Analyzing Analysis

I thought that this section gave some excellent ideas about how to really get kids thinking about media, about what it's doing, how it is doing it, and why. It's one thing to bring in various media to enhance your lessons, but it's another thing entirely to get stuents talking about media in a way that helps them to develop as thinkers.


How might you use the critical questions discussed in the book to inform your classroom conversations? 
     The questions regarding audience and author, message and meaning, and representation and reality are concrete ways to steer the class discussion in the way that is most profitable for students. Class discussions will often go on tangents, but by have the critical questions in mind and finding the answers to these questions as our goal, class discussion/small group discussion will be a beneficial use of time.
    Besides these questions, I like the idea of question-ing having a bigger presence in my classroom. I know from experience that when I am legitimately interested and curious about a topic that I an slightly but not totally familiar with, I am more engaged in learning about that topic and I am more motivated to seek answers and to share those answers in a meaningful way. I have learned about inquiry-based learning in other classes, but I like how Hobbs pointed out the need for students to make inquiry when it comes to media, and not just be passive consumers of media.
 
How might you modify the questions posed to better suit the goals and requirements of your own classroom setting?
     Given that I am going to be an English teacher, I thought that these questions were very appropriate to use when discussing traditional literature as well as other media in my classroom. If anything, I would want to expand or go beyond what is listed. For example, if we were discussing poetry, I would not only ask "What creative techniques are used to attract and hold attention?" but I would ask "Why? Why do these techniques/literary devices attract attention? What is the link between the techniques and the meaning? How is form related to function?" (These deeper questions can be used in discussing other media, but I know that form and function are closely tied when it comes to poetry, and thus I saw opportunity for modification in the questions when thinking about teaching poetry.) Also, I think it would be good to include questions that would help students to see the relevance of the media to their own lives, questions like, "So what? What  (if any) are the implications  that this media has for a high school student? Does this connect to any other texts, to the world, or to myself?"

 What ways could you utilize the Seeing and Writing readings to discuss media analysis and evaluation with your students?
      I would love to get a hold of the Rushdie essay that Scott Sanders refers to in his own essay "Homeplace," read both, and ask students to use the critical questions to further analyze the two men's views on "Place" and from there, students could draw their own conclusions about their idea/definition of "home." As was exhibited in our reading, however, essays are not the only medium that offers ideas about "home" and "place." I think text sets (essay, short story, movie clip, and a photograph, for example) are good to get students thinking critically about ideas. This can get overwhelming, however, if students are not familiar with the conventions of each type of text. For well-educated students or students that are familiar with the conventions of at least a few different types of media, text sets (like the one assigned from "Seeing and Writing") are perfect for exposing students to new ideas. For students/grade levels who are not familiar with what exactly they are supposed to look for in a photograph (or other medium) in order to make meaning, it would be good to use the two essays as subjects for analysis and work up from the essays to more and different types of media.