Media literacy as a pathway to religious literacy in pluralistic democracies: Designing a critical media education pedagogy for primary school children in India

Abstract

Abstract In the Indian political milieu, religious literacy and media education operate within the field of simultaneities, as religion is routinely performed through representations on media platforms. In order to create alternate narratives promoting ideas of co-existence while resisting the influence of exclusionary religious socialization, young students would benefit from using media as a site of both appropriation and resistance. In this article, we argue that audiences are both active and passive, and the dialectics of (in)action makes it possible to understand how the role of media education can be conceptualized in the age of religious pluralism in the Indian democracy. We propose critical media literacy as an intervention to question the exclusionary religious–political socialization of school children by introducing them to a set of alternate narratives encompassing different lived realities.