In this section:
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The teacher will be:
- Familiar with the concept of Media Image Literacy
- Familiar with how Media Literacy can be delivered into the classroom
- To emphasise the importance of why children should be aware of who is creating the Media message
Time: 40 Minutes to complete Part 1
Time: 40 Minutes to complete Part 2
Including 5 Minutes per task to compose your answers
Reading, Writing, Interpreting: Literacy in the 21st Century
The importance of literacy to an ever developing society is undeniable. The common understanding of literacy is the ability to read and write, however since man put pen to paper, literacy has enabled man form specific words that when combined, convey meaning. In turn teaching the young to use words to understand and express ever more complex ideas has been the goal of education as it too evolves over the centuries. Without literacy there is no creation or spread of ideas and without the spread of ideas society stagnates and ceases to evolve.
Literacy itself has evolved in the modern age of technology. How we receive information and how it is communicated has become more frequent and more varied in the information society. According to the PBS Frontline documentary "The Merchants of Cool" (2009) children view an average of 3,000 commercials a day, amounting to 10,000,000 by the time they enter adulthood. It is these commercials that dictate (or appear to dictate) how children should look, how they should act, and what they should have. Literacy has therefore taken on a new and expanded meaning in the world of the child. Children are consumers of information and media from a very young age and as a result, need to learn how to become responsible, conscious, and critical consumers of this media. This is a new literacy that extends beyond the traditional ability to read and write. It requires children to engage analytically with media to understand different levels of meaning with each interaction.
Thoman & Jolls (2003) comment how the convergence of media and technology in a global culture is changing the way we learn about the world and challenging the very foundations of education and therefore the concept of literacy. No longer is it enough to be able to read the printed word or communicate through writing; children and adults alike need to develop the ability to critically interpret the powerful images of a multimedia culture as well as express themselves in multiple media forms.
Media Image Literacy Education provides a framework and a pedagogy for the new literacy required for negotiating the information society that the 21st Century has become. Moreover it paves the way towards mastering the skills required for life long learning and development in an ever changing world with ever evolving communicative formats.
Information has become a constant; it comes from all around us, not only through words on a piece of paper but increasingly through images and sounds on multiple formats, all as part of everyday life in a multimedia culture. Although meaning appears to be obvious and self-evident, in truth, modern forms of communication use a complex audio/visual "language" which has its own rules (grammar) and which can be used to express many-layered concepts and ideas about the world in one single message.
During this course we will be taking a closer look at how the camera has the ability to portray multiple visual and imaginative images. Not everything may be obvious as it first seems, and as images go by at speed, we may be taking on more information than we are consciously aware of!
If our children are to successfully navigate through this multimedia culture, they need to be fluent in "reading" and "writing" the language of images and sounds just as we have always taught them to "read" and "write" the language of the printed word.
In the last 40 years, the field of Media Literacy Education has emerged to organize and promote the importance of teaching this expanded notion of "literacy." The core of Media Literacy Education is made up of higher-order critical and creative thinking skills. This literacy allows for real intellectual freedom and allows full participatory citizenship in a 21st Century democratic society. That is knowing how to identify key concepts, how to make connections between multiple ideas, how to ask pertinent questions, formulate a response, identify fallacies.
Media Literacy Education also expands the concept of "text" to include not just written texts but any message form (verbal, aural, visual or all three together!) used to create and then pass ideas back and forth between people.
Watch the following advertisement (Select one from the following website http://www.tellyads.com/show_movie.php?filename=TA8484 or use one you have yourself) and answer the questions listed below. To help develop your thought process write the answers down on a piece of paper.
- Who created this message?
- What techniques are used to attract my attention?
- How might different people understand this message differently from me?
- What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
- Why was this message sent?
This is a very useful and easy activity to do with your class as it can help develop the children's understanding of media literacy. If you don't have access to the internet in the classroom you could use a Film commercial/Trailer that runs before any of the Hollywood DVD's you have.
The teaching approach that best suits FÍS is called the "inquiry process" and includes both analytical (deconstruction) skills as well as creative communications (construction / production) skills. When analysis is combined with creative production, theory unites with application, thereby allowing students to discover and express their learning in an interconnected and natural process. Each enriches the other.
Since media messages are transmitted through so many different film processes, the combination of analysis with production also incorporates multiple intelligences in the learning process (linguistic/verbal, logical/mathematical, musical/rhythmic, visual/spatial, body/kinesthetic, intrapersonal and interpersonal). While both activities can happen independently there is much to gain by meshing the two into one cohesive activity of analysis and production - that is what we refer to in the FÍS Resource Pack as "Looking and Responding" and "Making and Doing"
"Reading"
For students to have the capacity to "look and respond", students need the skills and abilities to "read" their multi-media world and understand its many layers of messages. The process of taking apart messages, whether print or electronic, is referred to in many ways: analysis, deconstruction, decoding or "reading" in the traditional terminology of reading/writing literacy. Media analysis develops critical thinking skills and involves all the competencies of Bloom's Taxonomy (knowledge, analysis, comprehension, application, synthesis and evaluation) and is an important part of media literacy education because:
- It strengthens observation and interpretation.
- It deepens understanding and appreciation.
- It challenges stereotyping - both misrepresentations and/or under- representations.
- It illuminates bias and point of view.
- It uncovers motivations.
- It exposes implicit messages that are less obvious.
- It gives perspective and meaning to the media creators.
- It enlightens society about the effects and implications of a message.
In today's multi-media culture "writing" is far more complex than putting pen to paper. Today students may "write" a PowerPoint report for science class, "create" a persuasive poster about teen smoking for their health project or, in American History, express the Native American's point of view about Christopher Columbus by drawing an original political cartoon. All of these projects require the same creative thinking abilities as writing words on paper: organize your ideas, draft and redraft your words, images and/or sounds, video, edit, polish and present the final product. Student production is an important component of media literacy education for many reasons:
- It involves the application of multiple intelligences.
- It requires active hands-on learning.
- It increases motivation and the enjoyment of learning.
- It generates new avenues for alternative representations.
- It creates outlets to communicate beyond the classroom.
- It reinforces self-esteem and self-expression.
- It offers "real world" practical application of theoretical concepts.
On a piece of paper write down 4 or 5 real classroom examples of where Looking and Responding & Make and Doing come into play?
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