Yo! Are you hip
to these? Are you in the know?
Cause here's where Ego
Minis are made to go--
In Yo' Mouth!
Who needs a plate?
In Yo' Mouth!
Cause they're made to
fit your face!
In Yo' Mouth!
They're mega-yum.
In Yo' Mouth!
The taste is pure fun!
Walking down the corridors
of a middle school in suburban Massachusetts, the distinctive sound of
a television commercial stands out against the more traditional patter
of classroom noises. Inside, a teacher is leading a discussion about this
particular TV ad. A list of all the computer graphics and other images
appears on the blackboard-- more than 30 different descriptions-- written
in a student's handwriting.
"Who's the target
audience?" asks the teacher.
"Boys-- our age," responds
a student. "They only showed boys in this ad."
"And the music-- it was
like rap music, sung by boys," chimes in another.
"It's sung in a kind
of agressive way," the student continues. "And the words, 'In Yo'
Mouth'-- that reminds me of 'In Yo' Face!'"
"What's a synonym for
'In Yo' Face?'" asks the teacher, feigning ignorance.
The class erupts in laughter,
and a chorus of replies follow as children call out their synonyms. The
teacher flips open the thesaurus and adds some additional words: defiance,
bravado, dare.
The teacher changes the
pace. "In your notebooks, everybody take five minutes and write down
one or two reasons why the producer chose this phrase for the Lego Mini
Waffles campaign." Notebooks fly open, pens get located and students
get quickly down to writing. This is clearly something they have been
doing regularly in this class. After five minutes, he asks students
to read their ideas aloud. Six hands are in the air.
A dark-haired girl begins
to read. "The producer wants to show that eating Lego Mini Waffles is
a way of showing independence, being defiant."
"The producer wants kids
to think it's cool to eat breakfast on the run, not with a plate, not
sitting down," reads another student.
"The producer might want
to link Lego Mini Waffles with the attitude of 'In Yo' Face!' because
that daring attitude is so popular with kids nowadays," says another
boy.
After a few more such interpretations,
the teacher wraps up the lesson. "So sometimes commercials can use people's
feelings-- like defiance-- to link to their products. For your critical
viewing project tonight at home, I'd like you to look for a commercial
that uses bravado, especially kids defying adults. If you find one,
write down the name of a commercial and be prepared to describe it to
us tomorrow."
Then, the teacher switches
gears to "Flowers for Algernon," the short story they're reading, as
the teacher notes Charly's growing defiance towards his new friends
at this point in the novel. The whole media literacy enterprise this
day, clearly a regular part of this middle school English classroom
routine, has taken up about ten minutes of the period.
Media Literacy in K
- 12 Education
In more and more classrooms
in the United States, educators are beginning to help students acquire
the skills they need to manage in a media-saturated environment, recognizing
that in its broadest sense, literacy must include the ability to skillfully
'read' and 'write' in a wide range of message forms, especially considering
the dominance of image-based electronic media. In fact, the powerful
concept of literacy was the driving force that led leaders in the media
literacy movement to adopt a comprehensive definition of media literacy
as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and produce communication
in a variety of forms" in a conference sponsored by the Aspen Institute
in 1992. Put simply, media literacy includes the skills of literacy
extended to all message forms, including those little black squiggles
on white paper. Media literacy includes reading and writing, speaking
and listening, critical viewing, and the ability to make your own messages
using a wide range of technologies, including audio technology, billboards,
cameras, camcorders, and computers. However, media literacy is not a
new subject area and it is not just about television: it is literacy
for the information age.
Educators find numerous
reasons to introduce media literacy as part of the curriculum. Some
see media literacy as a tool to build relevance into contemporary education,
building links between the classroom and the culture, so that students
will see how important themes and issues resonate in popular culture
as they do in the study of literature, history or social studies. Some
see media literacy as a citizenship survival skill, necessary to be
a thoughtful consumer and an effective citizen in a superhighway-driven
media age. Some see media literacy as a kind of protection for children
against the dangers and evils engendered by the excesses of television,
and they also see media literacy as an antidote to manipulation and
propaganda.
Others see media literacy
as a new kind of English education, learning to appreciate and analyze
ads and sitcoms and films with the same tools used to study poetry,
short story and the novel. And then there are those who see media literacy
as a way to give children the opportunity to tell their own stories
and better understand the power of those who shape the stories of our
culture and our times.
But there are other visions
of media literacy, more narrow and more problematic. Unfortunately,
some see media literacy as option for low-performing, underachieving
students whose interest can be piqued by TV and nothing else. Some see
it as a kind of vocational education, where kids can learn to make TV
and head for careers like the grownups they see on the screen. Some
see it as a chance to play with sophisticated electronic tools, like
character generators, video toasters and wave-form monitors. Still others
see media literacy as a way to make children aware of the web of "false
consciousness" that capitalism has woven into our psyches. Some think
media literacy is just about making "good choices" about what to watch
or read. And many simply think the curriculum is already too crowded
and teachers already too incompetent, burned-out or overburdened to
make room for media literacy. It is because American educators have
so many diverse perspectives on the benefits and value of media literacy
and the best strategies for implementation within public education that
its last twenty years of growth has been so slow.
In Europe, by contrast,
media literacy has gained some measure of official status within Great
Britain, Canada, Australia, Scotland, Spain and other nations, where
media literacy is required as part of the language arts program in grades
7 through 12. Most of the training American teachers now receive is
strongly patterned after models provided by British scholars, including
Len Masterman, David Buckingham, David Lusted, Cary Bazalgette as well
as British and Canadian teachers who have written about their experiences
teaching media analysis and media production to young people.
With this nation's renewed
interest in children and education in the 1990s, there have been significant
signs of recent growth in the media literacy movement emerging in the
United States. In the State of North Carolina, for example, media literacy
is included in both the Communication Skills (English) curriculum and
in the Information Skills curriculum. In many communities, educators
have begun the process of thinking seriously about expanding the concept
of literacy to include media. While there was only one teacher-training
program in media literacy in 1993, in 1994 there were twelve different
programs held across the United States. However, in most communities,
media literacy exists due to the energy and initiative of a single teacher,
not because of a coordinated, community-wide programmatic plan of implementation.
At present, only one such plan is now underway, in the community of
Billerica, Massachusetts, which is developing a comprehensive media
literacy program that reaches all students across the curriculum in
grades K - 12.
*********
At circle time in a kindergarten
class, the teacher shows the children two samples of television programs:
an ad and a cartoon. "How are these different?" asks the teacher.
"The first one
was shorter," says a little brown-haired girl.
"The first one had real
people and real cereal," says a boy.
"The second one was a
cartoon," says another.
The teacher notices that her
students do not spontaneously use the word "ad," "commercial" or "advertising,"
so she introduces the word to them: ads are messages that are trying to
sell a product. Over the next few days, they look at a few ads, and after
each one, the teacher asks the children to describe how the ad tried to
sell the product.
"By making it
look real big," says one girl.
"By using music to make
it exciting," says another. "By having a story with cartoon animals
and birds.
Then the teacher invites a
parent into the kindergarten to make a home video of the kindergarten.
The parent tapes about ten minutes of the morning class. At the end of
the day, the children watch the tape and sit, transfixed in rapt attention
by the familiar images made novel by the camera's presence.
"Did this tape
show everything that happened in our class today?" asks the teacher.
Heads nod in agreement.
"Yes," they intone in unison.
"It showed us putting
our coats on hooks."
"It showed Tim and Kimitha
in the loft."
"Was there anything that
happened in our class that was not shown?" the teacher
asks again.
The children look thoughtful.
Arthur raises his hand slowly. "I came in late today. It didn't show me
putting my coat on the hook," he says.
Gradually, a flurry of
hands rise up. All the children can think of things that weren't shown.
The teacher carefully listens to all the responses and explains to the
children that a camera can never show everything at a scene. The teacher
notes, "A camera can only ever show part of an event, and it's the person
who uses the camera who decides what to show and what to leave out."
Media Production and
Media Analysis
While media production
is not common in every school, there is no real shortage of media production
in many US schools. Videotapes of student sporting events and dramatic
performances have been common since the 1970's. According to teachers,
coaches often have the latest and most modern video production equipment
and playback facilities. And of course, parents are out in force with
their video cameras documenting school plays, recitals and and all gatherings
that show their little ones interacting with classmates.
Student generated production
activities are found less frequently in American schools, but are more
and more evident at the secondary level, where students may make their
own morning news program, instead of reading the ubiquitous morning
announcements over the PA system. High school students have made their
own music videos, taped commercials for their own school plays, made
satirical "Saturday Night Live" skits in after-school programs, delivered
critiques of the new principal using computer publishing programs, and
handed in class assignments (and college entrance essays) on videotape.
And of course, student production in journalism and the performing arts
has long been an important part of secondary education.
In a culture which values
technology as the mark of progress and the completion of professional
quality media programs as a sign of success, "doing stuff" with video
(or better yet, with computers and video) is sometimes touted as cutting
edge education. It is for this reason that educators often jump on the
media technology bandwagon. However, student-based media production
activities do not necessarily build media literacy skills. Sometimes,
adult preoccupation with media technology and ego investment in media
messages interfere with a child's actual engagement in the complex process
of learning to create meaningful messages.
One young teacher working
with 8-12 year olds eagerly showed off the students' final videotape
in a public screening at a private school's summer arts program. It
was a satiric take-off of "Planet of the Apes," with students taking
the on-camera roles and reading lines obviously scripted by the teacher.
The camerawork, editing, sound effects and music selection were all
clearly the work of the teacher, someone who was undoubtedly headed
for graduate school in film production. Conversation with the children
participating in the program revealed that they learned quite a bit
about taking direction from a filmmaker, but little about the process
and skills of filmmaking itself.
It's not surprising that
in an educational environment which values product over process, media
production classes (in both print and video) become playgrounds for
creative grownups who make all the really important decisions about
the construction of the school newspaper or class video project, then
set young people on the task of finishing the scut work. Many young
people who are disillusioned or cynical about student journalism programs
in high school point to their inability to take real responsibility
for the choice of message content in the paper. Similarly, plenty of
video magazine programs are produced by students who are coerced into
making promotional messages for the sports program, the foreign language
program, or whatever programs the grownups approve. Such is more or
less standard educational fare in our schools.
Of course, such practices
occur because to truly empower children and youth with the ability to
design the content and form of their own messages would entail tremendous
risk to the current educational system. The issues which concern our
teenagers today-- sexuality, classism and racism, drug use, violence,
the environment and the nation's future-- are topics that most educators
are unprepared to bring into the classroom. Teachers and parents in
a community often find the voices of young people very uncomfortable
to hear and nearly impossible to respond to.
One of the biggest failures
of contemporary journalism education has been in defining its mission
as the cultivation of interest in the profession, focusing on developing
young people's interests in careers in journalism. This goal is far
too narrow, considering the oft-touted and imminent danger of losing
the next generation of news readers. Journalism educators must begin
to carve out a larger and more productive goal, one that reaches all
our children: helping young people develop the citizenship skills to
be effective, skillful and critical news readers and viewers. Such skills
are essential for full participation in a democratic society, yet they
are skills that few young people get the opportunity to develop. When
newspapers are used in American classrooms, too often they are used
for vocabulary practice and reading comprehension, and not to strengthen
students' critical understanding of newsgathering practices, their reasoning
or analytic skills.
As an effort to reform
current educational practice, media literacy advocates explicitly aim
to link the skills of analysis with student production activities, in
many of the same ways that language arts educators link reading and
writing as interdependent skills. But what exactly are the skills of
analysis? And what kinds of media analysis are most appropriate for
children of different ages? Most media literacy programs stress the
following key concepts, adapted from British and Canadian educators:
Messages are
constructed. The construction process is invisible to the readers
of newspapers or the viewers of television. Awareness of the choices
involved in the making of media messages sensitizes readers and viewers
to the subtle shaping forces at work-- in the choice of photo or cutline
in a newspaper, in the images, pacing and editing of a TV news program.
Noticing the construction of a message helps one become a more critical,
questioning reader and viewer-- but this kind of noticing doesn't come
naturally to the process of reading or watching TV. It is a learned
behavior.
Messages are representations
of the world. The reason why media messages are so powerful is
that viewers and readers depend on them for their understanding of
the culture. One reason why children are thought to be more vulnerable
to media influences is because they have less direct real-world experience
to compare with the representations provided by television and mass
media. Are police officers really like the guys on "Cops?" Are high
school students really as cool as the ones on "Beverly Hills 90210?"
Is our community really as dangerous and violent as it appears from
reading the newspaper's Metro section? Understanding how media messages
shape our visions of the world and our sense of our selves is a central
concept in media literacy.
Messages have economic
and political purposes and contexts. Understanding that mass media
industries sell audiences to advertisers is a powerful new concept
to many American adults, who are barely aware of how a newspaper can
be delivered to the doorstep for 35 cents a day or how television
can enter the home at no cost. Teaching this concept to young people,
of course, can be sticky, for how you teach about it depends on your
ideological perspective on advertising, market economics, the industrial
revolution and late-20th century capitalism. Individuals employed
by giant media companies might not feel comfortable with the idea
of high school teachers and students analyzing their ownership patterns
and acquisitions, looking critically at their annual reports and reading
their trade magazines. However, any meaningful critical discourse
about media messages must include a careful and systematic examination
of the economic and political contexts in which films, TV shows, newspapers
and news programs are produced.
Individuals create
meaning in media messages through interpretation.
While a family may occasionally
sit down to watch a TV program together, the meanings they make of
the program will differ. Based on contemporary scholarship in literature
and the humanities which examines the intersection between the reader
and the text as the source of meaning, this perspective focuses on
recognizing and critically analyzing the pleasures and satisfactions
that readers and viewers get from the experience of media consumption.
For example, in one English class, a 10th grade student submitted
an essay on "The World Wrestling Federation" analyzing the powerful
symbols of good and evil embedded in the setting, costume and music
of the program, interpreting the typical impotence of the referee
as a defense of vigilante justice, and describing his own comfort
in knowing the good guy will always win. After reading this young
viewer's thoughtful, creative work, who can say that WWF is trash
television? While not being completely relativistic, media literacy
advocates often refuse to line up with those individuals who have
a more traditional perspective on children's TV, those who are very
comfortable intoning the merits of PBS and the evils of popular, mass
audience fare, championing the "good" shows and decrying the "bad"
shows. It may not be so important what you watch, media literacy advocates
say, but how you watch it.
*****
For years, many educators
(and some parents, too) have stood like ostriches, sticking necks in
the sand and trying very hard to ignore media culture. To many of us,
television was the enemy of the fine arts, culture, history and all
that is best about civilization. The reasoning went like this: if only
we ignore television, our children will ignore it and all will be as
it was before television.
Now that the culture is
almost totally transformed by the compelling electronic and visual experiences
that enter our living rooms each day, the ostrich stance seems more
and more ridiculous. It's time to face up to the media culture we have
created and the media culture we have consumed. It's time that parents
and teachers begin to help our children to embrace and celebrate the
messages worth treasuring, to analyze and understand the economic and
political forces which sustain it, and to develop the skills and new
habits we all need to think carefully and wisely about the messages
we create ourselves and the abundant messages we receive.