Aims & Scope

TMQ has an ongoing general call (see details below under "General Aims & Scope) as well as periodic special issues.

Please upload your submission as a Microsoft Word or RTF document to Teaching Media Quarterly at https://pubs.lib.umn.edu/index.php/tmq/ using the Submit a Lesson Plan link in the sidebar. Please ensure that your submission conforms to TMQ Submission Template.

General Aims & Scope

Teaching Media Quarterly is dedicated to circulating practical and timely approaches to media concepts and topics from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. We are committed to publishing activities that help students bring critical questions to bear on the world around them. Our goal is to promote a collaborative exchange of undergraduate teaching resources between media educators at higher education institutions.

Teaching Media Quarterly encourages the use of critical perspectives. Our aim is to publish lesson plans that deal with important social, cultural, and economic issues. We have covered topic areas that address, but are not limited to, the following:

Gender: Lesson plans in this section are useful for teaching raced and classed masculinities and femininities in the media. They engage with, teach, and critique masculinities, femininities, feminisms, post-feminism, intersectionality, as well as post-feminist ideologies expressed in the U.S. and global media.

Race: Drawing from Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and Critical Whiteness Studies, these lesson plans push students to critically engage with the ways in which the media participate in construction of the material realities of post-racial ideologies and racialized bodies in the U.S. and globally.

Sexuality: Lesson plans in this section are concerned with teaching about LGBTTIQQ2S experiences, representation, intersectionality and the media.

Justice: Lesson plans in this section are specifically concerned with social, economic, political, environmental, media, racial, and gender justice. They ask students to recognize how media participate in creating inequality and how it may have the potential to work towards equitable futures.

Environment: Lesson plans in this area specifically engage the environment on a local and global scale. Topics include global climate change, ecomedia, food, place, framing, food, and other environmental topics.

Media Literacy: Lesson plans in this section teach media literacy concepts such as framing, spiral of silence, media convergence, surveillance, how to teach/lead difficult conversations in the classroom, and more.

Media Production: These lesson plans ask students to engage in some form of media making. Some of the lesson plans require little previous skills and minimal technology, such as mobile phones, others require use of advanced media production equipment.

Media Technologies: Lesson plans in this section are concerned with various media technologies including new media technologies, surveillance practices, social media, and data gathering.

Class and Work: Lesson plans in this section engage with mediated life and labor in capitalism and neoliberalism. They interrogate immaterial labor practices; engage students in understanding their interpellation as consumers and producers of content; reflect on the representation of class in society; and examine life and work in capitalism.

Media Industries: Lesson plans in this section bring a critical lens to the history, politics, and economics of media industries. Topics include the political economy of media, the military-media-entertainment-industrial complex, media policy, media consolidation and conglomeration, studies of post-production, and media ownership.