Curricular Unit Outline: Media Literacy

1.

Unit: The influence of the media on American political life.

Grade Level and Class: 12^th Grade- Principles of U.S. Government class

Unit Length: 10 days (2 school weeks)

2. It is absolutely critical that in the age of You Tube and Facebook, mainstream media and alternative media, that students be able to critically analyze and break down what they see and hear from media sources. This skill is known as media literacy. If students are to engage the democratic process and their voice is to be heard, they have to know how to navigate the complex world of American media. Without an understanding of the role of media in our society, its influences, and how the media can be used to manipulate and spin the truth, students can not make informed decisions as citizens in a our democracy. Far too often we have see the use of fear projected through the media that has paralyzed the judgment of our country. We can not allow young people to be manipulated, but must teach them the skills to be thoughtful and questioning citizens.

3. The topic of this unit will be the influence of the media on American Political Life. In the 12^th grade D.C.P.S. Content standards for Principle of U.S. Government, the broad concept standard 12.7 reads “Students evaluate and take and defend positions on the influence of media on American political life.” I believe that we can use all of the assigned standards here within this curricular unit.

a. The big ideas students should develop an enduring understanding of in this unit include: The meaning and importance of a free and responsible press in a democracy, How the media filters information for public consumption and limits your access to critical information necessary for making judgments as citizens in a democracy, Public officials and candidates manipulate the media but with the right skills you can decode these messages, and that American society and culture is influenced by the media and influences the media itself.

b. Students must know how to break down media stories, sift through the information and decipher what is important, what is being told, and maybe most importantly, what is not being told. Students must also know how they can, as citizen activists, influence how the media acts, through boycotts, exerting influence on advertisers with mainstream media, etc… Lastly, students need to know where they can look to get the most accurate and objective news information, and how to evaluate a media source. These core ideas will be learned by the students developing an understanding for the role of the media as a government watchdog in a democracy and their role as investigators. If students understand the role the media should play in a democracy, they can better interpret what is going wrong. Skills that will help include linguistic ability and strong vocabulary, ability to understand an interpret symbols (often used in advertising), ability to decode implications, inferences, and intentions.

c. We want students to discover how important it is that the media is responsible in how they choose what to cover and how to cover it. Should the media strive for balance OR objectivity? What is the difference between the two? How does the media use emotional appeals in order to achieve their objective? How do candidates do the same? How about drug companies (through advertising)? We want students to be familiar with arguments both for and against objective media. Students should also be aware of the principles and importance behind having a free press. Students should be able to identify arguments for and against whether media have an impact on people’s actions (like video games).

4. Essential Questions

A. What is the role of a free press in a democracy?

B. Do media outlets have a higher responsibility to the American people or their shareholders?

C. Does violence in the media lead to real life violence? Do people mimic what they see in popular culture?

D. How can the media be used to manipulate information and spin the truth?

E. What are some of the key differences between traditional media (TV, print, radio) and electronic media (the internet)?

F. Is the media bias? If so, towards whom?

5. Assessment

Students will be asked to make a political ad in groups. They are to pick one of the Presidential candidates (of any Party) and make a 30 second political advertisement that could be used on television and on You Tube. Students will be asked to upload their video to You Tube upon completion.

Students will also be asked to bring in, on the final day of the unit, an annotated list of their favorite and most reliable news sources. Students should annotate each source with why they believe that source contributes to their understanding of issues that matter to them, and how it helps them fulfill their role as a citizen.

The last means of assessment will be students taking a journal over the course of the second week of the class to track how many hours per day they use the following media: television, radio, print media (newspapers, magazines, journals), and the internet. The internet category will be broken down so they can track how often they use the following sites: YouTube, Facebook, any major news website (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc…).

6.

a. It is important that we build on what students already know by starting the unit with gaining a basic understanding of what the different media are, the differences between them, their advantages and disadvantages. Then we can move on to the impact they have on our lives, which students can also draw from prior experience. Then we will step back and examine what is the role of media in democracy, before we lead into how does our modern media either succeed or fail in the role, and how can they be used and manipulated to influence public opinion?

b. The knowledge and skills will be most engaging if the students interact with the different media themselves, monitor how they already use them, and draw on their prior experience.

c. Students will be able to practice what they learn as part of the assessment to this unit but then, hopefully, in their day to day lives as well. This isn’t an issue that will ever go away, especially for young people. They make these choices, consciously or unconsciously every day, we can hope the result of the lesson will be that they are more conscious of these decisions and evaluations.

d. Surely in their Language Arts and English courses students will have and continue to learn how to evaluate language and symbolism, which is a key part of this unit.

e. Students will be engaged in a group project to use their new knowledge to make their own political commercial. Also, students will have opportunities, throughout this two week unit to discuss, in pairs, media that they have used in recent days and what they remember or took away from it. Perceptions on the whole will be important for students to learn that in fact their habits may be common or uncommon, but it will show them how media influences all of our lives.

7. For this curricular unit it would be difficult to pre-test students knowledge of the issue, but certainly we could pre-test their skills of analysis, synthesis, decoding symbolism, and other important skills. As we go through the instructor needs to be very aware, and keep track of how individual students begin to develop media literacy. Do they begin to ask more questions, think deeper, analyze more thoughtfully?

8. Neighborhood Resources

Any radio stations or TV networks that are located in the area could be of help to incorporate some sort of field trip or class speaker to come in. It would work well to have an editor come speak about the process, from start to finish, of deciding what to cover. Also students could ask these individuals how they balance their responsibility to be government watchdogs and investigators with the network pressure to go with more news that is more superficial, violent, sexual, etc…

Also if there are newspaper stands in the are this could help because students could pick up the newspaper each day, and hopefully develop that habit, and continue to do so in the future to practice media literacy. The Best Buy in the neighborhood would be helpful if students need to purchase any sort of electronics to help them put together their video or if I as the teacher need to get anything that would help the class as a whole. The video store could be helpful in terms of finding appropriate movie clips to play or maybe even if they have tapes of old news broadcasts.

9. Materials Needed:

· TV with both VHS and DVD player

· Computer and projector to play online clips in class

· Common Sense Media’s “Media Literacy” guide

· The Living Room Candidate website- with campaign commercials for every election back to 1952. http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/

· Media Matters for America (the major progressive media watchdog group)

· Media Research Center (Right-wing media watchdog group)

· “What Liberal Media?” Book by Eric Alterman

· School Library/ Internet Access for students

· “News: The Politics of Illusion” Book by W. Lance Bennett

· Students will need access to internet, notebook paper, markers, pens.

Takaki Ch 4- Forcible Removal

The 4th Chapter of "A Different Mirror" provided some really great material for engaging students while teaching about the how early American leaders handled the "Native American problem." One of the most apt analogies I continued to think of as I read through was the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but that's only the beginning.

My lesson would focus on the forcible removal of the Native Americans from the land that was rightfully theirs, and what strategies were employed to move them off of their lands and force them into reservations, out of the way of the "beloved white" country as Ben Franklin hoped for. To start my lesson on this chapter I would put a series of statements on the board that begin with "they were...." and then have many descriptions such as "given monetary compensation in order to evacuate their own land", "forced into small communities that were segregated from the ruling race", "moved to make way for economic development of the elites", "forced to evacuate their land despite the economic contributions they were and could have continued to make to their country." Students would then be asked who they thought these statements applied to? Because of the reading and the unit we are on, students should logically guess Native Americans. But then I will write the following things on the board: Native Americans, Palestinians in Israeli territory, Jews during WWII, immigrants in American cities today. I will then explain how many of these statements actually apply to all of these groups. I think these parallels would allow students to better understand what was done to the Native Americans as a historical pattern and not an isolated event in American history.

In the lesson I will follow this up with a more specific case study of two comparisons- immigrants today and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I will discuss the different strategies that have been used with these 4 groups (Native Americans, immigrants in America today, Israelis and Palestinians) to separate them, to make way for economic development, to "homogenize" society, etc...

Also I think it is important to discuss a few other things within this lesson/ unit. The concept that land can not be substituted, that Native Americans had a connection to their land just like Jews, Muslims, and Christians all have a connection to Jerusalem. It is not sufficient to offer them other land that is not rich in their own tradition and history. We will also talk about a common theme in Takaki so far, how the elites have once again tried to turn the minority against each other so that they didn't unite against the elite.

I think this could make a very interesting and engaging lesson but could also be expanded to a larger unit.

Takaki Ch 3

It turns out that before the slavery that we all commonly study in our history classes, slavery in the United States has not always been tied to race. In fact for a long time, as Takaki explains in Chapter 3, it was tied to religion. I think that students would be very surprised to hear about the Irish slave trade, and more specifically, the differences and similarities between European and African slaves in the early days in the colonies. To teach this, I think it would be effective to have students re-read with this in mind. What was different about the lifestyle of European and African slaves? Students will go back through the first 10 pages of Chapter 3 and in one color, highlight all of the statements that pertain only to European servants and slaves, then all of the important statements that pertain to only African servants and slaves in another color, and finally in a third color, highlight all of the important statements that pertained to the lifestyle and treatment of both European and African servants and slaves. I would then have the students break up into groups in and discuss the different things they highlighted for the three groupings, and then come to a consensus as a group. We would then, as a class, make a large venn-diagram (Europeans on one side, Africans on the other, and the commonalities in the middle). I think this would provide the students with an interesting look at how slavery started in this country and how it became a racist institution through a progression of events in the early years, which is documented well by Takaki. This is using to some extent the learning process of Aaron Barnett when it comes to separating the reading by topics and then understanding each before you move on.

Learning Processes #1

This past Wednesday I observed that one of the ways that you sometime pick up information is through collaboration, even if it means collaboration with your 8^th grade students. On my first day of practicum in U.S. History class the students were handed back their world maps from the teacher where they had to color in each country depending on which continent it was in. For the most parts the students got everything right, but when it came to islands…that was a trouble point. You can’t blame the students. It’s hard to tell whether Bali is part of Asia or Australia and whether Cuba should be put under North America or South America or whether Iceland is part of North America or Europe. Anyway, I did happen to know almost all of the answers because I LOVE maps, and have studied them a lot, and done a fair amount of traveling. However, a few really threw me off, especially islands in the Indian or Pacific Oceans. I didn’t even know whether Cuba should be labeled North or South America…and I STUDIED in CUBA. Actually, I was fairly sure it should be South America, since Central America or the Caribbean were not options, and it is a Hispanic island. But not according to their textbook, which labels it is as North America. I learned a lot during this lesson, but especially that one of the ways we learn is to work together, to contest conclusions and to come to final answers as a group, even when there is dispute, we are learning in the process. The students and I may not have a final answer on whether Cuba is in North or South America, but they now know that the island is Hispanic, they speak Spanish, it is in the Caribbean, and some other facts I shared. It was a fun learning experience for me, especially with a diverse class who could all provide some valuable input.

Takaki Chapters 1-2

In the introduction to “A Different Mirror,” Takaki does a good job of explaining the expanding multiculturalism in the United States, our changing demographics, and the reaction by many Americans. The “this will ruin our moral fabric” argument that is now being made by people like E.D. Hirsch and Pat Buchanan is the same argument made by many, in times of great immigration in our history, that as we become more diverse, it will weaken our unity. Instead, the opposite has proven true. “E Pluribus Unum,” or “Out of many, one,” has accurately reflected how our nation has grown stronger through diversity and multiculturalism. Takaki also takes some time to compare various immigrant groups and how they have been dealt with as they have become part of the American fabric. He is wise to point out how we have often in the past pitted different ethnic and racial groups against each other, in order to, in effect, keep all of them down beneath the “ruling elite.” It is clear that history is written by the victors, but that we must take a look at other views of history, especially those of the victim, and minorities.

Chapter two of Takaki is a depressing but accurate view of how many of our founders viewed Native Americans, and how they dealt with trying to clear the way for the Europeans to set up their own communities, often in the same place that the Indians were living. It was common for the “settlers” to view the Indians as “savages,” and “barbarous.” They were viewed as animals, unable to control their savage instincts. Takaki, by exploring the views and writings of many people that Americans are taught to admire, exposes their hideous and hypocritical view concerning America and the rights of Native Americans.

Here is the way I would choose to teach this. I would start the class by putting some names on the board. Among them might be Thomas Jefferson, Sir Thomas Moore, John Winthrop, and Captain John Smith. I would then ask students to write down anything they already new about these 4 people. When they finished I would write down everything on the board. “President of the Untied States” and “founding father” for Jefferson, “City upon a hill” for Winthrop, etc, etc…. After this I would ask for students general views on these early Americans. Then I would write on the board next to these names 4 quotes. I would use Takaki’s material, like Jefferson’s quotes such as “nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country,” and John Winthrop’s quote about God “making room” for the colonists by wiping out the Indians with smallpox.

After giving them a chance to digest these quotes (without their authors), I would ask them who they thought would say things like this, and then match up the names on the other side of the board with these quotes. That would then lead me into a lesson on how the founders approached the “Native American problem.”