Mark Lipton
University of Guelph
Professor Mark Lipton currently works with Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), Science Communication Division, supporting the pedagogical training of ECCC's science communication professional development program, designed for over 2000 scientists. As an educator, he strikes a balance between theory and practice by employing alternative pedagogical models from multidisciplinary perspectives. He taught both middle and secondary school and worked as a teacher/educator and supervisor; he also works as a curricula specialist in the areas of communication, media, curriculum design, pedagogy, and assessment. He champions the educational uses of media and technology as promoting competence in multi-media literacies and advocates for its pedagogical value among Ontario public-school teachers and stakeholders. The funded project PrivacyStories and its PrivacyBooth studies young adults' negotiations with digital privacy policies. Prior funded research, the Media Education Project, led to Ontario Ministry of Education curricular changes supporting media education for students K-12. He wrote an award-winning media literacy textbook Smoke Screens: From Tobacco Outrage to Media Activism; has written numerous monographs on topics including performance, privacy, pedagogy, media, and education; is a co-editor of Visualizing the Web: Evaluating Online Design from A Visual Communication Perspective; and author of Research, Write, Create: Connecting Scholarship to Digital Media (w/T Gibson). 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 Digital Humanities and 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 led a team designing health promotion media literacy workshops. The New York State Department of Health and the Children’s Services Council of the United Way funded this multiyear research about health education, media literacy, and visual communication.