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Let's Get Critical: A Media Literacy Toolkit For Parents, Kids And Teachers
We're distracted and deadened by home-video slapstick and nightly news splatter, video-game carnage and
15-minute celebrities. To help young people make sense of our ever more mediated world, parents and teachers need to teach kids the basic moves of media self-defense: the critical viewing, listening and reading skills that will enable them to
crack the cultural codes and parry the coercive messages bombarding them.
This is the core mission of the growing
worldwide movement known as "media literacy," which seeks to educate children to
become more critical consumers of information. Best of all, as kids sharpen their critical skills, they learn that media literacy — the X-Ray specs that enable critical thinkers to see that the clothes have no emperor — is fun.
The following resources from MediaChannel affiliates offer advice, lesson plans and classroom projects to help parents, teachers and young people become
more media literate.
- Aliza Dichter and Mark Dery, "Teach Kids" editors
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Wising Up
From "Teletubbies" and "Power Rangers" to the full banquet of TV and Internet offerings in all their inane, violent, and commercial glory, children feast on the mass media these days. Parents concerned about giving their children both a more nutritious media diet and the critical viewing skills to digest it will find a wealth of resources in Media Awareness Network's "Becoming a Media-Wise Family." The many articles and tip-sheets on advertising, stereotypes, media violence, video games, television and the Internet offer insights into the way the media speak to children, the messages children may receive from media, and ways to help children understand, interpret and ask questions.
From Media Awareness Network
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Feed Your Mind
Savvy teenagers should bookmark Feedback Magazine, an Australia e-zine showcasing critical and fun examinations of mass media, from the "Power and Manipulation Of News Reportage" to "Bad Career Moves In Rock." With a gallery of student-produced films on media issues, and sections on media ownership, propaganda, stereotypes, and advertising, Feedback is both a tribute to pop culture and a tool kit for critical thinking.
From Feedback Media Review
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Deconstructing At Home
The New Mexico Media Literacy Project offers some downloadable media moments taken from a movie, a newscast and advertisements and invites you to look carefully and ask questions about the hidden meanings within. NMMLP also invites students in grades 5-12 to participate in their "Bad Ad 2000" essay contest: write an essay "talking back" to an advertisement you find "annoying, misleading or offensive." To help you decode the ad's subtext, they provide a how-to guide for deep reading.
From New Mexico Media Literacy Project
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FYI On The CTA
The U.S. Congress passed the CTA, or Children's Television Act, in 1990 in response to concerns about the poor quality of educational programming on American broadcast TV. This "CTA Tool Kit" provides background and an overview of how you can monitor the networks and comment to the Federal Communications Commission, plus a series of fact sheets about kids and TV.
From Center for Media Education
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Marketplace of Ideas
Ballyhooing this section of its site as "one-stop shopping" for media-literacy tools, the Media Awareness Network draws on the time-tested expertise of educators across Canada to offer elementary- and secondary-school teachers a wealth of classroom ideas, teaching units, student handouts and background information on media. Specific topics include Ethics and Values, Family and Social Relationships, Gender Portrayal, Body Image, Tobacco Advertising, Stereotyping and Violence.
From Media Awareness Network
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Lesson Banking
Just Think's Lesson Bank is a treasure trove for teachers embarking on media-awareness units. The site provides detailed outlines for classroom projects on advertising ("Automobile Advertisements: A Case Study with the Ford Company"), radio ("Radio Revolutionized the World"), political cartoons ("Toon Talk"), feminism and media portrayals of women ("Women in Transition: From the 1950s to the 1970s"), and propaganda ("World War II Propaganda: Mobilizing Artists to Mobilize"). Kids will get a kick out of "retro" images such as the wartime pro-carpooling poster with the jaunty businessman alone in his car, a ghostly Adolf in the passenger's seat. More important, historical distance fosters critical distance; kids will be surprised to see the mind managers of the Jurassic age — you know, when boomers ruled the earth — using the same subliminal seductions employed by today's advertisers and PR experts.
From Just Think Foundation
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Homework Helper
Cultural studies and media students and teachers, as well as others interested in the academic exploration of communication, culture, and society, will find an incredible resource at this "infobase." A library of academic texts, overview articles, bibliographies and indexes, the CCMS info-base covers all the major theorists, theories, events and personalities of the media studies field. Directed towards upper-high school and college students, with a U.K. focus, this encyclopedic site even includes online and downloadable quizzes for testing your grasp of media and communication theory.
From Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Infobase
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Kids, Try This At Home
Created with the help of experts in education and Web design, Launchsite.org is a launching pad for pen-pal or chat-room friendships between kids all over the world. The emphasis here is on kid-to-kid connection in a cyber haven free of marketers and worse. Screenagers tired of point-and-shoot video slaughter or "Dawson's Creek" fan sites can participate in group activities and school projects with kids from the far corners of the map. Launchsite is rich in links, among them a worldwide directory of schools that are involved in CU-See Me video conferencing and The pH Factor, a Web site that guides kids through chemistry experiments.
From Childnet International
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Safety Net
Media coverage of the Internet suffers from bipolar disorder, mood-swinging from breathless boosterism to fear-crazed witch hunts for online pedophiles. By contrast, the Media Awareness Network's site offers sober, straightforward information about family online agreements and kid-friendly search engines. There are real-life cautionary tales about sexual predators, intended to help parents school their kids in streetwise "cybersmarts." But the creepiest stories warn parents about the strategies of online marketers — the real child molesters of cyberspace — who weasel personal information out of kids by gaining their confidence.
From Media Awareness Network
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Wired Riding Hood
Not all video games are attention-deficit causing shoot-'em-ups and car races. "CyberSense and Nonsense: The Second Adventure of the Three CyberPigs" is an animated computer game designed to help kids aged 9-12 "learn to distinguish between biased, prejudicial information and factual, objective information, and to detect bias and harmful stereotyping in online content." Available in a downloadable trial version, "CyberSense and Nonsense" is a bias detector, netiquette training, and a playful way to give kids tools for navigating the wild Web. The online guide for parents and teachers provides additional information and printable handouts.
From Media Awareness Network
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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