"Doing Disney" Fosters media literacy in freshmen
2005; Rapid Intellect Group; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1096-1453
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoAbstract Media-literate citizens understand that cultural productions transmit ideologies and influence private and public life. The assignment sequence uses academic and non-academic sources to engage college freshmen composition students in reading and writing about in order to develop media literacy, helping them become more critical and helping them understand the cognitive dissonance that leads to real learning. Introduction Having been avid of media eighteen years or more, most college freshmen have unconsciously absorbed a worldview which endorses consumerism, validates the most ubiquitous messages of culture, and balks at criticizing the producers of media. Developing an understanding that media productions are ideological and that profit, not social or personal development, is the driving factor behind those productions may help them see that a quite limited range of acceptable emotions, behaviors, and futures are being sold to them in supposedly ideology-free packages. Developing media literacy in college students also serves my disciplinary goals freshman composition by reinforcing that writing is inquiry, that writing is a tool learning and a tool change. I introduce the students to Kenneth Burke's idea of the parlor, the ongoing conversation. Burke writes Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about.... You listen a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110-111) What I want to do is prepare students to join the social construction of our world by becoming media-literate citizens. Using documentaries and articles, I engage my freshman composition students in critical analysis of films, focusing particularly on images of women and minorities in their most popular animated features. Doing Disney while teaching the basic writing strategies of summary, paraphrase, and synthesis allows students to read and write about a topic they already have familiarity and experience with while achieving my larger mission of making students into more critical of the media by helping them see that ideologies inform every public message. This media literacy project is inspired in part by Henry Giroux's The Mouse that Roared, which recommends examining how media culture has become a substantial, if not the primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms that up and legitimate particular subject positions--what it means to claim an identity as male, female, white, black, citizen, noncitizen. The media culture defines childhood, the national past, beauty, truth, and social agency. (2-3) programming is, he asserts, largely aimed at teaching young people to be consumers (3). Giroux acknowledges that is not a monolithic evil giant, conspiring against democracy, but he urges us to examine the powerful and appealing images projects of fun, magic, and innocence for the futures they envision, the values they promote, and the forms of identifications they offer (7). Narrowing this charge to a specific analysis of values and identifications associated with gender and race provides an easily-discerned framework developing media literacy. …
Referência(s)