Schools educate. However, schools do not control education. Rather they share the teaching spectrum with a number of other powerful educational forces, including the mass media, whose pedagogical power begins even before young people enter school. This includes teaching about diversity. Consider the following example.

One day my wife Laurel and I heard our three-year-old granddaughter Holly, sobbing in the bathroom. Yet, when we went in, we found a face full of joyous dimples gleaming back at us from the full-length wall mirror.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?" asked Laurel.

"Nothing. I'm just practicing my crying, like Shirley Temple. She cries when she's in trouble, and then people help her. I can do that, too."

With kindergarten still two years away, Holly's education about diversity had already begun. In this case, that education involved informal lessons in gender roles and behavior. The unexpected textbook? Shirley Temple movies.

This anecdote illustrates a challenge that schools must face. Teaching about diversity will inevitably occur. It may or may not happen in schools, but it definitely will take place through the media. Put another way, schools do not control whether or not students learn about diversity.

Moreover, research has demonstrated that people learn not only from news, documentaries, and other nonfiction sources. They also learn, albeit often subconsciously, from entertainment media, cyberspace images, or from those hybrid forms, such as docudramas and reality TV, sometimes referred to as "infotainment." In such teaching and learning about diversity, the media play five major roles.

1. Media present information
Such information may be accurate or inaccurate, nuanced or simplistic. It may be framed in clarifying context or distortingly compressed into snippets. It may be delivered as news or packaged as entertainment.

For example, local TV news shows often operate from an "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" ideology of featuring a string of decontextualized stories about community violence. Regardless of the accuracy of the individual stories, skewed news selection and relentless repetition of such stories tend to foster intergroup distrust, even fear, particularly in ethnically diverse and residentially divided communities.

2. Media organize information and ideas
Through the way they organize ideas, the media influence the formation and reinforcement of reader, viewer, and listener cognitive structures. These idea "organizers" range from newspaper columnists, television commentators, and radio talk show hosts to media news editors and newspaper and magazine headline writers.

But such organizing also comes from entertainment. Fictional narratives perform the same roles that folk stories and fairy tales have done for centuries, helping people make sense of the world. Consider the millions of movie-going young Americans for whom Pocahontas provided "historical" insight into white-Indian relations, Tarzan provided "geographical literacy" about Africa, or Aladdin provided foundational "knowledge" about the Middle East.

3. Media transmit values
Although most mediamakers do not consider themselves to be values educators, both news and entertainment media are loaded with intentional or unintentional values lessons, often concerning diversity. Consider fictional series on evening mainstream TV.

Taken as a whole, they present a consistent, if unintended, values curriculum. Shows about police (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), hospitals (ER ), or schools (Boston Public), with their racially and ethnically diverse casts and characters, transmit the naturalness of workplace desegregation. Contrast this with the racial homogeneity of most situation comedies, which transmit the value that socializing with your own (racial) kind is the norm. The underlying, if unintended, values message: adults of different racial backgrounds may work together, but should not expect to play together.

4. Media create and reinforce expectations
One morning I happened upon the daytime television game show The $25,000 Pyramid. The competition involves two-person teams of total strangers. A series of words appears on a screen in front of one player, who then gives clues to guide the partner into correctly identifying the maximum number of words within the time limit. The team that gets the most correct answers wins. As I watched, the word "gangs" popped onto one cluer's screen. Without hesitation she shouted, "They have lots of these in East L.A." (a heavily Mexican American section of Los Angeles). Responding immediately, her partner answered, "Gangs."

Unfortunately, East Los Angeles does have gangs. But it also has many far more prevalent features like families, schools, businesses, churches, and socially contributing organizations. Yet the deleterious bombardment of gang-featuring news reports and movies has created and reinforced gangs as the quintessential popular vision of East L.A. (and many other Latino communities). The result? Under competitive pressure, two strangers found an instant connection via their mutual expectations of a Latino community as being synonymous with gangs, while simultaneously transmitting their stereotypical expectations to a national TV audience.

5. Media model behavior
While people do not inevitably mimic the media, media may influence behavior (as differentiated from unilaterally causing it). Evidence abounds concerning the impact of media role-modeling. It has influenced language ("Go ahead, make my day" and "Show me the money"). When Happy Days' Fonzie obtained a library card, real-life card applications leaped 500%.

Let's also consider the issue of "disinhibiting effects"—the potential of the media for lowering inhibitions to certain actions. For example, anecdotal evidence suggests that the constant use of negative ethnic epithets in televised comedy routines—particularly by members of that group—may unintentionally make those words seem more generally acceptable in daily speech. This effect has been noted in schools and has sometimes led to fights on school grounds.

Schools and Media
In short, teaching about diversity will occur, even if it does not take place, at least intentionally, in schools. This leaves two options for educators.

Schools can ignore the media, thereby letting them become virtually unchallenged diversity teachers. Or schools can actively and consciously use the media as a rich resource for integrating its treatment of diversity into the curriculum. In that way, by applying insights from media literacy, schools can draw upon media to help students think more analytically about diversity-related topics, learn about the process of stereotyping, and reflect about personal intergroup beliefs.