The Center for Media Literacy (CML) is dedicated to a new vision of literacy for the 21st Century: the ability to communicate competently in all media forms as well as to access, understand, analyze, evaluate and participate with powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture. Indeed, we believe these skills of media literacy are essential for both children and adults as individuals and as citizens of a democratic society.

The Center for Media Literacy (CML) has been a pioneering force in the development and practice of media literacy in the United States. Its origins stem from Media&Values; magazine, a publication begun in 1977 as a graduate school project by CML founder Elizabeth Thoman.

• CML provides leadership, teacher training and implementation programs, public education, plus publication and distribution of teaching resources for the media literacy field - locally, nationally and, now with the Internet, around the world.
  
  
• In 2007, CML introduced Questions/TIPS, a new framework for analysis in both deconstructing and constructing media messages. Q/TIPS™ is a central feature of the Second Edition of CML's landmark book, Literacy for the 21st Century: An Overview and Orientation Guide for Media Literacy Education, published in 2008.
  
  
• In 1999, Tessa Jolls (right) joined CML as President and CEO, partnering with founder Elizabeth Thoman (left) to further CML's mission and program into the 21st Century.
  
  
• In 2002, CML introduced its CML MediaLit Kit™, a framework for teaching and learning in a media age. The MediaLit Kit™ is based on the thinking and writings of leading academics and practioners in media literacy over the past 50 years.
  
• In collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Education Division of the Music center of L.A. and AnimAction, Inc., the Center received in 2001, one of 17 demonstration media literacy and the arts grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. The 3-year project, titled Project SmartArt, provides a range of media literacy opportunities for teachers and students in inner city LA.
  
  
• CML is a founding organizational member of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), a national membership organization chartered in 2001 to organize and host the National Media Education Conference every two years and to promote professional development in media literacy education in the USA. In 1996, CML hosted 350 teachers and leaders at the Second National Media Literacy Conference in Los Angeles which, along with the 1995 conference in Boone, NC, established the precedent and framework for national conferences in the media literacy field.
  
  
• Through the Felton Media Literacy Scholars Program, established in 1997 with a major gift from television pioneer Norman Felton, CML has established a national model for teacher training in the field of media literacy education. Hundreds of Southern California teachers have participated in CML's training events.
  
  
• Hundreds of teachers attended CML's former Crash Course in Media Literacy which was held periodically at the Center or as in-service programs arranged by educational organizations, such as the California Association of Independent Schools, Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Bureau of Jewish Education and numerous public school districts throughout Southern California and around the country.
  
  
• CML's pioneering curriculum, Beyond Blame: Challenging Violence in the Media, first published in 1995 with grants from the Carnegie Corporation and other foundations, is the most comprehensive teaching package available on the subject. Acclaimed by teachers as well as media professionals, the program has units for Elementary, Middle School, Teens and Parents plus a Community outreach component.
  
  
• From 1991-1995, CML created the first generation of teaching tools about the media published in the U.S., including: How to Analyze the News Media, Parenting in a TV Age, Break the Lies that Bind/Sexism in the Media, Citizenship in a Media Age and TV Alert: A Wake-Up Guide to Television Literacy.
  
  
• CML averages thousands of unique visits per day on its website, www.medialit.org – the most referenced media literacy site on the World Wide Web.
  
  

Tessa Jolls, President and CEO
Beth Thornton, Communications
Elizabeth Thoman, Founder
Professional Associates

Technical and Administrative Team: CML retains a full complement of technical and administrative professionals who contribute to the development and maintenance of the CML website and ongoing operations.

Tessa Jolls, President and CEO
Tessa Jolls is President and CEO of the Center for Media Literacy, a position she has held since 1999. During that time, she restructured CML to focus, grow and change, preparing to meet the demand for an expanded vision of literacy for the 21st Century. Her primary focus is working in partnership to demonstrate how media literacy works through school and community-based implementation programs. She actively contributes to the development of the media literacy field internationally through her speaking, writing and consulting, with curriculum development and research projects, and through publishing and disseminating new curricular and training materials.

Recently, Jolls co-founded, with Mary Ann Sund, Ed.D (formerly deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction for Arcadia Unified School District), the Consortium for Media Literacy, a nonprofit consisting of a network of school districts, to address testing and implementing new research-based curricula. Working in diverse topical areas such as nutrition education, violence prevention and gender representation, Jolls has applied the CML MediaLit Kit framework, showing how the framework can be integrated throughout a school curriculum while meeting state education standards.

This builds on her previous work with managing programs such as Project SMARTArt and Smoke Detectors! Project SMARTArt, a joint effort of the CML, Los Angeles Unified School District’s Leo Politi Elementary School, the Education Division of the Music Center of Los Angeles, and AnimAction, Inc., was one of the first federal grants offered in 2001-2005 for the field of media literacy education and was funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jolls serves on the Advisory Board for the Women’s Foundation of California’s Youth, Media and Social Change Initiative, and she has also served on expert panels on media literacy for the Comprehensive Health Education Foundation (CHEF) for product development on media’s role in teen stress and on nutrition, consulted with major textbook publishers on media literacy-related content and worked to support the efforts of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. A seasoned speaker and presenter, she has appeared on public television shows such as “A Place of Our Own” and local shows such as KTLA TV’s Pacesetter program. She has spoken at major conferences and presented on media literacy at the U.S. Department of Education and venues internationally and throughout the U.S., addressing students and audiences interested in public, private and parochial education and media literacy. Jolls has written articles for publications such as Middle Ground: the Magazine of Middle Level Education, Arts Education Policy Review, and the 2007 monograph on media literacy for the Korean Press Foundation. With Elizabeth Thoman, CML’s founder, she co-authored the CML MediaLit Kit books, Literacy for the 21st Century and Five Key Questions that Can Change the World, and articles for the Yearbooks of the National Society for the Study of Education and American Behavioral Scientist. Portions of the CML MediaLit Kit have now been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Turkish, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic. She is the first “lifetime” member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education upon its founding as a new membership organization.

Originally, Jolls’ professional expertise was in the organization development/strategic communication fields, with a focus on change management. Consulting regularly, Jolls in 1983 founded and for ten years, published and edited HR Reporter, a subscription-based newsletter covering human resource strategy, organization development and change management for senior executives at primarily Fortune 500 companies, with special reports on Europe and Asia. She sold HR Reporter to the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), a legal and labor publisher based in Washington. Her writings are cited in textbooks such as “Personnel Administration in Education: A Management Approach,” by Ronald Rebore, (Prentice Hall, 6th Ed., 1998).

Before moving to Los Angeles in 1986, Jolls led the communications/change management practice for the St. Louis office of Towers Perrin, an international consulting firm specializing in human resource management for large corporations. She was a vice president/account manager for a regional promotion firm, handling consumer goods account, and began her career by teaching reading to adult illiterates. She earned a B.A. in English Education/Rhetoric from the University of Illinois and worked toward an M.B.A. from Southern Illinois University.

Her volunteer activities have included being a partner in BLSH Investor Club, and serving on advisory boards at her children’s schools, Our Lady of Malibu School (OLM) and Malibu High School. Her work with OLM led to the school’s receiving, in 1997-1998, the Bravo Award sponsored by Club 100 for the Education Division of the Music Center of Los Angeles County. This program, which linked Howard Gardner’s “eight intelligences” research to arts/multi-media education, was also recognized in 1997 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Jolls and her husband, Tom, live in Los Angeles and have a combined total of six children.

CML President, Tessa Jolls, explains the Five Key Questions for media literacy in this YouTube video.

Beth Thornton, Communications
Beth Thornton joined The Center for Media Literacy as Communications Director in 2008. Her primary focus is to ensure that the Center’s educational programs and resources are accurately presented and easily accessible to a wide audience. She teams with writers, web developers and graphic designers to promote the Center’s work in media literacy via web and print.

Thornton has held management positions in the communications field for more than 20 years, primarily in the medical device industry where her responsibilities included production of educational training materials for doctors and nurses in a variety of formats and languages. She received her BA in Liberal Studies from UC Santa Barbara and has recently completed a two-year Writers’ Program in Creative Writing through UCLA Extension.

An avid reader and writer, Thornton has spent many volunteer hours in local classrooms reading with elementary school students, and is also active in youth athletics. She lives with her husband and three children in Santa Barbara, California.

CML has an international network of professionals with whom we work on interdisciplinary teams.  Advocacy, curriculum development, training and implementation programs and evaluations are all part of the services offered by CML.