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@ marklipton liptonm@uoguelph.ca drmarklipton@gmail.com

Mark Lipton is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

He is an advocate for media literacy and is currently working with social media to advocate for Ontario public school teachers. His current work with the Media Education Project is funded by the Canadian Council on Learning and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This research considers how Canadian teachers engage with media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the classroom to assess how ICTs function within a broader context of teaching and learning. The project allows him to offer media education workshops to teachers across Ontario. His current research interests focus on media education and include work in the history of communication, semiotics, media cultures and subcultures.

This research, along with his teaching, addresses the rapidly changing face of media production practices by challenging relationships among technology, users, information, politics and action. He teaches courses about media and communication, digital literacy and pedagogy, performance studies and research methods. He also teaches in the Media Studies program at Guelph-Humber. In the classroom he strikes a balance between theory and practice by employing alternative pedagogical models from multidisciplinary perspectives.

Before coming to Guelph, Lipton directed the Media Ecology program at New York University, worked as a resource and site advisor for New York City public school teachers, taught at the Harvey Milk High School in New York City, held the Mellon Fellowship in Visual Literacy at Vassar College and was the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant. He also spent time as the education director at the Children’s Media Project, a non-profit organization, where he developed health-promotion media literacy workshops. The Dutchess County Department of Health and the Children’s Services Council funded this multi-year research about health education, media literacy and visual communication. In 2009, as a result of his work with the Media Education Project, Lipton was awarded the Jacque Ellul Award for Outstanding Media Ecology Activism.