RESEARCHER.
TEACHER.
THOUGHT LEADER.
ADVOCATE.
Learn how Renee Hobbs has inspired a generation of educators and community leaders to embrace the practice of media literacy education as a means to transform schools and society.
ABOUT RENEE HOBBS
Renee Hobbs is one of the world’s leading authorities on digital and media literacy education. As a teacher, researcher, activist, and media professional, she has offered programs for educators on four continents and produced some of the leading empirical research on the subject. She has published more than 150 scholarly and professional publications on digital and media literacy education, digital learning, contemporary propaganda, and copyright and fair use. Renee Hobbs is the author of 12 books on media literacy education. With Paul Mihailidis, she is the editor of The International Encyclopedia on Media Literacy (2019, Wiley and the International Communication Association). It is the two-volume edition that offers a state-of-the-art look at the interdisciplinary and global practice of digital and media literacy education. She is also the founding co-editor of the Journal of Media Literacy Education, the peer-reviewed, open access journal of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE).
Renee Hobbs has spoken at the United Nations and consulted extensively with educators, school leaders, and government officials in Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Greece, Lebanon, Netherlands, and many other countries. She has been a regularly featured keynote speaker and presenter at numerous professional associations around the world.
Renee Hobbs is the Founder of the Media Education Lab, an online community that reached 20,000 users from 66 countries in 2021. At the University of Rhode Island, Hobbs serves as the Co-Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy, a professional development program for educators that was officially recognized in the U.S. Office of Education’s National Education Technology Plan (2015). She won the 2021 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences for Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in Digital Age from the American Association of Publishers. In 2018, Hobbs was awarded the Research Excellence Award from the University of Rhode Island Division of Research and Economic Development. She also received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association (MEA). In 2015, Hobbs received the Media Literacy Education Meritorious Service Award, awarded by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE).
Renee Hobbs offers consulting services in media literacy education and her clients include media companies, universities and colleges, school districts, libraries, non-profit organizations, and community-engaged police academies, just to name a few.
WORK WITH RENEE HOBBS
As a leading scholar in the field of media literacy education, Renee Hobbs has a proven track record of implementing media literacy education programs in a variety of local, regional, national, and global contexts.
Bring Renee Hobbs to your institution, school, or college to help your community ensure that all learners have the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed for success in work, life, and citizenship.
Hobbs offers keynotes, workshops, program evaluation and consulting services, and her generosity and creative approach to collaboration has fertilized a wide variety of important media literacy initiatives around the world.
SERVICES
Renee Hobbs offers customized services to meet your needs, on topics including:
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Media Literacy Education
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Create-to-Learn Pedagogies
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Persuasion and Propaganda Education
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Copyright and Fair Use for Media Literacy
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Media Literacy Around the World
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Media Literacy in English Language Arts
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Integrating Media Literacy Across the Curriculum
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Program Design and Implementation
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Strategic Planning and Curriculum Development
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Professional Development Programs
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Measurement of Media Literacy Competencies
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Online Learning Communities
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Program Evaluation
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Sustainability
A PRACTICAL VISIONARY
Renee Hobbs has advanced the practice of media literacy education through research and community service, receiving nearly $4 million in grant and philanthropic funding over the course of her career.
Hobbs is a highly-respected researcher. In 2003, she published the first empirically rigorous quasi-experimental study that examined the impact of media literacy education on the academic achievement of adolescents in Reading Research Quarterly, where she identified media literacy as an expanded conceptualization of literacy. Hobbs has developed and validated measures of media literacy that have been widely used in the field. With her colleagues, Hobbs developed a multiple validated measures of media literacy, including a performance-based measure of ML analysis skills, the Smoking Media Literacy (SML) index, the Motivations Profile for Digital Learning, and the ML Implementation Index.
Hobbs is active in creating digital learning platforms for media literacy. She pioneered the use of a an online game, My Pop Studio, developed in 2007 to help girls ages 9 - 14 learn media literacy concepts through play. She also created a crowdsourced digital platform to help media literacy educators share artifacts for analysis and teaching purposes, with Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda.
Hobbs is a change agent. When confusion about copyright was interfering with the advancement of media literacy education, she led a team of researchers to create the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy, which helped to clarify how the doctrine of fair use applied to the practice of media literacy education. This project also resulted in the book, Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning.
In 2017, she conceptualized the principles of create-to-learn as a pedagogy for media literacy education in Create to Learn, and her recent work has examined strategies for teaching about algorithmic personalization in the context of teaching the persuasive genres.
In 2022, Hobbs offered the first-ever professional development program to police academy instructors, working with the Austin (TX) Police Academy to ensure that law enforcement professionals use video in ways that cultivate critical thinking and communication skills so as to identify and disrupt patterns of racial bias, stereotypes, and use of force and enable instructors to consider ethical issues in the use of videos that depict law enforcement personnel, perpetrators, and victims, especially those with disabilities or in mental health crisis.