Media Literacy: Teaching Our Students to Swim

Why Media Literacy? 

Would you throw your students into a pool without swimming lessons? Then, why would educators allow our students to drown in advertising when we can throw them the lifesaver of media literacy? Let's pass down the knowledge that our kids can use to construct the vehicles to ride out the storm…

Find at: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134

There are 52 million kids under 12 in the United States – the equivalent to the height of the baby boomers – and these children spend a total of 40 billion dollars a year on everything from music to electronics to clothes; and more importantly, these toddlers to tweens directly influence (are you sitting down?) over 700 billion dollars a year in spending (Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, 2004). 

So, it comes as no surprise the amount of time and energy that is spent by advertisers attempting to successfully market to these overly influential –yet extremely susceptible- cohort of buyers.

I think what was more surprising is that the government deregulated advertising under the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan deregulated advertising? The same man who testified in the McCarthy hearings, which resulted in extreme censorship in Hollywood during the 1950s, deregulated advertising in the 1980s? Interesting.

http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/

The deregulation of advertising opened the door for juvenile marketers to create campaigns that saturated children’s lives. Campaigns that began with the creation of a children’s television show whose sole purpose of existence was to infiltrate every pore of a kid’s imagination with a litany of products from bed sheets to food to shoes branded with their favorite characters (Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood, 2004).

Raising Kids in the Ruckus

My kids grew up with Power Rangers, all the Disney characters, Power Puff Girls, Sponge Bob, all the anime characters, and whatever else was the flavor of the month. And admittedly, I was influenced to buy everything from branded toothbrushes to macaroni and cheese (that tasted better, I swear).  

 

http://www.psmag.com/

During this same time, I was a waitress trying to make our lives better by getting my university degree; and I had a natural inclination for decoding popular culture, social movements, and gender issues.

I was teaching my children to read media literacy while I learned to be outraged by consumerism, patriarchy, and classism. Yet, I kept buying the branded kids' wares; it was just easier. It absolved my guilt of not being able to keep with the Jones as a single Mom – even Walmart carried Disney. 

So, my point is that the American hypocrisy runs shift and hard even for the advocates. 

The art classroom: Media Literacy Lessons 

Chung and Kirby (2009) define culture jamming as an act of detournement, a counter-revolution against the mainstream media constructs to reveal the hidden agendas of advertisers. Examples of detournement include performance art, subverisements, and flash mobs. Chung and Kirby (2009) turned their art classrooms into a space of detournement by asking their students to rebrand corporations’ logos and slogans to reveal the real agenda behind advertising campaigns, as an act of resistance power of symbols used for consumerism. Students produced such subverisements as matching the Toyota logo with the slogan, “Global Warming”; and another student wrote “obesity” in the famous font associated with Coke-a-cola. For more go to the journal, Art Education, January 2009. 

In Killing Us Softly 4(2010), Jean Kilbourne continues her campaign to educate people on the impact of advertising on women, ultimately on all gender roles. Kilbourne reveals the “stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes – images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality” (reference the study guide found at the Media Education Foundation). 

So, one question that art educators -invested in teaching media literacy- can ask is: how can we teach students “to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relations to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence” (Killing Us Softly 4 Study Guide, Media Education Foundation)?

 

http://iamguiltless.blogspot.kr/

What would the visual landscape look like if all of the gender-biased advertisements were removed from magazines, the mall, television, and movies? How would advertising campaigns based on empowering women’s self image of themselves look like? How would advertise campaigns based on positive gender roles for both men and women manifest?

After a series of media literacy lessons on power relationships, gender roles, reductionism, and decoding of advertising, ask your students to take ads and/or fashion layouts from a high-end magazine (like Vogue) and reimagine what that layout would look like with healthy, powerful gender images. Students should incorporate the original image in the final composition as an act of subverisements and resistance of its intention to disempower. 

http://www.almostallthetruth.com/

Also, students should be given the option to take the campaign off the page into such actions as flash mob or performance art. This will provide students with a sense of agency and resistance against the flat, dimensional-less images that are designed to assault their concepts of what body really is in everyday action; they are provided the opportunity to take body image off the page and into their lives.