Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Vanessa Domine

Dr. Vanessa Domine comes to the School of Communication and Media after a nearly 15-year tenure in the College of Education and Human Services (CEHS).  And, she’s hit the ground running.  In just a few short months in her new home, she’s already leveraging her diverse background to build connections and break down the silos that place walls between media literacy and civic engagement.  Domine is assisting in the development of two major collaborative media-focused events — one developing regional K-12 teachers’ understanding of fair use and copyright in the classroom, and the other calling attention to National Media Literacy Week, specifically in the context of politics.  The goal that unites these endeavors is Domine’s passion to increase the knowledge of media literacy education use among today’s youth to create engagement and ultimately greater involvement from that demographic.

Dr. Domine describes her coordination of the fair use and copyright event “Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning” as a “collegial partnership”.  The event, which will take place on Sept. 30, includes hosts Renée Hobbs and Kristin Hokanson of the University of Rhode Island Harrington School of Communication and Media and Montclair State University’s own ADP Center for Learning Technologies in the CEHS. In-service and pre-service teachers will participate in this all day workshop based on Hobbs’ book of the same name to obtain a working knowledge of teaching in conjunction with media.  As a result of Dr. Domine’s relationship with the CEHS, the college has provided needed facility and local connections with K-12 teachers from 30 school districts. The event will prove pivotal since although media has been found to be a clear asset to student learning in the classroom, many teachers are apprehensive to take advantage of its capabilities in fear of copyright violations.

“The classroom has protections because of certain legislation, but many teachers don’t know what those are, what you can use, so they steer clear of using media in their classrooms because they feel that they’re constrained,” said Dr. Domine.

If successful, the event may extend to a university-wide partnership open to all university faculty. Dr. Domine believes the workshop holds potential for even further collaboration for media literacy education across campus.

Dr. Domine will continue to build bridges in support of the development of media literacy by collaborating with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and Big Pictures Educational Consulting to moderate a non-partisan “political party” screening event during National Media Literacy Week on Nov. 3 from 4:00-5:30 pm. With Election Day taking place the following week, the “party” falls just in time for its high profile subject matter, media literacy in the voting process. The event will highlight the rhetorical aspects of elections with help from the SCM Public Speaking Resource Center and expert facility panelists Dr.’s Marylou Naumoff, Marc Rosenweig, and Joel Penney in addition to Dr. Domine. A special screening of We the Voters: 20 Films for the People will also be featured, encompassing short film documentaries. The “political party” stands to illuminate the true definition of media literacy in action with the added energy of the most presently relevant focal point in politics today, the presidential election.

“The National Association for Media Literacy Education has a very robust definition of media literacy,” said Dr. Domine. “Media literacy would be the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, produce, communicate, and then act on that information across all media forms and that could be print media, digital, anything in between.”

In total, the event will underscore this significance in a proactive sense that moves beyond mere understanding of media and challenges attendees to engage in the creation of media for positive results, which Dr. Domine describes as the end phase of the complete media literacy cycle.

“There is an activist piece linked to this, whereas that’s great that we’re all critically viewing and creatively producing, but then what?” commented Domine. “What do you do with it? There is this idea that you need to get engaged. That’s where the civic engagement comes in, that you need to engage in your community and be an agent of change.”

Dr. Domine has taken this responsibility to heart with the use of vastly collaborative pursuits to join differing departments and universities under a mutual communicative need in which the power of media can break down barriers and incite purposeful action with education as its sole instrument.