This study investigated how an interdisciplinary first‐year seminar focused on representations of schooling in popular culture supported the acquisition of an academic version of critical media literacy. The authors explore how tapping into students’ funds of knowledge, constructing carefully scaffolded assignments, and offering targeted, personalized feedback allowed the instructors to support students as they acquired academic and critical media literacy through recursive acts of meaning making. Findings suggest that implementing these practices may help students perform close counterreadings of media texts and compose evidence‐based arguments that examine the clear and hidden lessons that these texts teach.