Author

Professor Hobbs is an internationally-recognized authority on digital and media literacy education. Through community and global service and as a researcher, teacher, advocate and media professional, Hobbs has worked to advance the quality of digital and media literacy education in the United States and around the world. She is Founder and Director of the Media Education Lab, whose mission is to improve the quality of media literacy education through research and community service.

Renee Hobbs is Professor of Communication Studies at the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. With her colleague Julie Coiro, she created the URI Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy, a 12-credit graduate program for K-12 and college faculty, librarians and media professionals. The program’s signature professional development program is the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy, now in its 6th year. Renee Hobbs maintains an active research agenda that examines the intersections of the fields of media studies and education. She has published more than 100 articles in scholarly and professional journals. Her current research examines approaches to teacher education in digital and media literacy education, with a focus on measuring how teacher motivations shape their practice of integrating digital tools and media literacy concepts into the curriculum. She has also developed and validated measures of media literacy competencies for adolescents and she has evaluated the impact of media literacy programs implemented in American pubic and charter schools. In 2017, Create to Learn: An Introduction to Digital Literacy will be published by Wiley Blackwell. In 2016, Hobbs wrote Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative (Temple University Press) to examine some of the “intellectual grandparents” of media literacy education from the point of view of a variety of leaders in the field. To learn how children activate media literacy competencies in formal and informal learning, Hobbs wrote Discovering Media Literacy: Digital Media and Popular Culture in Elementary School (Corwin/Sage) a book that chronicles a three-year partnership with the Russell Byers Charter School in Philadelphia, written in 2013 with David Cooper Moore. Her 2011 book, Digital and Media Literacy: Connecting Culture and Classroom (Corwin/Sage) offers portraits of how secondary educators integrate critical thinking and communication skills across the curriculum. Her 2010 book, Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning (Corwin/Sage) helps teachers understand copyright law as it applies to the use of digital media in education. Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English (Teachers College Press) provides the first large-scale empirical evidence of the impact of media literacy education on reading comprehension skills. She also co-authored Elements of Language (Harcourt), the first secondary English language arts textbook to incorporate media literacy. Hobbs also offers program evaluation services for multimedia education with clients including PBS Student Reporting Labs and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is the founding co-editor of the Journal for Media Literacy Education, an open-access peer reviewed journal that advances scholarship in the field. Renee Hobbs received an Ed.D in Human Development 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.