For a long time, parents and educators worked hard to buffer the schools’ educational mandate from the encroachments of popular entertainments with a “check your Ninja Turtles at the door” stand-offishness. Since this approach failed, more and more educators recognized it was impossible to stop kids from bringing popular culture influences with them into the classroom. Children consume media because they share experiences and get peer support for doing so. Their influence is articulated in the drawings, stories and play of children. Many concluded that the schools had to learn to work within the changing social landscape of the postmodern world by developing a ‘media education’ strategy. Discussions of programs and video games are becoming a topic in children’s peer interactions, and need to be allowed into the schools as well (Potter, 2001). Rather than building barriers to popular culture, our media education strategy welcomes media into the classroom in order to help children understand their own current use of it and challenging them to explore what they can do if they did not rely on media so much to entertain themselves.

Although there are competing interpretations of how to do this, our own position amounts to a kind of cultural judo: We believe that the mandate of education in the schools can now only be protected by teaching kids to be critical of popular culture in their lives. But it is hardly adequate to deconstruct media in a way that denies that children take pleasure in watching stories and playing games. If we only condemn their popular culture, we will be seen as prohibiting something that is fun and part of their peer culture. To change peer interactions we need to make alternatives to media, if not cool, then at least acceptable for many children. The task then must be to challenge them to change their leisure, without asking them to give up an element of their leisure activities they truly value.

Project Goals: To develop a critical media education curriculum which examines students' media consumption habits and encourages them to explore alternative ways of using their leisure time.

a) Media Education Curriculum

b) Research Report

Media Risk Reduction Strategy

This media risk reduction strategy uses a two-pronged social marketing campaign to convince elementary students to participate in an experiment. The experiment addresses the question 'What would you do if you turned off TV, video games and PC’s for a whole week?'

The object of this exercise is to explore what else there is to do instead.

The first prong is the Media Education Component: we will go into their classrooms and talk to the children about what and how they use media.

A) What is it that we can do to motivate children to watch less TV?

AUDIT: you can’t change what you can’t see: A week long media diary will be used to get students to study and discuss their own media usage patterns. Parents will also be encoraged to particpate in the media audit to encourage discussions about media use within the family.

MEDIA EDUCATION: Children spend more time with media than they do in the classroom. But they cannot check the knowledge, attitudes and social behaviours they are exposed to in popular culture at the school door. Since children bring their fascinations and interest in popular culture with them into the school, media educators developed strategies for dealing with media within the framework of a curricullum. The approach this project based on sees media education as a kind of ‘judo’ that absorbs to the force of popular culture on children by critically reframing their relationship to it in the classroom.

We have developed a four phase curricullum which uses learning exercises which helps children understand the role that media play in their lives. Each lesson has both media education and approved curricullum goals which include research, art, writing, social skills and, math and creative problem solving aspects to them and children will be given homework assignments such as interviewing their parents or keeping a diary.

Week 1) Media Audit. This first week allowed the students to get to know the researchers from SFU by expressing their preferences for certain television programmes, video game and computer related activities. The aim was to make the children feel comforable enought to speak freely about their media use patterns. We then asked them to fill out a week long media diary asking how long they spent with media and what shows, games and computer related activities they engaged in. On the last day of the week we came back to the school and conducted a media math lesson, which asked the students to add up all their media use for the week. This approach allowed the students to see for themselves the amount of media they used, rather than being told they watch just enough or too much, they made their own judgments. Most of the students did however, decide they spent too much time with the media and the project allowed the students to direct their future decisions based on their own empirical evidence from their own survey data.

Media Education Program

Week 2) Heroes and Heroines. This unit looks at the hero asking children to identify thecharacteristics that they admire. Children get to discuss both their own personal heroes and fictional heroes that they see on television.

Week 3) Scripting and Re-scripting. This unit looks at the idea of the villain or ‘bad guy’. It goes on to discuss what makes characters villains by comparing the conflict in media with examples of bullying. The class discusses character stereotypes and the types of programmes and games in which conflict is a central part of the story. Students are taught to apply this analysis of bullying behaviour to scenes they find in media.

Week 4) Fair Play as moral principle. This lesson will ask children to examine the games they like to play and what makes play fun. Children will interview their parents about the games they like to play as children. The unit explores the difference between conflict and cooperation in games and the way limits and rules help make games both fair and fun. We look at the variety of games such as hop scotch, skipping games and ask them to create a game of their own using 4 objects. Groups will discuss the rules and objectives of their game explaining what happens if anyone play’s too rough or breaks the agreed rules.

Week 5) Tune Out Week. The final unit is preparation for the Tune Out the Screen Challenge. The activities involve making posters, T-shirts, writing stories or advertisements to encourage others to Tune Out the Screen. Children will decide what approach they wish to try which range from making no change to going cold turkey screen free. They will also be asked to plan alternative activities so they can enjoy the free time they gain during Tune Out week. Parents will be asked to support the children in finding alternative actitivies and to help them make healther lifestyle choices. Children will keep a diary which helps evaluate how well they achieved their plan. Both parents and children will be part of the challenge evaluation and debriefing.

Another role of the Media Analysis Lab is to educate others about 'Kid Culture'. Over the summer we had 60 students at Simon Fraser University examine popular books, video games, toys, movies and televisions shows as a mean for them to become familiar with youth culture today and apply their knowledge of communication theory to these products. Many of the student succeeded in producing excellent summaries and analysis of these products. These reviews will soon be available for you to examine and maybe use in your attempt to monitor and provide cultural products for your children.

coming soon.