On a typical day in my class, you will have the makings of a mashup: a combination of old and new material recycled into fresh meaning. One student wears a T-shirt emblazoned with "Gleek" in homage to the popular TV show Glee; another reluctantly pulls out the ear buds of her iPod, trailing music from the rock band The Killers; two boys wax poetic over the 20-year anniversary of The Simpsons. Meanwhile, each student scribbles a response to the prompt on the board: "Explain the importance of screens in your life." Students' answers includeIf we didn't have screens, we'd have to find new ways to communicate.School creates stress, which in a way makes kids go to screens. The screens become more and more common as stress levels go up.Technology and screens have become such a part of our everyday lives that we might not know what to do without them.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey (Rideout, Foehr, & Roberts, 2010) indicates that the average time 8- to 18-year-olds spend with computer screens is almost the equivalent of the time a typical adult spends at work—seven hours a day. That's longer than the typical school day, longer than any other activity except sleep. Young people's answers to the survey show how pervasive on-screen entertainment and interaction are in teenagers' world (see "<EMPH TYPE="4">Screen-Saturated Teens"
Screens, Skills, and Good Work
How can this reality inform us as educators? If we break down the skills we want students to gain and the online activities teens want to do, we can arrive at a learning model that uses their prized activities to reinforce necessary skills. It's not just about bringing cell phones or iPods into the classroom for creative enhancements to lessons, however; teachers must embrace the notion of the modern-day child as cocreator of his or her hyperstimulated, cyberconnected, visual, parody-laden world. We live in a participatory culture, where even children perceive themselves as having authority as content creators. Why not, then, show young people the power of the screen to help them play a socially responsible role in society? Why not help them create messages that can change others' thinking and actions?
For the past two years, I've used this approach as a middle school media literacy teacher. As part of a project through which local teachers wrote curriculum for sustainability education, I designed a 7th grade media literacy unit focused on analyzing television advertising and creating public service announcements (PSAs).
According to a 2008 study, health issues and fund-raising account for almost 50 percent of all PSAs; environmental themes represent a mere 4 percent (Gantz, Schwartz, Angelini, & Rideout, 2008). This clearly indicates an opportunity to promote more environmental awareness, and who better to educate and enlighten the public than those who will soon inherit this world of diminishing resources?
- A critical analysis of television advertising and public service announcements.
- Lessons on sustainability and the environment—which both supported and enhanced our science and social studies departments' lessons.
- Instruction on creating public service announcements.
Seventh graders are at the perfect developmental moment for this type of learning. They've been exposed to enough television commercials to participate in informed discussion about advertising, they are experienced enough in the real world to know that advertising messages can promote change, and they're mature enough to take responsibility for a video shoot. It's not sufficient, however, to throw these components in front of students and say, We're going to have so much fun! As students create technology-enhanced products, learning has to take place; teachers have to see growth and know that seeds have been sown for synthesizing that learning.
I planned to assess four components as I taught this unit: whether students' work showed excellence, engagement, ethics, and flow. These first three are qualities that Howard Gardner, William Damon, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as elements of good work in their 12-year examination of how workers in various fields define and embody high-quality work (Gardner, 2008). Gardner explained the first three elements in a 2008 address he gave at a meeting sponsored by the International School of Geneva:We define good work as work that embodies three Es: excellence in a technical way; engagement [meaning] that people are meaningfully involved with what they are doing and they find it motivating. … and ethical, behaving responsibly in your world as a worker. … The challenge of good work is to intertwine those three Es.
The fourth component is Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, which, for a student, manifests itself in accomplishing a significant challenge using existing skills, while acquiring new skills to meet greater challenges in the future. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990/2008). One highly unscientific method I use to assess flow is whether students often say, "Is the period over already?"
I've found that when working to create an authentic product using technology, middle schoolers show all four of these qualities. Students are highly engaged, work together respectfully, and come up with innovative ideas and excellent PSAs. One group used the special effects in the iMovie editing program to render their video in black and white and add a smog effect to outdoor scenes. Their PSA depicted students leaving the school building and donning face masks to protect against the pollution, with eerie music accompanying the somber action.
"Light Bulb" Moments
Media literacy education involves experiencing, analyzing, and making media products. At the start of the unit, I expose students to a wide array of television advertising from 1964 to today, letting them investigate the effects of advertising on U.S. culture. A variety of classic, high-quality television commercials are available at websites like www.ClassicTVAds.com and www.Superbowl-ads.com, and on YouTube. After selecting appropriate content, I prepare a playlist and show the ads to the class on an interactive whiteboard. By focusing on advertising's overt and covert messages, students gain an understanding of marketers' goals and of their own susceptibility to advertising tactics. We examine target audience; the approaches by which advertisers convey messages (humor, parody, nostalgia, expert opinion or celebrity endorsement, to name a few); persuasive language and imagery; and the belief systems marketers sell alongside products and services.
Apple Computer's 25-year history of TV ads shows compellingly how advertising can shape a culture's thinking. Starting with Apple's "1984" Super Bowl commercial, students discover how this campaign began with the message that Apple computers will give users power and progressed to the message that Apple products embody style, "cool," and simplicity. In the last decade, Apple has personified the products: With an ad campaign using actors as stand-ins for computers, the company persuaded an entire generation that Apple products were hip, young, and attractive (like the "Mac Guy"), whereas personal computers were old, square, and boring (like the "PC Guy"). Tallying up how many students in the class have iPods (as opposed to other MP3 players) makes the case that advertising can change the way people think and act.
These lessons create "light bulb" moments. As an exit ticket after one class, I ask students to write down a time when a television commercial made them buy something, try something new, or change a habit. I make a graph showing how many reported doing each of these things, and students marvel that the longest bar by far is the "buy something" category—with an inordinate number of purchases being Apple products.
As we move into public service advertising, we examine two popular campaigns (the " Above the Influence" antidrug campaign and "The Truth" antismoking campaign), and look at a variety of PSAs about sustainability. Students are intrigued to note that the same techniques used in commercial advertising are used in public service ads—aha! Engagement is strongly evident during this phase of the unit. (OLet's face it, what kid wouldn't want to spend a 42-minute period at school watching commercials?). Students begin demonstrating excellence by becoming adept at analyzing ads, to the point where they come in each day with new stories about commercials they deconstructed while watching TV the night before. Opportunities to demonstrate ethical behavior follow.
The Flow of Good Work
- Understanding what will happen if we don't change.
- Showing that actions are better than words.
- Using powerful images.
- Showing people how.
- Getting leaders involved.
- Making change seem fun.
Such answers inform students' thinking as they work in small groups to create a 30-second PSA for television on a topic of interest to them related to sustainability. I teach students such skills as assigning jobs and roles, storyboarding, script writing, location scouting, equipment handling, acting, and filming with attention to lighting and angles. Student groups have several days to show me their ideas for approval (to make sure we cover a variety of topics) and put their plans together. I remind them of the importance of their message and that a final tag line must clearly reiterate it—then I move to the sidelines and let students go to work.
I've observed that when four to five 7th graders brainstorm ideas for a project involving communications technology, they quickly come to consensus. They assign roles based on individual talents, and—although each offers his or her own input—come together as a unit with one creative idea that blends all that input, keeping their message clear throughout. The period always flies too quickly for students, and they produce all the required planning materials on or before deadline.
When the time comes for video production, I allow students to film on any part of our school campus, provided they have requested and been granted permission. I allow student teams to leave the classroom for the entire period to shoot footage. Because video shot outside always looks much better, we're slaves to the weather, but students are supremely resourceful, using rainy days for indoor practice or setup. Occasionally, they recruit younger students to act in PSAs, and they take full responsibility for providing props (Some of the more interesting things living in my classroom have been a truck tire and an Earth costume.)
For example, for one particularly effective PSA, students set up the video camera in front of a library scene in which two students sat on chairs reading books. As they shot the video, students stopped the recording multiple times to remove one item from the scene: first a book, then a table, a student, even the chairs. Eventually, one student was left alone on the floor, looking puzzled. The PSA then cut to a photo of a polar bear struggling to find ice to stand on. Cut to the tag line: "What if everything in your world disappeared too?"
The ease and relaxation I see in student groups by the time postproduction rolls around is remarkable. Each group assembles around a laptop, importing video, raucously laughing at bloopers, learning how to whittle down days of shooting to 30 seconds of message. Students learn techniques for special effects and teach one another, gliding from table to table to view partially finished products and throw compliments back and forth. I have 10 MacBook laptops for students to use in a mobile lab equipped with iLife software: We use iMovie to edit videos, GarageBand to compose music, iPhoto for occasional still shots, and iDVD to burn the disks for television and website broadcast.
Sharing the Message
This unit leads to an extraordinary experience for students—sharing their message and getting exposure for their work. Students first share their PSAs with parents at a "broadcasting premiere," then with the local community through the school district's cable television station, and finally with the world on the school's website. Realizing that their voices will be heard beyond the school walls is a potent motivator for these screenagers.
Last year, students had one more powerful outlet for their messages: an exhibit at the Children's Environmental Literacy Foundation's Expo '10, an annual sustainability showcase. Using laptops to display their PSAs(as well as two "green report" newscasts they had made), the 7th graders did an amazing job representing their school. Taking turns manning their table, students welcomed a continuous stream of fascinated and impressed visitors, many of whom were unfamiliar with media literacy education. Visitors complimented the students' hard work. One summed up the evening in three words: "Articulate, passionate students."
This unit has taught me much about how, why, and when screenagers will rise to the occasion. My students mastered myriad technical elements of video production and postproduction. They brought meaningful messages to their global community regarding recycling, diminishing resources, and water conservation, which nurtured a profound understanding of ethical behavior and responsibility. Students displayed focused engagement and something I can only describe as self-respect. By honoring who middle school students are (identities-in-progress who want to simultaneously fit in and show the world their individuality); what they love to do (interact with their media-rich world as observers and creators); and how they prefer to learn, we can lead them to excellence, engagement, and ethical conduct.
