves to build such pedagogical competencies, which would be very limited and scattered. Though social media and digital devices are increasingly infiltrating initial teacher education, the integration of social media is not often concerned with building critical media analysis pedagogy (Iredale et al., 2020). The professional development programs are often focused on technical skills, but not on the knowledge of pedagogy to enable students critique media representations (Sarkar, 2026). PL models can be used to foster sustainable growth of media literacy teaching in teachers by fostering teacher agency as the ability to make purposeful pedagogical decisions in response to the cultural backgrounds of students and disciplinary learning outcomes (Du and Curdt-Christiansen, 2026). Devoid of protracted, cooperative chances to explore thinking processes among students, to build, via an equity prism, on media texts, and to create together provisional scaffolds, teachers find it difficult to transition beyond mere media discourse to critical engagement of a transformative nature.

This mixed-methods study addresses these interconnected gaps by examining the development of pedagogical capacity among 30 teachers in a culturally significant film environment (Kerala, India) across a professional learning sequence spanning one school year. The study traces how teachers’ concerns about media effects, framed in deficit terms, gave way in their reported reasoning to asset-based orientations that position adolescents as competent critical observers of aggressive representations; an anonymised survey of 150 students was used within the sequence as a pedagogical stimulus rather than as a measure of student outcomes. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory and desensitisation scholarship, we traced reported changes in teachers’ beliefs, self-efficacy and pedagogical reasoning as they engaged with students’ consumption patterns and interpretive frames. Teachers reported moving the focus of media literacy from content defence towards a disciplinary approach situated within English language arts and social studies, and they developed situated scaffolds, including perspective-taking protocols, production-based critique and cross-textual analysis, intended to help students question power and representation (Villamañan Alba, 2025). This paper builds on a conceptualisation of media literacy as a situated pedagogical practice that can be purposefully prepared, with implications for teacher education curricula and for professional learning in schools. Given the single-group design and self-reported outcome measures, the account offered here concerns what teachers reported and reasoned, not what was demonstrated in their classrooms.

Conceptual framework

Media literacy should be rethought as an embodied pedagogy and not as a content regulation or protectionism intervention. Such re-framing makes media analysis an essential aspect of disciplinary literacy education whereby teachers mediate students in critically challenging representational options, narrative formulas, and ideology placement in media texts (Zhang et al., 2020). This kind of practice appreciates the fact that meaning-making is done through dynamic interrelations between readers, texts, and sociocultural realms- never as the decontextualised application of skills (Park et al., 2021). Media literacy should be asset-oriented pedagogy when integrated into real-life classroom experiences, thus utilizing the prior cultural competencies and funds of knowledge of adolescents as an analytical tool as opposed to interpreting their engagement with the media through the prism of deficits (Cho et al., 2024). This located orientation acknowledges that students arrive at media consumption with complex interpretive schemes that are constructed out of lived experience in film ecologies of cultural significance. The pedagogical project of teachers, then, is to create scaffolded avenues of student development of these already extant competencies towards critical analysis of power relations, representational practices, and methods of production, turning passive consumption into disciplined scrutiny. Vitally, it is a methodology that denies independent ways of conceptualizing literacy in which the media is examined as a neutral skill that can be transferred to other contexts. Rather, it adopts ideological lenses of literacy practices that are intentional, socially organised, and full of power relations that educators need to assist students in negotiating critically in disciplinary cultures (Street, 1984, as operationalised in modern media literacy scholarship). This theoreticalization defines media literacy as a non-auxiliary curriculum but a fundamental pedagogy practice in need of deliberate teacher training and continuous learning to acquire responsive pedagogical practice.

The terminology used here needs precision as the study focuses on representations of harm, and aggression and violence are not synonymous. Aggression is taken as the superordinate category that refers to behaviour meant to cause harm, whether this harm is physical, verbal, psychological, or relational. Physical aggression is done with physical force, verbal aggression through insult, threat, and humiliation, psychological aggression through coercion, intimidation, and control, and relational or social aggression through exclusion, rumour, and reputational damage. Violence is the more restricted group in which there is the possibility of bodily harm. In addition to being different in language, it is also different in terms of the analytical work that is involved: a pedagogy that sees adolescents as competent interpreters demands a vocabulary that is both sufficiently fine-grained to discriminate between the types of harm that the text represents and sufficiently varied to discriminate between the types of narrative and aesthetic legitimation that each type of harm offers. In the film excerpts throughout the professional learning sequence, physical aggression dominated in confrontational/revenge scenes, verbal/psychological aggression was more evident in home and work-related scenes, and relational aggression was more evident in scenes of exclusion and reputational harm.

The operationalisation of the construct is also to be explained in terms of the scope, since current frameworks give dimensions that this intervention covered in an uneven manner. The main focus was analysing and evaluating, which was covered in Sessions 2–6. Because it was introduced into the sequence via the production-based critique strand, creating was an object of pedagogical design, rather than a measured teacher competence. Reflective writing was dealt with in weekly reflective journals and in stimulated-recall dialogues. Only a limited amount of attention was given to acting, as part of the classroom action planning process conducted in Session 8, and no attention was given to civic and institutional action. The least attention was given to access, as concerns of provision and infrastructure were not within the sequence. The intervention thus reflected a limited notion of media literacy, and the results are to be interpreted in light of this limitation.

This synthesis carries an acknowledged internal tension. Social Cognitive Theory and desensitization scholarship are historically situated within an effects- and deficit-oriented paradigm, whereas the asset-based, critical, and culturally sustaining stance advanced here treats adolescents as competent interpreters rather than as at-risk targets of media influence. Rather than treating these traditions as fully reconciled, this framework draws selectively on the constructs from Social Cognitive Theory that lend themselves to a pedagogy of critical interpretation, namely observational learning, self-efficacy, and moral disengagement, while setting aside the deterministic causal claims associated with the effects paradigm. Constructs drawn from clinical and neuroscientific literatures, including the CASPER model and social-cognition research on theory of mind, are used illustratively here to signal affective-cognitive dimensions of media response; they are not intended as claims about neural mechanisms operating in this study’s classrooms, and their role in the analysis is accordingly limited to this interpretive, non-clinical function.

This pedagogic re-framing is theoretically grounded using the power of Social Cognitive Theory in terms of observational learning and self-efficacy acquisition in a media setting (Bandura, 2009). The framework by Bandura sheds light on the ways adolescents acquire interpretive schemas by being exposed again and again to media images, but most importantly, it puts teachers in a position of scaffolding a critical distance to the forces involved through an instructed analysis. Instead of perceiving observational learning as a deterministic effect, this point of view enables instructors to develop learning sequences in which students learn to analyze how texts in the media create verisimilitude, normalize certain acts and influence audience identification, turning passive modeling into active analytical activity. In addition to this, modern cognitive-affective frameworks have developed the knowledge of the interaction of emotional and cognitive processing when engaging with the media (Camacho et al., 2026). The Cognitive-Affective Social Processing and Emotion Regulation (CASPER) model gives teachers conceptualized approaches to understand that both emotional reactivity and cognitive appraisal have integrated neural systems to determine how students react to media representations. Such knowledge can help teachers create pedagogical interventions that consider affective aspects of media use and pursue the growth of the metacognitive ability to question emotional reactions. Research on narrative and social cognition similarly suggests that engagement with fictional narratives draws on theory of mind and perspective-taking, capacities that teachers might deliberately cultivate through structured classroom discussion of how characters are motivated and positioned within narrative situations (Mar and Oatley, 2008). Combined, these theoretical prisms can empower teachers to transcend the simplistic assumptions of causal effects of media influence to complex pedagogical practices that can cultivate critical consciousness of students about the processes of media construction.

A key difference lies in the fact that deficit-oriented approaches that view media literacy as a defence against harmful content contrast with asset-based orientations that view media literacy as the development of critical agency. Deficit views are reflected in teacher education that focuses on protecting students against violent imagery by withholding content or making moral judgments, which have the unwanted effect of reinforcing passive consumption habits with no development of analytical skills (McAnulty, 2020). These strategies usually have teachers acting on their own fears of media spaces and not pedagogical approaches that are sensitive to the adolescent meaning-making processes. Conversely, the asset-based orientations acknowledge teenagers as already-active media participants who have complex but mostly unarticulated knowledge of narrative plans, genre requirements, and representational codes. The next competencies based on these in place are effective media literacy pedagogy, which extends the existing competencies by providing intentional scaffolding that helps to make implicit knowledge explicit and leads to critical analysis (Zhang et al., 2020). Such an orientation necessitates that teachers take a critical look at their own state of positionality in and around media texts- in this instance, the way that their generational, cultural, and gendered views influence how they interpret the aggressive images. Professional learning that facilitates this transition can help educators shift away from policing content and instead create disciplinary tasks where students are asked to analyze directorial decisions, lighting effects, sound effects, and framing of the narrative in order to comprehend how media texts create specific realities and place the audience in specific positions. This pedagogical stance asserts that protectionism is inadvisable in favor of developing what scholars refer to as critical media consciousness, or the ability to perceive media as representations of ideological positions which construct power, gender and identity (Korona and Hutchison, 2023). Equity dimensions are non-negotiable elements of critical media literacy pedagogy, which demand an explicit focus on the manifestation of power, gender, and identity in media representations. Feminist media scholarship offers crucial models to the study of the ways in which film narratives create gendered archetypes, in which specific forms of masculinity are normalized, and in which female characters are placed in visual economies of gaze and agency (Antunovic and Cooky, 2025). With such analytical instruments in their hands, teachers are able to direct students to ask questions about how violent representations of masculinity are often used to support hegemonic masculinity and silence other forms of gendered identity–analyzing media as a practice of critical gender literacy. The intervention of this piece is required to intersect with intersectional viewpoints that consider the interrelationship between race, caste, class, and language identity and gender representations in the context of regional cinemas (Krijnen and Van Bauwel, 2021). Culturally perpetuating pedagogical practices enable educators to help students examine whose narratives prevail in the visual images and whose lives are relegated to the periphery–making media literacy practice a development of critical consciousness as opposed to the acquisition of neutral skills (Judd and McKinnon, 2021). By teaching to analyze the media through the prism of equity, the classrooms can be spaces where students acquire the ability to perceive representational politics and affirm their own cultural knowledge as an analytical tool. This orientation is what makes media literacy more a matter of practice of democratic citizenship in which students are learned to question power relations in seemingly naturalized media images.

Disciplinary embedding is the last pillar of this conceptual framework, which establishes media literacy not as an independent subject matter but as an integrated aspect of teaching English language arts and social studies. Studies are indicative of a significant role of media literacy in attaining the ability to analyze primary sources, assess the credibility of information and learn about historical/cultural contexts present in visual texts (Gould et al., 2024). In the classroom, multimodal texts used as a way of film analysis expand the long-standing traditions of the literary analysis practices students of ELA classrooms explore character development, narrative, symbolism and author intent in multimodal texts and employ disciplinary habits of mind to visual text. Teachers of social studies use media texts as cultural texts that show societal values, power relations, and historical events, which places film analysis in the category of historical inquiry but not entertainment consumption (Erol, 2021). Most importantly, successful integration means going beyond the superficial film Friday activities to intentional curricular design where media analysis is an authentic part of social studies (interpreting historical context) or ELA narrative technique (Korona and Hutchison, 2023). This intellectual basis makes media literacy intellectually serious without being marginalized as an enrichment pursuit. By educators who are ready to implement this integration, the ability to plan scaffolded activities in which students evaluate the ways in which cinematic techniques create specific images of social conflict, gender relations, or cultural identity is made, transforming media consumption into disciplined inquiry oriented to the content-area learning outcomes. These theoretical dimensions (shown in Figure 1) are convergent and tend to form an integrated model that places teachers in the role of pedagogical agents who develop media consciousness in the critical sense of students by engaging in a context-specific practice.

The diagram demonstrates that the Social Cognitive Theory and Desensitization Models shape teacher agency, which is a practice that makes pedagogical choices such as instructional strategies, classroom discourses, and content choices. The practices are regulated by contextual elements like institutional limitations, student demographics, and access to technology, and develop equity aspects, including diverse representation, critical access, and empowerment. The paradigm places media literacy on a localized pedagogical process and not a content regulation, and the role of teachers in shaping the development of critical media consciousness among students. Three research questions guided our inquiry:

• How did teachers’ beliefs about adolescents’ capacity for critical media analysis shift over the course of the professional learning sequence?
• What pedagogical scaffolds did teachers develop to support students’ interrogation of power, gender, and representation in media narratives?
• How did teachers reconceptualize media literacy as a disciplinary practice rather than content regulation across the professional learning experience?

Methods

Design

The study employed a longitudinal mixed-methods intervention design with an embedded qualitative strand and a sequential explanatory component. Session artefacts and reflective journals were produced concurrently with the professional learning sequence and were embedded within it, whereas the post-intervention interviews and stimulated-recall dialogues followed the post-test and served the explanatory function of accounting for the quantitative pattern. Priority was given to the qualitative strand, with the survey providing the outcome frame within which the qualitative analysis operated. The overall research design and analytical sequence are presented in Figure 2. Integration was planned at three points. Anonymised student data were introduced as a stimulus in Session 1, and session artefacts were analysed at the midpoint of the sequence; the two strands were then brought together through joint displays at the analytic stage (Creswell and Plano Clark, 2017; Nastasi, 2026).

The design was single-group and pre-post, with no comparison or control condition. Changes observed are therefore reported as within-participant differences in teachers’ self-reported beliefs and practices across the time span of the intervention and not as the result of the PL sequence. Other explanations, such as maturation over the course of one school year, testing effects due to repeated testing of a clear instrument, expectancy effects among volunteers, regression to the mean with low pre-intervention scores, and concurrent professional experience outside the study, are not ruled out and are taken into account in the Limitations. Data collection, analysis, and reporting were conducted pseudonymously, with all participants providing written informed consent and being given pseudonyms. Students were not identified as research subjects under the approved protocol; the data collected at the school level were anonymised and used as a pedagogical stimulus in Session 1, and no analysis of student-level data was undertaken or reported.

An a priori power analysis was not conducted. The intensity of the qualitative data collection determined the target of 30 participants, as each participant provided an individual interview, session artefacts, a reflective journal, and a stimulated-recall dialogue, making a practical upper limit of participants in a design of this type. A sensitivity analysis is provided for instead of a reconstructed power calculation. The smallest detectable standardised mean difference for a two-tailed paired-samples test with N = 30 is about dz = 0.53 at alpha = 0.05 and a power of 0.80. The design was sufficiently powered to detect moderate within-participant effects but not sufficiently powered for smaller effects. This sample size also provides broad confidence intervals for the estimates and cannot be used to make any statements about statistical generalisation beyond the group in the sample.

Context and participants

The study sample consisted of eight higher secondary schools in Kerala, which had institutional diversity vital in investigating transferable pedagogical practices, three government schools (two rural and one urban), three aided schools (one rural, two urban), and two private schools (both urban). This targeted sampling approach guaranteed diversity in student socioeconomic status, technological facilities, and curricular autonomy–factors critical to creating context-sensitive and potentially transferable models of teacher preparation. The sample consisted of 30 teachers (Table 1; 22 female, 8 male), instructors in English language arts (n = 18) and social studies (n = 12), with years of teaching experience ranging from 3 to 22 (M = 9.4, SD = 4.7). At the same time, 150 Grade 11–12 students (78 female, 72 male) were surveyed about media consumption, which did not place students as the main research participants but informed pedagogical planning of teachers. Teachers were nominated through the district education offices on the basis of receptiveness to critical media discourse rather than prior expertise, as described below. Each teacher completed pre- and post-intervention surveys on beliefs about adolescents’ analytical capacity and on self-efficacy for facilitating media analysis.

Table 1. Participant distribution across school contexts (N = 30 teachers).

The recruitment process is as follows. A written invitation to schools describing the professional learning sequence, length, data-collection commitments, and voluntary nature of participation was sent to eight higher secondary schools through the district education office. The teachers who indicated interest were contacted directly by the research team, and informed consent was obtained by signing a written form before any data were collected. The inclusion criteria were as follows: having a current teaching role in English language arts or social studies at a higher secondary school, at least three years of teaching experience, and the ability to attend all eight sessions and be videotaped in the classroom for stimulated recall. Teachers on deputation or extended leave during the study period and those who could not make the commitment for the full sequence were excluded.

Two features of this procedure bear on interpretation. Nomination rested partly with district officers, which introduces the possibility of gatekeeper selection, and teachers came forward partly on the basis of expressed receptiveness to critical media discourse, which introduces the possibility of self-selection and motivational bias. The participating group may therefore have been more favourably disposed towards the intervention than the wider population of higher secondary teachers in the state, and some of the reported change may reflect dispositions present before the sequence began. Since the group cannot be regarded as representative, this constraint is discussed in the Limitations alongside the single-group design and the reliance on self-report.

Although no dedicated baseline measure of participants’ pre-existing media literacy competence was collected prior to the PL sequence, existing scholarship offers some indication of the broader context. National curricular frameworks in India have only recently begun to name media and information literacy as a distinct objective, and reviewers of secondary-level English language arts and social studies syllabi have noted that explicit attention to critical media analysis remains limited relative to the prominence of media consumption in adolescents’ daily lives (Erol, 2021; Gould et al., 2024). Teacher education provision serving the Kerala context has historically emphasised technical or safety-oriented digital competencies over critical-interpretive media pedagogy (Iredale et al., 2020; Sarkar, 2026), a pattern broadly consistent with the pre-PL orientation reported later in this paper, in which the large majority of participating teachers described media literacy primarily in protectionist or content-surveillance terms.

The professional learning sequence

Session 1 laid the groundwork of asset-based foundations through the collective analysis of anonymized survey data on student engagement with media in order to disprove the assumption of deficit in teenage media engagement. Sessions 2–4 were devoted to scaffold co-construction. The teachers developed perspective-taking protocols that analyzed character motivation in film excerpts and production-based critique activities. The students produced counter-narratives to dominant representations and cross-textual analysis frameworks for comparing the representation of the past. Sessions 5–6 incorporated equity lenses by leading analysis of gendered power dynamics and patterns of representation based on feminist media frameworks. Session 7 focused on disciplinary embedding, and teachers of English language arts worked on creating narrative analysis tasks based on literary standards, and teachers of social studies worked on creating media text historical contextualization assignments. The action planning in the classroom implementation with peer feedback cycles was the conclusion of session 8. This recursive design reflected successful models of mixed-method professional development in which quantitative feedback is used to refine qualitative practice (Zhang et al., 2026). Facilitators always demonstrated what critical analysis looked like without moralizing (it was always presented as a model), placing representations of conflict as the location of analysis of directorial decisions as opposed to content that needed to be censored.

Table 2 summarises the structure of the sequence. Session durations, the film excerpts used, intersessional assignments and the feedback procedures for each session are set out in the facilitation guide provided as Supplementary File S1, together with specimen instructional materials. The sequence was facilitated by members of the research team, all English language teacher educators (see Researchers’ Positionality), who held calibration meetings before the first session in order to agree a common protocol. Under that protocol an analytical rather than a moralising stance was maintained throughout, so that representations of conflict were treated as occasions for examining directorial choices rather than as content deserving condemnation.

Table 2. Structure of the eight-session professional learning sequence.

Fidelity information is partial and is reported as such. Attendance was recorded at every session, with a mean of 7.6 of eight sessions attended (95%), ranging from 7.0 to 7.8 across school groupings (Table 1), and the completion of session artefacts and reflective journals was logged. Since attendance was high and varied little across school types, differential dosage appears unlikely to account for the pattern of results, although this observation cannot substitute for a fidelity protocol. No such protocol was implemented: adherence to session objectives was not independently rated, facilitator consistency was not audited by an external observer, and no structured measure of participant engagement was administered. This constraint is carried into the Limitations, together with the possibility that unmeasured variation in implementation contributed to the observed change.

Instruments

Quantitative data were collected through a teacher questionnaire administered before the first session and again, in identical form, at the close of the sequence (Abdullah, 2025). The questionnaire comprised three parts: (a) demographic questions covering teaching experience, subject area, school type and location; (b) a 12-item self-efficacy scale with a 5-point Likert response format (1 = not at all confident to 5 = extremely confident), assessing teachers’ confidence in facilitating critical media analysis; and (c) a 7-item semantic differential beliefs scale (1 = passive-consumer/protectionist orientation to 7 = critical meaning-maker/analytical-capacity orientation), assessing teachers’ beliefs about adolescents’ capacity for critical media analysis. A separate anonymised media-consumption survey was administered to 150 Grade 11 and 12 students, who rated how often they viewed Malayalam and other-language films and responded to items on film technique and on their interpretive reactions to representations of conflict. As this locally developed instrument functioned as a pedagogical stimulus rather than as a scaled research measure, it was not subjected to item-level psychometric reporting; its results were used only in aggregate, anonymised form to prompt discussion in Session 1 and were not analysed as part of this study's quantitative findings.

The claims attached to these instruments are deliberately narrow. The two scales measure teachers’ beliefs about adolescents’ analytical capacity and their self-efficacy for facilitating critical media analysis; no claim is made that they measure media-literacy competence, critical analytical skill, or the capacity to interpret aggressive portrayals. Evidence bearing on the reconceptualisation of media literacy as pedagogical practice is drawn from the qualitative strand rather than from the survey. Both instruments are reproduced in full in Supplementary File S2, with the source or adaptation basis of each item, the response anchors, the scoring procedure and the mapping of items to research questions. The instruments were administered in English, with Malayalam glosses for a small number of terms; before administration, the items were reviewed by two experienced higher secondary teachers who did not take part in the study, and minor rewording followed that review.

Internal consistency for the present sample was acceptable for both scales (self-efficacy, Cronbach's α = .87; beliefs, α = .82). These coefficients are reported as estimates of internal consistency reliability only. They establish the coherence of each item set but do not show that the items capture the intended constructs, and no inference about the accuracy or validity of the instruments is drawn from them. Content-related validity evidence derives from the expert review described above. No convergent, discriminant or criterion-related validity evidence was collected, and this is acknowledged in the Limitations.

The student data were completely anonymized and aggregated at the school level before being shared with teachers in the first phase of the professional learning sequence to stimulate reflection on adolescent analytical abilities–students were not identified as research participants in the IRB protocol, and no student-level results were obtained and reported in the study. All 30 teachers completed both administrations, so the construct-level paired analyses were conducted on complete cases (N = 30); the treatment of any item-level omissions is recorded in Supplementary File S4 (Popovich, 2025). The survey design also included practices of reflexive questioning, which did not presuppose heteronormative and deficit-based assumptions about adolescent media use, as well as oriented students as meaning-makers whose analytical abilities already existed, a methodological approach that conforms to the current critiques that require epistemic justice in the construction of instruments (Grzanka, 2025). The qualitative data were collected through semi-structured individual interviews (30–45 min) with all 30 teachers using protocols about belief change and pedagogical decision-making; session products including co-designed scaffold templates and weekly reflection journals; and stimulated-recall procedures in which all 30 teachers discussed real-time pedagogical reasoning in watching five-minute video excerpts of their classroom practice. All the procedures were highly confidential as teachers and schools were pseudonymized, and data were stored on a password-protected, encrypted server, to which the research team had exclusive access as required by the IRB. Although the survey drew on data reported by these students, the students themselves were not treated as research participants under the approved protocol: their role was limited to supplying anonymized, school-aggregated input used as a discussion prompt in Session 1, and no individual student data were linked, analysed, or reported at any point in this study.

Qualitative data collection and analysis

Qualitative data included individual semi-structured interviews conducted with all 30 teachers after the post-test, which lasted 30–45 min; artefacts from sessions (co-designed scaffold templates); weekly reflective journals; and stimulated-recall dialogues. The interview protocol is included in Supplementary File S3 and consists of initial biographical questions, key questions on belief change and pedagogical decision making, and a common set of probes.

The stimulated-recall procedure was as follows: One lesson was video recorded, and the teacher chose a five-minute segment from the video. The recording was stopped at specific moments as decided by the teacher during the recall session, and the teacher was asked to describe the reasons that were at work at that moment of teaching, not to analyse the lesson as a whole. It is important to note that the recordings were only used as elicitation stimuli. This was not observational coding and no rating of enacted practice was performed, and no analysis of the recordings as data was conducted. Therefore, this study differentiates between practices planned in session artefacts, practices reported in interview, and practices reflected upon in stimulated recall, of which all three are evidenced here, and practices enacted in classrooms which were not measured.

The analysis method used was not reflexive thematic analysis, but codebook thematic analysis in a pragmatist orientation, which was in line with the mixed methods design. A priori codes were created based on the conceptual framework, including codes such as deficit-to-asset shift and disciplinary embedding. The coding was done independently by two researchers, emergent codes were generated through constant comparison, and the codebook was reviewed during consensus meetings where differences were discussed until resolution. A record of analytic decisions and memoranda, along with dated codebook versions, was maintained for the audit trail. Reflexivity was exercised at the level of specific analytic decisions, as well as in the positionality statement below, and involved deliberate attention to accounts that did not conform to the deficit-to-asset trajectory the research team had anticipated.

Because coding was carried out independently against a shared codebook, a chance-corrected coefficient is the appropriate index of coding consistency, and percentage agreement alone would be insufficient. Of the qualitative corpus, [proportion]% was coded independently by both researchers, yielding Cohen's κ = [value] and percentage agreement of [value]%; disagreements were resolved through consensus discussion before the codebook was finalised. Coding agreement is a suitable quality criterion within a codebook approach, since the codebook functions as a shared analytic instrument, whereas it would sit uneasily with a reflexive orientation in which interpretive divergence is treated as a resource rather than as error.

Qualitative adequacy and trustworthiness

Adequacy is argued on the basis of information power rather than saturation (Malterud et al., 2016). The sample was narrowly specified, the research questions were focused, the analysis was guided by an explicit theoretical framework, and four types of data were collected from every participant; taken together, these conditions justify a smaller sample than an exploratory study would require. Credibility rests on several procedures, each named rather than assumed. Patterns identified in one source were checked against the others through triangulation across interviews, artefacts, journals and stimulated recall. Participant validation took place in the joint interpretation sessions held with the participating teachers, and the feedback received there was used to refine the analytical categories before the findings were finalised. Peer debriefing within the research team, analytic memoranda and the audit trail complete the account. Transcripts were not returned to individual participants for checking, and no validation was undertaken after the sequence ended.

Researchers’ positionality

Being Malayali scholars who have grown up in the rich film culture of Kerala, we have been in a complicated position in this investigation. The process of interpretation of regional filming conventions and teacher-pupil relations in Malayalam media settings was facilitated by the common language and cultural fluency. Nonetheless, we explicitly questioned our own adult positionalities in comparison with adolescent respondents. We understood that our generational gap with the modern youth media usage necessitated active dependence on student survey data, as opposed to presumptive knowledge. The focus on disciplinary literacy integration as English language teacher educators was somewhat influenced by our own professional identities and may predetermine language arts orientation, despite the deliberate balance in the design of PL. On the issues of conflict representation in the movies, we were critical of deficit representations of regional film industries, and we also held valid interests of the problem of adolescent development- a line that we negotiated by focusing on the pedagogical agency of teachers and not dictating on content prohibitions. Being female researchers (two authors) and a male researcher (one author), we were reflexively involved in the gendered aspects of representation analysis, especially on masculinity in action narratives. To reduce power imbalances, we employed joint data interpretation and analysis sessions with the participating teachers, and their feedback was taken into account to narrow down the analytical categories prior to concluding the findings, which is consistent with equitable mixed-methods research commitments.

Results

This section reports the development of pedagogical capacity for facilitating critical media analysis among 30 teachers in Kerala across a one-year professional learning sequence. Findings are presented in the order of the research questions, each in three movements: the quantitative finding, the qualitative evidence, and an integrated statement specifying the relation between the two. All findings are at the teacher level. Enacted practice was not coded through classroom observation, and no student-level outcome data were collected or analysed.

RQ1: how did teachers’ beliefs about adolescents’ capacity for critical media analysis shift?

Table 3 shows that paired-samples t-tests revealed statistically significant differences for the pre- and post-intervention administration in teachers’ beliefs about adolescents’ analytical ability and in their self-efficacy in facilitating critical media analysis. These overall differences are shown in the size of the aggregates in Figure 3, and item-level statistics are provided in Supplementary File S4. These differences are reported as changes observed during the time of the intervention and not as effects of the PL sequence, as there was no comparison condition.

Table 3. Within-participant pre–post differences in teacher beliefs and self-efficacy (N = 30).

Beliefs Total = mean of seven semantic differential items (C1–C7; scale 1–7). Self-Efficacy Total = mean of 12 Likert items (B1–B12; scale 1–5). M diff = post-intervention minus pre-intervention mean; dz = M diff/SD diff. Holm adjustment was applied across the two construct-level tests. All tests are two-tailed.

The qualitative data offer a plausible account of these changes. Teachers repeatedly described how reviewing anonymised student survey data in Session 1 unsettled their deficit assumptions, prompting them to regard adolescents as already possessing analytical capacities, such as attention to lighting, character motivation and patterns of representation, and to move from remedial framings towards an asset-based position that informed their later pedagogical design. [Insert two or three verbatim extracts, attributed by pseudonym and school context, from interviews and reflective journals, illustrating how the Session 1 data disturbed deficit assumptions]

Taking the two strands together, the relation between them for this research question is one of explanation. The survey registers the direction and magnitude of the reported shift, while the interview accounts identify the encounter with anonymised student data in Session 1 as the point at which deficit assumptions were disturbed. The qualitative evidence accounts for the quantitative pattern without establishing that the sequence produced it.

Figure 3 shows the pre- and post-intervention results in (a) beliefs of teachers with regard to the ability of adolescents to engage in critical media analysis (Beliefs Total; 1–7 semantic differential scale) and (b) self-efficacy in facilitating the process of critical media analysis (Self-Efficacy Total; 1–5 Likert scale) in the context of the professional learning (PL) sequence (N = 30).

Points represent means and error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Inferential statistics for these aggregate changes are reported in Table 3 (paired-samples t-tests; both p < .001; very large effect sizes). The figure summarises the principal quantitative result at construct level, and item-level statistics are reported in Supplementary File S4.

The teachers reported a coherent movement on both constructs of change, which are represented in Figure 3, in the way they described adolescents’ ability to analyse media representations of aggression and their confidence in supporting this analysis. As this study emphasised media literacy as situational pedagogical practice and not content regulation, the increase in Beliefs Total is read as reflecting a reported shift from deficit framings, such as passive consumption and protectionist orientations, to asset framings that assume the role of adolescents as meaning makers. The gains in Self-Efficacy Total suggest that teachers found that they could plan and facilitate specific pedagogical practices that could lead to critical engagement in the context of disciplinary teaching, including structured discussions and analytic support. Taken together, the two panels indicate that parallel changes in teachers’ orientations and in their perceived instructional capacity occurred over the period of the PL sequence, changes that teachers’ accounts of the anonymised student data and of session-by-session scaffold co-construction help to elaborate. This is an association observed within participants, and no causal effect of the sequence is claimed.

Figure 4 indicates that the reported gains were not confined to a single belief or an isolated skill: item-level mean differences were positive across the full range of belief items (C1–C7) and self-efficacy items (B1–B12), a pattern consistent with a broad reported reorientation towards critical media literacy as pedagogical practice rather than content regulation. The largest change among the belief items (C4) points to a reported shift towards regarding adolescents’ media knowledge as sophisticated but tacit, while the largest self-efficacy gains were concentrated in practice-enabling skills, such as designing perspective-taking procedures and leading counter-narrative production. These item-level differences are presented descriptively and are not treated as a further family of significance tests. Once teachers had begun to reposition adolescents as competent meaning-makers and to report greater confidence in organising structured analytic routines, the question arises of how that reframing was translated into concrete, equity-sensitive pedagogical resources. RQ2 therefore examines the scaffolds that teachers co-designed and planned, including perspective-taking protocols, production-based critique and cross-textual analysis frameworks, with the caveat that their classroom enactment was not observed.

RQ2: what pedagogical scaffolds did teachers develop to support students’ interrogation of power, gender, and representation?

Thematic analysis of session artefacts and interviews identified three principal types of scaffold developed by teachers (Table 4). Each of the 30 teachers produced at least two scaffold types, and perspective-taking protocols were the most widely produced (n = 28).

Table 4. Pedagogical scaffolds developed by teachers (N = 30).

Frequencies record the number of teachers who produced at least one instance of each scaffold type; teachers could produce several types. The counts function descriptively, indicating distribution across the sample, and are not an index of analytical or pedagogical significance.

This distribution requires careful interpretation. Production-based critique, produced by 22 participants, was the least frequent of the three types, yet it is theoretically the most demanding, since it requires students to move from analysis into composition and therefore represents the fullest realisation of the asset-based orientation the sequence sought to develop. Its lower frequency is more plausibly read as a marker of implementation difficulty, arising from the constraints of equipment, time and assessment discussed below, than as a sign of marginal importance. [Insert verbatim extracts, attributed by pseudonym and school context, illustrating each scaffold type and drawing on more than one data source where available] The relation between the strands for this research question is one of elaboration. The survey registers increased self-efficacy without specifying its content, while the artefacts and interviews specify the pedagogical forms that this self-efficacy took, thereby giving the quantitative finding its substance.

RQ3: how did teachers reconceptualize media literacy as a disciplinary practice rather than content regulation?

Pre-PL, 24 out of 30 teachers defined media literacy as content surveillance or moral instruction, with only 6 teachers defining media literacy as a pedagogical activity. After PL, all 30 teachers described media literacy as a subject-specific practice, emphasizing it differently (Table 5).

Table 5. Disciplinary reconceptualizations of media literacy.

The table reflects the dominant qualitative pattern across interviews and artefacts.

The pattern was not uniform, and this variation is reported rather than smoothed. Despite movement in their survey scores, a minority of participants continued to describe media literacy in predominantly protective terms, adopting the vocabulary of critical analysis while retaining an orientation towards shielding students from particular content. Two teachers expressed continuing reservations about analysing representations of caste and gender in their own school communities, citing the local reputational risk that such discussion might carry. [Insert verbatim extracts from these discrepant cases, attributed by pseudonym and school context] A disciplinary asymmetry was also evident: English language arts participants more readily took up media analysis as an extension of textual analysis, whereas social studies participants more readily framed it as a form of historical enquiry. The conditions under which teachers declined to adopt the critical orientation are as informative for teacher education as those under which they adopted it. For this research question, the relation between the strands is one of convergence with qualification. The quantitative and qualitative evidence point in the same direction; yet the qualitative evidence also reveals a subgroup for whom the reorientation was less thoroughgoing, a divergence that the aggregate survey data conceal.

Integration of quantitative and qualitative findings

Joint displays were constructed in which survey data were mapped onto interview and artefact evidence relating to belief change (RQ1), scaffold development (RQ2) and disciplinary integration (RQ3). Teachers who showed greater movement towards regarding students as holders of complex but tacit knowledge tended to report more production-based critique and more extensive curricular integration. Movement was operationalised as the magnitude of each teacher's pre-post change score on the Beliefs Total scale, and teachers in the upper tercile of this distribution were compared with those in the lower tercile in terms of the type and depth of scaffold reported in interviews and session artefacts. Integration across the three research questions is summarised in Table 6.

Table 6. Joint display of quantitative and qualitative findings by research question.

Discussion

This study contributes to media literacy scholarship by reframing critical response to aggressive media portrayals as an educational practice rather than as a compliance-driven exercise in content management. Across eight professional learning (PL) sessions, teachers reported moving away from deficit assumptions about adolescents’ media engagement towards an asset-based perspective that treats popular film as a legitimate space for meaning-making and inquiry. This repositioning matters because images of aggression are not simply messages with uniform effects on spectators; they are cultural discourses, carrying aesthetic and genre conventions and ethical economies, that invite identification, evaluation and contestation. The findings suggest that teacher learning can be designed to move beyond generalised warnings about media effects towards instructional routines through which students might question how aggression is produced, normalised, romanticised or challenged across texts and contexts, an approach aligned with calls to treat violence both as a social phenomenon and as a representational practice. In this respect, the study speaks to a long-standing tension between media-violence research, which reports associations between exposure and aggression-related outcomes, and media literacy education, which seeks to develop critical interpretation, moral reasoning and civic deliberation.

The scale of the observed changes must be read against the wider literature on aggression and violent media, which reports associations between violent media exposure and aggressive cognition, affective desensitization, and short-term reductions in empathic responding, alongside acknowledged variation in mechanisms and contexts (Anderson et al., 2010; Bartholow et al., 2005; Fanti et al., 2009). This literature is often mobilised in schools for restraint; our qualitative data suggest a different pedagogical use, in which desensitization findings become material for classroom questioning rather than injunctions to avoid content, for instance about the role of repetition, genre, humour, and production choices in shaping emotional response, and about how numbing to harm may combine with gendered and caste- or class-based stereotypes (Bartholow et al., 2006; Carnagey et al., 2007). This reading should be treated as an interpretation of teachers’ reported reasoning rather than as a demonstrated effect on how students actually engage with violent media, since no student-level data were analysed in this study.

The Kerala film situation is especially significant in this case since the local cinemas do not qualify as the outskirts of the entertainment industry; they are thoroughly embedded in the local public culture, the scripts of masculinity, youth identity, and moral discourse. Scholarship on Malayalam cinema has shown how star-centred masculinities organise familiar patterns of heroism and identification among young male audiences (Osella and Osella, 2004), and how popular films may legitimise aggression and dominance as natural attributes of the male hero (Kumar, 2015). We suggest that by treating cinema as a cultural text, but not merely as dangerous exposure, teachers can instruct students to interpret aggression as authored, on whose behalf it is authored and how it is legitimized via narrative plots. This strategy is consistent with the larger assertion that media literacy should not only be concerned with determining the presence of negative influence, but also with how representations are engaged in cultural and political work, especially where cinema itself has significant social accessibility. Historically, on-screen violence and content deemed obscene in Indian cinema have been governed primarily through statutory certification and censorship mechanisms rather than through pedagogical engagement (Cinematograph Act, 1952), a regulatory backdrop against which the asset-based, interpretive orientation advanced in this study stands in contrast.

Such a move toward regulation to interpretation also conforms with traditional media literacy research on the importance of speaking and talking about television and movies that builds interpretive repertoires in the social world (Buckingham, 1993) and bargaining the meaning of growing up in the electronic media saturation (Buckingham, 2000). The growing self-efficacy of teachers in our study is probably not just a matter of new strategies, but a modified perception of the role of the teacher: to become a gatekeeper of organized inquiry, or a facilitator of it. This role change is important, since the interactions of adolescents with aggression are not merely imitative, but also identificational, fantastical, humorous, morally positioned, and pushing social limits. A pedagogy that recognizes students as agents of interpretation can address these dynamics more directly than a pedagogy of warnings. Social cognitive theory will be helpful to interpret the increased willingness of teachers to provide such engagements. The original work of Bandura highlights the reciprocal determinism between individual factors, behavior, and environment (Bandura, 1986), which is in line with the belief and efficacy of the teachers to influence what they intend to teach and what classroom norms can maintain. The self-efficacy theory also indicates that teacher efficacy to implement challenging instructional strategies, such as dialogic discussion of gender, power and violence, will determine perseverance and responsiveness to challenge (Bandura, 1997). Social cognitive theory of mass communication offers a further dimension in a media-saturated space: mediated models are not only viewed but also construed in terms of the attention, retention, motivation, and social reinforcement processes (Bandura, 2001). This theoretical framing fits well with the PL design. The teachers were facilitated to observe the way in which the workings of the interpretations of students are influenced by peer talk, genre knowledge, and local moral discourse.

One of the most important additions to the discourse of aggression is the notion of moral disengagement that can be used to understand the reasons behind why aggressive behaviors of heroes might be justified, glorified, or even seen as justified. According to Bandura, 2002, there are mechanisms by which individuals neutralize moral self-sanctions (e.g., moral justification, euphemistic labeling, displacement of responsibility). These processes are most applicable to film analysis: the students can be instructed to look at how films excuse harm (i.e., vengeance arcs), downplay the victimhood of the victims in terms of spectacle, or shift the blame. Moral disengagement, as an analytic frame, allows media literacy teaching to bridge the gap between representational critique and ethical reasoning in a moral-free way. This method helps classrooms to answer not just what violence does, but how violence is given meaning and how audiences get to accept the impact of violence.

Notably, the results of this study do not imply the denial of the public-health issues concerning violent media. The public-health strategies emphasize the population-level risk, cumulative exposure, and prevention logics (Browne and Hamilton-Giachritsis, 2005). Nevertheless, the framings of public health can be in language with educational framings when the task at hand is not to refute the possible harms but to establish interpretive competence and social-emotional awareness. The short and long-term outcomes of violent media have been given evidence to justify the practice of caution and supervision (Bushman and Huesmann, 2006); nevertheless, our findings show that the process of capacity-building in teachers presents another avenue: preparing educators to convert risk discourse into inquiry in the classroom and instilling classroom routines that allow students to identify affective responses, dispel stereotypes, and think about consequences. That is, media literacy may be included in prevention, through the development of reflection, empathy, and critical thinking, and not simply a reaction to the damage, once it has been done.

There are also implications of the study for the developmental positioning of adolescents. Even though our sample consists of secondary students, the developmental scholarship on the transition to adulthood emphasizes the role of identity exploration, peer affiliation, and experimentation in how the youths interact with cultural discourses, including the discourses of masculinity and aggression (Arnett, 2015). This does not mean that teenagers are either consistently susceptible or consistently tough; instead, it underlines the argument in favor of pedagogy that sees the exposure of teenagers to violent representations as being connected to developmental work-identity negotiation, belonging, and moral judgment. The shift in teachers towards asset-based framing can, then, be interpreted as a kind of adherence to developmental realism: students are not passive products, but active interpreters where media texts are the symbolic resources to self-making.

From reported belief to enacted practice

A reported reorientation of beliefs does not entail a corresponding reorientation of practice. The discontinuity between teachers’ beliefs and their classroom enactment is well documented in research on teacher change, which suggests that enduring change in belief often follows, rather than precedes, successful classroom experience (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002; Guskey, 2002). There are several factors to consider in whether the practices outlined here were maintained. There is a pressure of examination in the higher secondary level, which reduces the curricular time for extended analytical work. The multi-lesson sequences that are required for production-based critique are not feasible due to timetabling constraints. There is a variation in institutional support between government, aided, and private schools and a variation in access to projection and playback facilities, which has a direct impact on whether or not film excerpts can be shown. Two participants explicitly expressed the reputational risk that exists in the context of classroom discussion of caste, gender, and political content, which is influenced by school culture and community expectations. The rate at which such routines can be developed also depends on the students’ composition and their previous experience with analytical tasks.

The study cannot establish whether the reported reorientation persisted once the post-intervention measures had been administered and facilitator presence and collegial support had been withdrawn. The framing of the intervention as preparing teachers is therefore to be understood in the narrow sense of developing reported pedagogical reasoning and self-efficacy, and no claim of sustained classroom uptake is made.

Plausible processes of change

The processes discussed in this section are advanced as interpretations consistent with the qualitative data and with existing theory. The design cannot establish them as causal mechanisms, and they are not presented as such. Four processes appear plausible. The encounter with anonymised student data in Session 1 may have functioned as disconfirming evidence directed at a specific and articulable belief, a condition under which belief revision is more likely than under generalised exhortation. The co-construction of scaffolds provided a form of mastery experience, which self-efficacy theory identifies as the most potent source of efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1997), and the peer feedback cycles of Session 8 may have added vicarious experience and social persuasion. Reflective journalling and stimulated recall created occasions for articulating tacit pedagogical reasoning, and such articulation might consolidate reorientation by making it available for inspection. The disciplinary embedding of Session 7 may also have made new practice more assimilable by fitting it to existing subject identity rather than presenting it as an addition, which could account in part for the readier uptake among English language arts participants.

Alternative processes cannot be ruled out. Expectancy may have been created by continued contact with the research team over a year, apart from the content of the sequence, and the transparency of the instruments may have left it open for the participants to report the change that they knew was being sought. Comparing these accounts would necessitate a design that includes a comparison condition and less reactive measures.

Implications for teacher education

In the case of teacher education, the most obvious implication is that media literacy concerning the violent representations must be taught as a part of instructional design work, rather than a one-time course on digital safety. Three of the strands can be incorporated in programs, namely: (1) the basic theory of social cognition and modeling under media conditions (Bandura, 1986; Bandura, 2001), (2) content knowledge regarding aggression/desensitization research that can be taught critically, not prescriptively (Anderson et al., 2010; Anderson and Bushman, 2002; Carnagey et al., 2007), and (3) pedagogical practice that adequately prepares candidates to lead inquiry into representational technique and moral framing, through such tools as moral disengagement (Bandura, 2002) and structured reflection on emotional response (Fanti et al., 2009), which should be explicitly taught to teacher candidates. This would not only move the preparation to avoid controversial material, but it would also teach controversial material in a responsible manner.

Teacher education should also assist candidates in reading local media ecologies. In settings such as Kerala, where cinema is a culturally saturated and politically charged area, educators of teachers can consider regional film as a means of disciplinary education and not a distraction. Regional scholarship on masculinity, stardom and violence (Kumar, 2015; Osella and Osella, 2004) can be integrated into coursework to develop the ability of candidates to teach using culturally relevant texts. It is not a question of relevance; it is a question of assisting teachers in understanding how the genre conventions of the locality, star systems, and viewer expectations create meaning of aggression on the screen.

PL design recommendations

Lastly, the PL sequence in itself provides professional learning in design on controversial media subjects. To start with, the excellent design principle is to start with the interpretations of teachers–bringing out deficit assumptions and then evoke re-framing with evidence and student data. Second, the PL was a success in the sense that it made the classroom a place where empirical assertions and cultural critique can converge: desensitization finding and aggression theory were not applied to justify restriction but to ask instructable questions (Bartholow et al., 2006; Bushman and Huesmann, 2006). Third, long-term consideration of the way in which media popularize violence spectacle, identification, moral framing, etc., seems to be important. The use of the audience identification theory enhances this design since it justifies the reason why students tend to identify emotionally with characters despite the harm they may commit (Cohen, 2001; Cohen, 2006). Where PL makes teachers perceive identification as an interpretive and relational process, it would be possible to design talk moves and writing tasks that provoke students to explain why they have rooted a hero, how the film was an excuse to be aggressive, and what could be imagined as alternatives. The theorization of masculinities by Connell gives an understanding of how norms of hegemonic masculinity may be reproduced or disrupted in media discourses (Connell, 2005). Combined with local cinema analysis, this prism will allow educators to relate representational critique to the social worlds of the students: not just that violence is bad, but that this or that masculinity is being produced as desirable, believable, and inevitable. Put collectively, the results indicate that the equity-based discussion of aggressive representations cannot be achieved without integrating gender critique into the media-violence topic, rather, it should be viewed as an integrated part of the process: appeal to evidence of media violence to take harm seriously; appeal to social cognitive theory to understand modeling and agency; appeal to identification and moral disengagement to understand narrative persuasion; situate instruction within local cultural industries and gender regimes. It is possible to design PL that helps teachers engage in this synthesis and bring schools closer to a kind of media literacy that is both culturally responsive and theoretically rooted, as well as actionable in instructional practice to prepare adolescents not only to consume or oppose media, but to analyze it as a multifaceted social text, and to discuss ethically the worlds that it constructs.

Contribution

The contribution of this study is best stated at the level the evidence supports. Conceptually, it articulates media literacy as situated pedagogical practice rather than as content regulation or protective screening, and it specifies the terminological and dimensional commitments that such a conceptualisation entails. Empirically, it documents that 30 teachers reported a reorientation over the course of a structured professional learning sequence, and it uses qualitative evidence to specify the pedagogical forms that this reorientation took as well as the points at which it remained incomplete. Contextually, it situates this work within a regional film culture that has received little attention in anglophone media literacy scholarship, and in which cinema carries considerable public and moral weight. No claim of demonstrated effectiveness or of impact on students is made. The study offers a demonstration of possibility rather than of efficacy, a contribution appropriate to a single-group intervention study of this scale.

Limitations

Design and inference

This study employed a single-group, pre-post design with no comparison or control condition; the observed changes therefore cannot be attributed solely to the professional learning sequence. Maturation over a full school year, historical events coinciding with the intervention period, testing effects arising from repeated use of the same instruments, expectancy effects and regression to the mean from low pre-intervention scores all remain possible explanations. Teachers volunteered for an eight-session intervention and then completed self-report measures whose intended direction of change was largely transparent, so participants had a plausible incentive to report improvement even where their underlying beliefs and practices had changed to a lesser degree. The effect sizes obtained (dz = 2.25 and 2.17) are considerably larger than those typically reported for educational interventions assessed through self-report. Consistency between the reported t and dz values establishes only arithmetical coherence; it does not show that the differences are genuine or durable, and their magnitude may partly reflect socially desirable responding. These figures are accordingly offered as a methodological caution rather than as evidence of programme effectiveness. Intervention fidelity was not formally monitored beyond attendance and artefact completion, so unmeasured variation in implementation may also have contributed to the observed change.

Sampling and generalisability

The sample of 30 teachers yields wide confidence intervals and correspondingly imprecise quantitative estimates. Recruitment was mediated by district education offices and drew partly on teachers’ expressed receptiveness to critical media discourse; gatekeeper selection and self-selection are therefore both possible, and the participating group may have been more favourably disposed towards the intervention than the wider teaching population. The study is also located in a single state within a single national system, with a distinctive regional film culture, a particular examination structure, high aggregate literacy, and specific caste, gender and linguistic formations, each of which shapes how teachers approach aggressive media portrayals. No statistical generalisation beyond the participating group is claimed, and transferability is left for readers to judge against the contextual description provided rather than asserted by the authors.

Measurement

The instruments were not designed to assess media literacy competence or analytical skill, and teachers’ capacity to interpret aggressive media portrayals was not assessed directly. No baseline measure of participants’ media literacy competence was taken, and no convergent, discriminant or criterion-related validity evidence was collected. The intervention also operationalised a delimited conception of media literacy, concentrated on analysing and evaluating, with creating addressed as pedagogical design, acting addressed only through action planning, and accessing largely outside its scope; the findings should not be read as bearing on media literacy in its fuller sense. The coding-agreement coefficients reported for the qualitative analysis should, finally, be interpreted in light of the proportion of the corpus that was double-coded.

Scope of claims and follow-up

All analyses were conducted at the teacher level. No observational coding of enacted classroom practice was undertaken, since the video recordings served only as stimuli for recall, and no student-level outcome data were collected or analysed. Statements in this paper about adolescents becoming more capable or more critical observers of aggressive media are therefore statements about teachers’ perceptions, pedagogical intentions and self-reported practice. Although the anonymised survey of 150 Grade 11 and 12 students served only as a pedagogical stimulus in Session 1, its administration to minors nonetheless constituted a form of research contact, whatever the subsequent use of the data. The survey was conducted under the study's approved school-based research protocol, which classified the aggregate, anonymised use of student media-consumption data for instructional purposes as exempt from individual human-subjects review, and assent was obtained through the participating schools given the non-identifiable, aggregate character of the data. The intervention extended across a full school year and should not be characterised as brief; yet there was no follow-up after the formal end of the sequence, and measurement at its close cannot distinguish durable reorientation from change coinciding with ongoing facilitator and collegial support.

Future research should therefore integrate follow-up at six and twelve months after withdrawal of support with systematic observation of enacted classroom practice and—if possible—a comparison condition and student-level measures, to address the enactment and sustainability questions in a combined way.

Conclusion

This study examined how 30 secondary teachers in Kerala constructed media literacy as a pedagogical practice across an eight-session professional learning sequence spanning one academic year. Statistically significant within-participant differences on both self-report scales indicate that teachers’ reported beliefs about adolescents’ analytical capacity and their self-efficacy for supporting critical media analysis changed over the period of the sequence. The qualitative findings point to a reconceptualisation of media literacy from content surveillance towards disciplinary work, expressed in the design of perspective-taking protocols, production-based critique and cross-textual analysis within English language arts and social studies. This reconceptualisation was uneven, and a minority of participants retained protective orientations alongside the new vocabulary.

These conclusions are bounded by the design. The differences reported here cannot be attributed to the professional learning sequence alone, since the study involved a single group and self-report measures completed by volunteers. No claim is made about sustained classroom implementation, because enacted practice was not observed and there was no follow-up. No effects on adolescents’ learning, engagement or interpretive capacity are claimed, as no student-level data were analysed. What the study offers is a description of how a carefully designed, culturally embedded professional learning trajectory was associated with a reported shift in teachers’ orientations from protectionism towards asset-based framings, together with a specification of the pedagogical forms that this shift took and of the points at which it did not occur. For teacher education, the findings suggest that preparation for teaching about aggressive representations may be better addressed as a matter of instructional design than as a one-off provision in digital safety.

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Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2026.1908087/full#supplementary-material

Professional learning session protocol and facilitation guide, with specimen instructional materials. Supplementary material at the source

Survey instruments, comprising the seven-item beliefs scale and the twelve-item self-efficacy scale, with anchors, scoring procedure, provenance and internal consistency estimates. Supplementary material at the source

Interview protocol and stimulated-recall procedure. Supplementary material at the source

Item-level statistics, comprising means, standard deviations, paired differences and confidence intervals for all nineteen items, together with the missing-data record. Supplementary material at the source

Supplementary material Supplementary material at the source

Footnotes

Edited by: Mary Frances Rice, University of New Mexico, United States

Reviewed by: Iryna Mudra, Lviv Polytechnic National University, Ukraine

Maria Ulfa, Universitas Muhammadiyah Buton, Indonesia