Media Literacy: Developing a Critical Eye

   Media, like reading, writing and oral communication, is so deeply integrated into our daily lives that we don't realize how often we actually come into contact with it. Films, television, advertisements, images, music, it’s present in nearly everything we do. When young children start to become exposed to these different forms of media in larger and larger amounts, parents can’t be monitoring them all the time and so it is the educator’s job to teach young students to think critically about the media that surrounds us and analyze its messages. 

   In this blog, I want to discuss ads and how they can be an extremely useful tool for improving a student’s media literacy. I’ve been on an SNL kick recently and so I’ve been on YouTube more than usual looking up short sketches to watch during study breaks. I clicked on a promising looking sketch featuring Emma Stone in an insanely huge wig when an ad started playing. It was one of those super annoying thirty second ones that you can’t skip. And as I was forced to listen to middle aged women tell me why I needed to buy a blender I started thinking about my younger siblings who spend a lot of their time on YouTube, and I wondered if they were getting the same ads that I was or if for some reason my watch history had somehow informed YouTube that I might likely be a middle aged woman in need of a blender. It’s easy to believe that we are all impervious to ads and that our brains just ignore the messages they are subtlety or not so subtlety trying to deliver, but the messages conveyed by the media impact us all and helping young students recognize this fact is a great way to examine just how media may have shaped the way they perceive the world. Or their understanding of how their gender, culture or ethnicity is often perceived. 
   TEDxTalks is currently running a spotlight on bold young women who challenge stereotypes and sexist or unrealistic portrayal of females in the media, education and society. Many of these young girls formed their foundational knowledge on what they were capable of from their parents, educators and peers, which serves as a reminder that we all have a part to play in fostering environments that break down these barriers. 

    A good exercise to open up this kind of reflective thinking would be to give each student in your class a brand or company whose target audience is the age group of your class, or just young people in general, and ask them look up and choose a couple ads for this brand and write down similarities in the marketing, the people they see featured in the ads, the people they don’t see, how they are portrayed, how it made them feel, and have them present their findings in groups and discuss the messages they thought the companies were trying to convey. As the Ontario Language Curriculum states, it is so important for students get in the habit of questioning media or any form, breaking it down and learning to separate myth from fact. Many activities of a similar nature are being used in classrooms all over the world so students can be equipped with the tools to approach any form of media with a critical eye. 

Ministry of Education. (2006). Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8. Ontario, Queen’s Printer. Web. Retrieved from http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/language18currb.pdf