Funes, V.S. (2008) Advertising and consumerism: A space for pedagogical practice. Counterpoints, Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education 338, 159-177. Advertising is a powerful weapon; It is a seducer of the masses; A master manipulator that reconstructs realities and coerces the observer into believing they need the products being sold. It is a weapon against which our students have little critical defense. Schools develop reflective and critical attitudes; Schools transmit knowledge onto our students and try to personalize learning. However, many feel the methods and processes used in school are ineffective and old fashioned. How can we turn this around and update our teaching to incorporate this powerful medium in our classrooms? The philosophy behind Fune's work is intriguing. Though some of the references are dated, and several assumptions/blanket statements are made about teachers and how media is used in public education, the root of the theory is definitely thought provoking. Acknowledging that there is an undeniable gap between the school culture and the media culture in which our students live, and the pedagogical experiences each one creates, is the first step to recognizing the place for advertising as a learning tool in schools. If we accept that students live in a participatory media-rich world and that many students feel they have no place in our current school system, then we can address the existing inconsistency between education systems and the socio-cultural environments in which our students live. As educators we need to dismiss our usual precautionary attitude, and instead work to fuse the two environments together for the betterment of our students. The teaching and learning process outlined ties together two pertinent issues. It takes the most provocative element of the media culture our students live in and, acknowledging their inability to be critical consumers of that media, offers ways in which the school culture can inform and educate them, while at the same time, forcing educators to question their current techniques and pedagogy. In my role as Literacy/Numeracy Coach I work with teachers from Kindergarten through to Grade 8 and it would be interesting to see how they interpret the objectives of this teaching and learning process. Co-creating a continuum of media/literacy learning and tying it to specific curriculum expectations, along with planning for implementation and designing developmentally relevant activities would definitely be worthy of exploration. Data would need to be gathered to see if and how this approach impacted our students. What measures would we take? Who would our control group be? What parameters would be set and how would achievement gains be measured? Lastly, I wanted to share a couple of websites I found, that I could potentially use with my teachers. Mediasmarts Media Mash Up In The Classroom
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Wong, D., Henriksen, D. (2008). If ideas were fashion. Counterpoints, Mirror Images: Popular Culture and Education 338, 179-198.
In this piece, Wong and Henrickson investigate the idea of using fashion as a framework for teaching and learning. If fashion enhances our lives by adding interest, meaning and beauty to our every day, it makes sense that today’s youth are infatuated by it. If only we could get our learners to observe, create and engage in the educational experiences we offer them in the same way they observe, create and engage in fashion…Maybe we can! This article suggests using fashion as a scaffold for thinking about our teaching and learning. Focusing on the similar experiential qualities that exist between students’ lives in and out of school, can we enliven our learners and foster engagement, creativity and critical observation? How do we as educators foster creativity and possibility and include visual and tactile forms of expression? We need to attune ourselves to the psychological qualities that make fashion and ultimately learning so engaging. How do we capture a natural playful open-mindedness, reflective of that students’ experience in their everyday lives? How do we engage emotion and intellect? To fashion is to style or create so how do we help students ‘fashion a worthwhile existence? How do we get ideas to live on beyond the immediate experience? How can we get our students to imagine possibility? We learn best in the ‘flow zone’, where we naturally and spontaneously hope, dream, create and desire; where we face goals that are challenging yet achievable. The challenge for teachers is how we help our students to enter and remain in this zone of optimal learning and productivity. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s research lends itself to this exact question, and the importance of an exact balance between challenge and skill level. http://www.positivefuturesguide.com/free/Flowcond.html When we look in the mirror we rarely see ourselves as others see us. Our reflection is skewed by our own biases - by the filters we create. Similarly, we present ourselves to the world through alternate personas...but what if we went with the philosophy of 'what you see is what you get' and as a result our world became less limiting?
We all have multiple personas that we willingly and openly share with the outside world; Masks, if you will that we interchange as and when we feel the need, or circumstances dictate. In reading Rettberg’s “Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves” we are presented with the theory that it is not, perhaps, so much about censorship, but about presenting an alternate persona of our choice to the world. Whether it be to gain acceptance, to create an image, to impress or impersonate, our reality is seen through the personas or ‘filters’ that we create. While we are filtering and presenting our alternate selves to the world, the world is filtering information back to us based on that image. These filters exist technologically, culturally and cognitively. Search engines make decisions on what information our searches pull up based on our history, Facebook posts advertisements on our page based upon personal information that we have shared, group pages we follow, our friends and our profiles, Pinterest recommends pins that we may be interested in based on previous pins…the list goes on. In short, technology shapes our reality; skews our reality and through personalizing, in actuality, limits our reality. In a similar vein, cultural and cognitive filters can have the same limiting effect. We each have our own cognitive and cultural biases based on our upbringing, education, and measure of ‘intelligence’. Bringing these biases to the education system can be detrimental to our students, as it may prevent us from considering alternate explanations, possibilities or methods. As educators we need to break through the filters of our own creation in order to avoid living through the filters of the outside world. Walker Rettberg, J. (2014). Seeing ourselves through technology: How we use selfies, blogs and wearable devices to see and shape ourselves. Berkshire: Palgrave Macmillan |
AuthorJust another teacher hoping to change the world! Archives
November 2015
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