Close Reading the Media

Literacy Lessons and Activities for Every Month of the School Year

Frank Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315443027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teach middle school students to become savvy consumers of the TV, print, and online media bombarding them every day. In this timely book copublished by Routledge and MiddleWeb, media literacy expert Frank W. Baker offers thematic lessons for every month of the school year, so you can engage students in learning by having them analyze the real world around them. Students will learn to think critically about photos, advertisements, and other media and consider the intended purposes and messages. Topics include:

• Helping students detect fake news;
• Unraveling the messages in TV advertising;
• Looking at truth vs propaganda in political ads and debates;

• Revealing how big media influences the news we read;
• Understanding how pictures changed America during the Civil Rights Movement;

• Exploring the language of film and the symbols of costume design;

• Thinking about how media appeals to our emotions;

• Examining branding, product placement, and the role of celebrity;

• Reading and interpreting iconic news images;
• And much, much more!

In addition, the book's lesson plans contain connections to key standards and step-by-step activities you can use immediately. With this practical book, you'll have all the tools and ideas you need to help today's students successfully navigate their media-filled world.

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August

This opening chapter will introduce you and your students to media literacy and the art of asking questions. Among other things, media literacy seeks to raise your students’ awareness of how much time they spend with media, because frankly they don’t know. This chapter and its resources are designed to provide a framework for the remaining chapters, so you might wish to conduct these activities first before moving on.

The Common Core teaching standards emphasize “close reading,” so you’ll find an abundance of ideas and resources for engaging your students at deeper levels of comprehension.

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LESSON 1

Exploring Media Literacy with Students

Background

Teachers can use this “defining” exercise to introduce the media literacy “big idea” to students and explore some facets of media literacy education.

Look up any published definition of media literacy and you’re likely to find analyze and create (or its less robust synonym produce) – two words associated with higher-order thinking skills. Most teachers would expect to have students “analyze” media as part of literacy learning. Media literacy educators believe it is also important to have them “create” media as a way to gain a deeper understanding of how persuasion and the manipulation of words and images can be used to shape our thoughts and desires. You’ll want to make sure you introduce both these concepts as you work through this activity.

Here are two often-cited definitions of media literacy to keep in mind. You may wish to present these to students during or after the exercise described below.

This succinct definition was crafted by a conference of educators in 1992:

A media-literate person . . . can access, analyze, evaluate, and produce both print and electronic media.

(www.medialit.org/reading-room/aspen-media-literacy-conference-report-part-ii)

This longer, richer definition (one of my favorites) was written by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1989:

Media Literacy is concerned with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the nature of mass media, the techniques used by them and the impact of these techniques. More specifically, it is education that aims to increase students’ understanding and enjoyment of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products.

(www.medialit.org/reading-room/what-media-literacy-canadian-definition)

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Activity: Defining Media Literacy

1. In your classroom (on the board or some other visible place) create two columns with the words MEDIA and LITERACY where you can make a list under each term.

2. Ask your students to imagine they’re going on a train ride across the USA and they can use only one medium to keep up with what’s going on. What would it be? Their answers will be written under the column you’ve created that says MEDIA. Many are likely to immediately say “a smartphone.” List this and any other choices. Then share a simple definition of the word. MEDIA: A means of mass communication. Ask students if the items on the list meet this definition. Strike any that do not.

3. Ask what other things might meet the definition. Do they mention books, magazines, television programs, radio, billboards, the Internet, movies, theater, social media apps, music? Add any missing media to the growing list. Depending on the size of your group, choose some or all of the mediums on the list and divide into subgroups.

4. Assign each group one form of media (you might have the forms of media printed on index cards, so you’d be distributing one card to each group). In their groups, they’ll have 10 minutes to come up with answers to these questions:

1. Three good things about my medium are . . .

2. Three not-so-good things are . . .

3. On a scale from 1–10, how good would my medium be at mass communication? Why?

4. Would advertisers want to use my medium? Why or why not?

5. At the end of the 10 minutes, a representative of each group shares their responses.

6. Next, ask your students to define the word LITERACY. Note some responses in the column. If most of the focus is on reading and writing skills, share the second definition of LITERACY: Competence or knowledge in a specified area. Then ask, “What else might we need to be literate about? Do the examples of media we’ve identified give us any clues?” Add other literacy examples to the list. Then teachers might ask “Which of these literacies might have special importance in today’s digital world?” If it hasn’t come up, students might be encouraged to think about visual literacy – the ability to comprehend the messages behind all the images we see today in mass media. The teacher might model a few examples of “reading an image.”

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7. Then ask your students: “How many of you have ever created some form of media?” Their responses can include anything from artwork to music, a video, a poem, even a movie. Students love to be able to make media. With cameras now a part of every mobile phone, computer, and e-tablet, they are already broadcasters and movie makers. Ask, “If you’ve created a form of media, what messages did you communicate? Was it effective? Why?”

8. Now have students write a 1–2-sentence definition of “media literacy.”

Teaching tip: When I’ve asked my audiences (groups of educators) to define media literacy, many of them understand the importance of analyzing or questioning media messages, but many of them do not include the fact that media literacy is also about giving students opportunities to create media with conscious attention to the messages they want to communicate.

Simply put, ANALYSIS + PRODUCTION = MEDIA LITERACY

This activity helps put media literacy into perspective. By first having students think critically about media and what media literacy means, we help them appreciate the fact that the various mediums are powerful and work on us in different ways. I am a strong advocate for teaching media literacy skills and the chapters that follow demonstrate that.

Additional Resources

Getting Started: Strategies for Introducing Media Literacy

www.medialit.org/getting-started-strategies-introducing-media-literacy-your-school-or-district

Introduction to Media Literacy

http://opi.mt.gov/pdf/TobaccoEd/IntroMediaLiteracy.pdf

Media Literacy Teaching Manual

www.alaska-ipc.org/documents/media_literacy_manual.pdf

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LESSON 2

Close Reading and What It Means for Media Literacy

Background

The Common Core Standards call for students to become detectives: learning how to observe closely, locate evidence, look for clues, and ask the right questions. But today many students don’t ask questions at all.

In my work as a media literacy consultant, I like to use media texts (and youth media) as the jumping-off point to get students asking questions.

A photograph from the morning’s news can be coupled with the question “what do you see?” A snippet from a movie can be used to teach the language of film by asking “why do you think the director put the camera there?” A magazine cover featuring the latest celebrity can be used to get students to recognize layout, design, color, font, facial expression, body language, and much more.

As I travel around the United States conducting professional development workshops with teachers, I continually hear the same refrain: our students tend to believe everything they see, read, and hear in the media and on the Internet. Apparently many educators have not yet been trained to use materials from the news and popular media as catalysts to critical inquiry. Many are uncomfortable with the idea, in fact.

Close reading of print is something that is taught in colleges of education and in professional development sessions, but close reading of non-print (radio, photography, film, video) “texts” is seldom part of this professional learning process.

That’s unfortunate because, as we all know, our students are very much drawn to this kind of media. It surrounds them. And because many now carry mobile phones or e-tablets with them, they have their media close at hand all of the time.

Activity: Learning to Question Media Texts

One way to get started is to ask students to bring in a favorite photo, magazine, advertisement, or movie. There are many ways to use these texts in a classroom activity or exercise. Depending on the media text, a variety of questions can be posed.

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In media literacy education, these general questions are most often recommended. They make an excellent poster for the media literacy-savvy classroom (see also www.frankwbaker.com/KeyQuestions0001.jpg):

• who created/produced the message?

• why was this message created: ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Close Reading the Media
• Also Available from Routledge Eye On Education and MiddleWeb
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Author
• Introduction
• 1. August
• 2. September
• 3. October
• 4. November
• 5. December
• 6. January
• 7. February
• 8. March
• 9. April
• 10. May
• Conclusion
• Glossary