Amy Aidman

Dr. Amy Aidman "is the Associate Dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois and has a faculty affiliation in the Institute of Communications Research. Her research and teaching focus on 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 co-author on Media in the Make-Believe Worlds of Children: When Harry Potter Meets Pokemon in Disneyland (with Maya Gotz, Dafna Lemish, and Hye Sung Moon, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2005) a book about an international study of children's fantasies and their relationship to media.

"She is a contributing author to 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. 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 was Associate Director of the Institute of Communications Research Initiative on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded through a grant from the Ford Foundation. She 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."