Media Literacy Unit, Grade 5
Media creation is a powerful pedagogy for engaging in meaning-making; offering authentic pathways to bolstering core reading and writing skills and cultivating deep engagement with themes of perspective, influence, and narrative control. In the grade 5 (Ontario) unit plan described here, students are invited to identify and consider the presence of advertising in their lives. Students are introduced to critical literacy, and guided in developing skills in decoding, interpreting, and responding to advertisement, both print and digital. Applying what they know, students engage in the medium through the creation of their own 1-minute TV commercial. The literature review below examines both the theory and evidence-base for these lessons.
Literature Review
As we enter the digital age knowledge economy, educators seek to prepare young people with the aptitudes and abilities the 21st century demands: skills in critical thinking, creativity, collaboration in groups, and communication with diverse audiences (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2016). To meet this challenge educators must be ready to engage in evolving forms of literacy, to investigate and “understand continuities and differences between the ways people in societies like our own produced, distributed, shared, and negotiated meanings” (Knobel & Lankshear, 2014). Instructional time must provide focus on teaching competency in these new literacies, as well as skill development in meaning-making in these mediums through exploration and experimentation (Hagerman, 2017). This new focus requires both a shift in content as well as pedagogy.
Central to the project of understanding these new literacies is proficiency in critical digital literacy, where attention is given to decoding stereotypes and assumptions embedded in the media, identification of included and excluded voices, and the role of power (Gainer, Valdez-Gainer, & Kinard, 2009). Children are sensitive to the many messages about body image, gender norms, and racially coded communications they encounter in media environments, and need help recognizing and interpreting these (Media Smarts, 2019).
As the target for a significant portion of marketing and advertising, children must gain awareness of the influence that advertisers seek over them, and the particular tactics and implied messages deployed. Critical engagement with advertisement is a compelling curricular project.
Student created videos offer the opportunity to strengthen student’s core skills in traditional forms of literacy (reading and writing) while gaining proficiency in new literacies of the digital age (Hutchinson, 2012; Young & Rasinski, 2013). Hutchinson (2012) reports benefits of increased motivation and student engagement, improved student learning, and strengthened curricular connections. Watt (2019) argues this medium “promotes multidimensional learning” for students, developing “valuable collaborative and community building skills and dispositions that are transferrable to other contexts” (p. 95).
Finally, Knobel & Lankshear (2014) highlight the opportunities for inclusion that new literacy praxis offers, critiquing traditional schooling models’ demands for uniformity. “Not everyone has to know or be good at exactly the same thing; often outcomes are richer when young people bring different bits and pieces of knowledge and know-how to collaborative efforts (Gee & Hayes, 2013)” (p. 99).
Media Literacy Unit
I would like to acknowledge the sources and influences for this unit: the Media Smarts lesson “You’ve gotta have a gimmick!”, though the lesson below diverges from the theme of food advertising, the Media Smarts ideas scaffolded this lesson. “The Bubble Project” lesson was borrowed from Gainer, Valdez-Gainer, & Kinard (2009); and finally my former teacher mentor, Jennifer Allingham, whose lesson idea was to give students random mystery objects and have them create TV commercial skits.
