Exploring Differences.

The media explores several different topics be it entertainment, weather, travel, cooking, or politics.  Good news shares stories in a way that you can see all different sides of the story.  Hobbs does mention in the reading that even though bad news is a negative thing for the people as it sends mixed messages it sells well and attracts a large following.  Why would the people want to follow rumors more than facts.  I think this is shown in entertainment magazines.  There whole point and mission is to bring news that doesn’t make a difference in our lives to our homes and create an invested interest in us.  Media can exploit differences.  The way it can do this is have your students look up a article on a hot topic from one newspaper or news channel and then have them find another article on the subject from a competing news channel.  This will explore the differences in how media is presented.  Does the station the news come from affect your opinions more then you realize?  Are you creating unneeded biases in your beliefs. 

From this reading it showed me the importance of using media in the classroom especially to teach about local stories and things on the news.  This prompt asks us how we might engage the media in our classroom to better explore differences I think by using media to showcase news and the different forms it comes in and messages it delivers would be an excellent exercise for the students to do.  It would be affective in a science, history, English classroom as well as in the drama classroom.  How I would use media to explore differences in the drama classroom would to use news articles for research to show them the different tactics the writers or also known as storytellers used to share their story.  Then once we have identified these different tactics or rules of news we would implement these strategies into our personal stories we have been working on.  Or another option would to tell the story from a characters point of view.  And this character would be from a new article the class found and researched with.  This would have the students be using their drama skills to educate their audience of the happenings of the world.

Our responsibilities as teachers when sharing media messages is to know what is appropriate and not appropriate to share with the students.  In the second chapter of this reading Hobbs discusses the topic of security measures for the internet in schools.  What should the students have access to at school?  My responsibility is to create guidelines for my students.  Be clear with what I expect from them and hold them accountable to the classroom rules.  In the reading it mentioned the story of how a change in school rules made a huge difference in productivity in students.  The change was that students could listen to their music and text in passing time and at lunch but not in class.  Class was the time to focus on learning.  The incentive of having the privilege of using their media devices a bit of the day took away the desire to use them during class.  This sounds like a good story but how accurate is it really.  If you allow your students one piece of candy they are only going to want more and more.  The students are addicted to their technology.  In my classroom I want them to see how media is a positive thing but only when balanced with the other aspects of their life.      

Examining Difference through Media

Here’s the deal, friends: Every. Last. One of us. Is DIFFERENT.  Exploring and examining difference doesn’t have to be a big deal; it just has to be acknowledged as an inherent and integral part of our existence.  If we can achieve that – if we can truly see and appropriately value that fact – and then pass that understanding and its significance on to our students – I honestly feel that the “battle” is almost won.  Once our students truly understand that no two of us (let alone faceless millions) are really alike, they can begin to place their own value on difference, to value the richness of culture, wisdom, and experience that comes with these differences, and to begin to negotiate the differences to which they have access – to tap into the differences all around them as a means of gaining (albeit at second-hand) insight into and knowledge and wisdom from those experiences that are foreign to them.  In the end, difference can and should benefit everyone, broadening our knowledge, understanding, and capacities far beyond anything any one person could ever hope to achieve or experience on their own.  Difference should be celebrated and sought out not simply for difference’s sake or even by way of celebrating diversity in terms of inclusion; it should be celebrated for its ability to expand each and every one of us individually.  If we (and our students) can learn to truly value and embrace difference in this way, we will find that our entire world is a very different place than we thought it.

Media (at least, I believe, popular media) have a tendency to exploit difference more than to explore it.  Things – and people – that/who are “different” from the “norm” are presented in popular media as scandalous or shocking; indeed, stories of “difference” are often picked up and disseminated by these media specifically for their “shock-value.”  As educators, we must take on the responsibility of shattering the shiny façade of pop-media spectacle; we must lead our students to the tools they need to deconstruct the messages, ideals, and metanarratives with which these media present them.  Without these tools, our students will never gain the skills they need make critical decisions in their chosen level of media and civic participation – they would be “blown about by every wind” of whatever pop-media happens to be current at any given time.  This is not to say that all media, or even all pop-media, is irresponsible, dirty, or underhanded; media creators simply have an agenda (whether it’s making money, selling something in order to make money, selling something in order to facilitate change in the world, informing citizens as honestly as they know how, or whatever else may drive them), and they use the tools available to them to reach their goals – some more or less ethically than others.  As we integrate all kinds of media into our classrooms, we will be uniquely placed to help young people acquire the critical skills that will enable them to make thoughtful decisions in all aspects of their experience – skills they will come to use consistently, capably, and constantly throughout their lives.

Ideals

I watch students use media in their projects and in the writing of their papers and it makes me very nervous. They have grown up with cell phones in their hands and internet access at their fingertips. This is a generation that expects information to be conveyed succinctly. The media knows this, and opinions are gobbled up as facts because of that cultural impatience, it seems.

I did not grow up with all of this technology. My family was very careful with what we viewed, and I did not really learn to use the internet until I was in sixth grade. When I did learn how to use it, it was drilled into my brain that I was not to take everything I read on the internet for granted. TouTube had not yet been developed, so we had to usually search for news sites in order to get our information. We had to read articles on online newspapers in order to get a story.

Now we have a culture in which our students create and use media constantly. They usually know much more than their teachers when it comes to the use of technology for the receiving and transmitting of information. It seems that most of their information comes from media, and their opinions are shaped by the opinions of others.

When reading Hobbs this week, I noticed that she talked about the way politics has become a dirty word and that our students aren’t really taught that much about them and they dislike learning about it. I personally think that this comes not only from the fact that the media makes it such a sticky mess, but also from the fact that students want their information now. And, for as much as they complain about not getting their own voice or not being able to form their own opinions, they seem rather content to let decisions be made without them unless it has to do with their social life or the limiting of media consumption. The media they consume, however, seems to be mostly about (as Hobbs states) Brittany’s latest boob job or other such subjects. In the consumption of this media, our students are fed images and messages about “the ideals” and are pushed to conform, while at the same time being told that they should be themselves. The media confuses and manipulates more than it informs, I think.

My job, as an educator of media in my classroom, is to make sure that my students know the real uses of media for creating messages of their own, and how those messages can be a real way to express their own opinions after analyzing what the media messages really are. I want to make sure that my students know that I am their advocate more than I am an advocate of societal norms. I know that many of my students will find societal norms to be greatly important, but I will try my hardest to at least help them see the real messages those media sources that create “societal norms” are sending them. Then, as many of the passages in Seeing and Writing do, express their feelings about what they have found in a creative use of the technology available to them.