Amy Aidman

Assistant Dean, College of Communications

Research Assistant Professor of Communications and Media Studies

aidman@uiuc.edu

Primary Areas of Interest: Children and media, media literacy, and the social impacts of communication technologies

Amy Aidman is a researcher and advocate on issues related to children and media, media literacy, and the social impacts of communication technologies. She has lectured and taught on these topics in the U.S. and Israel. She is a contributing author of two volumes Creating Competent Communicators: Activities for Teaching Speaking, Listening, and Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom, which were written to complement National Communication Association standards. She is currently completing the US part of an international study of children's fantasies and their relationship to media with the IZI, a research institute of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation.

Her research on girls' understanding of the Disney movie "Pocahontas" has been included as a chapter in the edited volume Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity, (Peter Lang Publishing, Sharon R. Mazzarella and Norma Odom Pecora, eds.).

Dr Aidman is the former Research Director for the Center for Media Education, a Washington D.C. based research and policy organization. She has also worked with the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education and the National Parent Information Network where she coordinated the creation of a statewide electronic information service for parents and families in Illinois. She was a Visiting Lecturer in the University of Haifa's Department of Communication. She has been a featured speaker and panelist at scholarly conferences and lectured widely on children and media, children as consumers, media literacy, and in-school advertising, and has been frequently quoted in the popular and parenting press about these issues.

Dr. Aidman received her Ph.D. in Communications from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois (1993). She earned an M.A. in Telecommunication Arts from the University of Michigan. Her undergraduate work was in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and included a year of study abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.