Renee Hobbs offers presentations, keynote addresses, workshops and seminars. Contact Renee directly at renee.hobbs@temple.edu or phone (978) 201-9799 for more information.

Renee Hobbs is one of the leading authorities on media literacy education in the United States. She is a Professor at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia and holds a joint appointment at the College of Education. She founded the Media Education Lab in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media. Over her career, she has raised over $2.5 million to support media literacy education in the United States. She has written dozens of scholarly articles, created multimedia curriculum resources and offered professional development programs on four continents to advance the quality of media literacy education in the United States and around the world.

Hobbs is a field-builder. She helped create the Partnership for Media Education, which evolved into the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), the national membership organization for media literacy. She served as President in 1998. She is co-editor of the Journal for Media Literacy Education, an open-access online peer reviewed journal. In 1993, she created the Harvard Institute on Media Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education as the first national program of teacher professional development in media literacy in the United States.

Renee received a research grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation along with her colleagues Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi at American University in Washington DC to explore how copyright and fair use issues apply to media literacy education. Her latest book, Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning (Corwin/Sage, 2010) helps teachers understand copyright law as it applies to the use of digital media in education.

In 2008, Renee developed Powerful Voices for Kids, a university-school partnership that offers a comprehensive program for K-12 schools including a summer enrichment program for children, staff development program, hands-on mentoring and curriculum development, parent and community outreach, and research designed to develop alternative assessment methodology to document children’s development of the critical thinking and communication skills in response to mass media, popular culture and digital media.

Hobbs’ scholarly work is situated at the intersection of the fields of media studies and education. Her book, Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English (Teachers College Press, 2007) provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of the impact of media literacy education on reading comprehension skills.  Hobbs has worked with educators internationally to advance media literacy education. She has worked in Italy, The Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, France and China to help bring media literacy education to students and teachers worldwide.  She is involved in a partnership with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations to explore how media literacy can promote children’s global understanding.

Renee Hobbs and her team at the Media Education Lab are leaders in educational multimedia for media literacy eucation. Over the years she has developed numberous award-winning multimedia curriculum resources for K-12 educators that help teachers integrate media literacy into the curriculum. Assignment: Media Literacy was developed with support from the Maryland State Department of Education and the Discovery Channel. With support from the U.S. Office on Women’s Health, she created My Pop Studio, an award-winning online multimedia edutainment website that introduces tween girls to media literacy concepts that takes girls “behind the scenes” of popular music, television, magazines, and online media. Along the way, girls are asked to reflect on the messages the media offers about what it is like to be a teen girl in America today and to think about the cultural and economic factors shaping the media and digital environment that has become so much a part of their everyday life.

Teachers need tools to help them explore the power of social media for learning. Hobbs and her colleagues created an online interactive education program for integrating social media into the teaching of the 2008 Presidential election, with support from PBS Teachers.  Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement is an interactive website for teachers designed to strengthen their ability to use social media tools developed by the PBS community.  The project received the Creative Projects Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in 2009. Over twenty years, Hobbs has created numerous award-winning multimedia curriculum resources for media literacy education. She is chairman of the board of Youth Empowerment Services (YES Philly), a youth development program for out-of-school youth in North Philadelphia. Hobbs received an Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an M.A. in Communication from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. with a double major in English Literature and Film Video Studies from the University of Michigan. Her children, Roger and Rachel, are enrolled in college at Reed College and Franklin & Marshall College.  She lives in Center City Philadelphia with her husband, Randy, who is studying to be a chef at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, Canada.