In 2003, Penn State Professor Patricia Hinchey recollected common responses to teaching media literacy in the university: "During the course of the year I learned that invariably when a colleague asked "What are you teaching this year?" and I answered "teaching media literacy;" I could anticipate the follow up question, "What is Media Literacy?" (p. 268). Hinchey's story is indicative of media literacy's current existence in U.S. higher education. Difficulties in both defining and locating media literacy initiatives in the university have often led to vague and disparate conceptions of the term. As a result, media literacy education's potential value to higher education has been constrained (Christ & Potter, 1998).

Central to media literacy's tenuous post-secondary status is the issue of consistency: Specifically; inconsistencies in definition, use and adoption have led to marginal and often contested notions of media literacy for the university: This has ultimately hindered media literacy's ability to produce tangible and coherent learning outcomes for higher education. Three general trends have contributed to such inconsistencies.

First, since its formal introduction in the United States in the early 1990s, media literacy implementation across all levels of education has lagged behind other major English-speaking countries in the world (Mihailidis, 2006; Kubey & Baker, 1999).( n1) As a result, the United States has labored to build and successfully implement media literacy initiatives on all levels of education. Media literacy advocates will point out that all fifty states have adopted standards and parameters for the existence of media education in K-12 education. These parameters, however, have little in common with one another or the learning parameters commonly associated with media literacy.( n2) While new state-led initiatives have increased the overall exposure of media literacy; its progress in the United States continues to struggle (Galician, 2004).

Second, the majority of media literacy teaching initiatives and scholarship has been geared towards K-12 education (Hobbs, 1998). This has done little to cultivate media literacy in higher education. Postsecondary teachers largely construct and implement their own curricula. Pending administrative approval, college-level educators are generally free to teach with the content they find most effective and with classroom techniques that personally suit their teaching style. As will be illustrated below, this has led to different interpretations about what constitutes media literacy education in the university, including where it should be taught, how it should be taught, and who should teach it.

Third, the existing definition of media literacy is premised on rather broad and figurative terminology: In the United States, media literacy is commonly referred to as the ability to "access, evaluate, analyze and produce both print and electronic media" (Aufderheide, 1993). While this definition has solidified the existence of media literacy in K-12 education, it provides little guidance as to how these terms should be conceived in the university--specifically in terms of teaching and learning outcomes. While such definitional vagueness is not necessarily negative for post-secondary media literacy; it has compromised, to an extent, the learning outcomes media literacy education aims to achieve.

This paper looks at the results of two exploratory studies that surveyed the existence of media literacy in higher education. The results of these studies lend themselves to addressing some of the key questions and inhibitors for post-secondary media literacy education as it currently stands in U.S. universities: Should media literacy develop definitional parameters for the university? What differentiates media literacy from other media-related disciplines? What should media literacy look like in the university? Frameworks for post-secondary media literacy are first discussed to provide some background for the exploration and subsequent discussion.