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Re-imagining Media Education: Media Detectives-in-Training Pilot Project
Author: Kym Stewart. .... A lack of media-education-teacher-training opportunities and media-education materials for elementary teachers, combined with the already-busy schedules of teachers, have often forced media-education programs to be overlooked or relegated to the margins of the BC curriculum. This project, collaboratively developed by Kym Stewart, an IERG associate and Education graduate student with an extensive media studies background, and Jude Comeau, a wonderfully energetic Grade 3 teacher at Armstrong Elementary School in Burnaby, BC, seeks to provide teacher training by presenting examples of imaginatively-based, media-education lessons, and by supporting the teacher as she creates space for the exploration of children’s media culture in classroom discussions. This is part one of a two-part article.
This media-education project focuses on helping students become “Media Detectives-in-Training.” Becoming detectives provides the students with a framework in which to examine their media environment more closely. As the lessons progress, the students are provided with situations to hone their detective skills including: opportunities to examine ‘clues’ found in media texts, images and advertising; go undercover to create their own ads; collect data through surveys; conduct interviews and, finally, analyze the data as they create a detective portfolio and report. The focus of the project is to provide an environment in which the students can reflect on their own relationships with media culture. The curriculum developed is not necessarily viewed as a series of lessons to be completed but rather as an adventure of personal transformation and reflection.
Cognitive tools to be used in the classroom, such as story, binary opposites, jokes and humour, a sense of mystery, drama, heroes and heroines are commonly found in children’s media programs and advertising. However, as Egan (1997) comments, “It is a little odd that the eight- to fifteen-year-old’s enjoyment of books, TV shows, and films that deal with the exotic and the extreme has had so little impact on learning theories and curriculum planning” (p. 85). The fact that purveyors of popular electronic media have been much more successful in understanding and capitalizing on children’s imaginations suggests that media education needs to be viewed through a broader educational theory that focuses on students’ emotional and intellectual engagement.
Our April/May newsletter will contain part 2 of this article, in which Kym provides some examples of her use of IE frameworks for this project.