Author: Jane Tallim, Media Awareness Network
Level: Secondary Cycle One
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Moral Education, Physical Education and Health

Description: This lesson helps students become more aware of the media's role in determining what, and who, are perceived as being cool. Through class discussion and activities, students explore the differences between superficial and real "coolness," how marketers use cool to sell products, and how their own attitudes and perceptions are affected by media messages that reinforce specific messages about what coolness is.

Cross-curricular Competencies	Broad Areas of Learning
To use information To exercise critical judgement To be creative To adopt effective work methods To construct his/her identity To work with others To communicate appropriately	Media Literacy Environmental Awareness and Consumer Rights Health and Well-Being Citizenship and Community Life

This lesson satisfies the following English Language Arts Competencies from the Quebec Education Program:

Competency One: Uses language/talk to communicate and learn

Production Process:

• Uses strategies to generate, clarify and expand ideas
• Explores a structure that will help the audience to receive the intended meaning:
• Selects an organizational structure suitable to function of text
• Examines the relationship between context, producer of text and familiar, intended audience to identify potential problems in communication:
•  Adopts a stance to topic and audience
• Presents the spoken text to audience

Social Practices of Classroom and Community

• Examines the discourse used to present information in selected spoken, written and media texts

Competency Two: Represents his/her literacy in various media

Production Process

Preproduction

• Immerses self in the text type to be produced in order to deconstruct some of its textual features, codes and conventions:
• Analyzes samples of text type
• Carries out a content analysis or inquiry into some aspect of media text

Production

• Communicates information, experiences, points of view and personal responses to a familiar audience
• Inter-relates the characteristics of media text in a specific context drawing on:
• Specific communication strategies and resources
• Images, symbols, signs, logos and/or words to communicate meaning(s)/message(s)
• Reviews and edits text to focus on meaning(s)/message(s)

Postproduction

• Presents text to intended audience

Text, Audience, Producer

Textual Features, Codes and Conventions

• Interprets media texts:
• Explores the codes that construct media texts, e.g. headlines, captions and photographs in newspapers
• Constructs message(s) and meaning(s) using familiar codes from media texts
• Identifies functions of media discourse: to entertain, to persuade, to promote, to inform
• Makes connection(s) between images, signs, symbols, pictures and printed text and meaning
• Confirms, by talking with peers and teacher, that a media text can contain more than one message
• Identifies and discusses some of the ways in which pictures, illustrations, symbols and images enhance the message
• Explores the use of “formulas”
• Examines ways in which bias occurs in various media texts

Representation

• Identifies some aspects of representation and exclusion, i.e. deconstructs:
• Age, gender, family, culture, race, location, such as: portrayals of teens, depictions of a student’s neighbourhood in local news
• Heroes, heroines and idols such as: role(s) in popular culture and how they are constructed, publicized and exploited by the media

Audience and Producer

• Explores self as individual member of audience (use, personal biases, prior experiences) and as part of a larger target audience
• Compares:
• Own values with those presented in media texts
• Discusses characteristics of producer:
• Explores where, when, why, by and for whom texts are produced
• Considers the stance of different media texts on issues and concerns of interest to young adolescents
• Identifies aspects of media industry related to marketing and promotion
• Examines the impact of marketing on common social concepts such as childhood

Competency Three: Reads and listens to written, spoken and media texts

Reader’s Stance: Constructing a Reading of a Text

• Focuses on the world of the text to construct an aesthetic reading of text
• Focuses on making sense of information in a text to construct an efferent reading, e.g. reads print and visual information with the intention of remembering details/examples and/or of following instructions, rereads to verify meaning(s) s/he is making, relates to personal experience and prior knowledge
• Focuses on the relationship between own world and world of the text to construct an interpretive reading, e.g. elaborates on story world or information in text, connects literature or nonfiction to life experience(s), recognizes familiar textual features, codes and conventions that confirm own meaning(s)/message(s)

Reading Strategies: Text Grammars (Structures, Features, Codes and Conventions)

• Constructs meaning(s)/message(s) by reinvesting her/his knowledge of the text as social construct, i.e. language-in-use:
• Draws on cues in familiar structures, features, codes and conventions to make sense of texts
• Identifies connotation and denotation of words, images and their referents
• Makes connections between conventions of a familiar text type/genre and own response(s) /interpretation(s)
• Examines the constructed world of narrative text: uses her/his response(s) as the basis for connecting own meaning(s) to the conventions used to plot/construct the story
• Applies contextual understanding when meaning breaks down:
• Socio-cultural: draws on understanding of values and beliefs to make sense of incidents, events or message(s)

Reader, Text, Context: Interpreting Texts

• Interprets the text for a familiar audience by drawing associations between own world of personal experiences and knowledge and the world of the text by considering:
• Own characteristics as a reader and the constructed world of a text, e.g. comparison of own values and experiences with those presented in the text; issues, ideas or questions the text raises for her/him; experience with similar texts; attitudes towards subject/topic/character; personal interests
• Predictions and inferences about the view of the world presented in text
• Initial, tentative impressions about the statement(s) or view of the world the author/narrator /producer is making
• Features, codes and conventions of known text types/genres
• With guidance, examines text in its literary and/or socio-cultural context:
• Identifies features, codes and conventions used to achieve a recognized social purpose and/or function and/or effect and impact on self as reader, e.g. in a popular television commercial, in a humorous text
• Connects, in a trial-and-error fashion, her/his understanding of some characteristics of narrator/writer/producer to what s/he notices about the view of the world presented in the text, e.g. reads “between the lines” to locate apparent values/beliefs of a character/narrator in a story, understands the intent of a fast food ad, sees that an opinion excludes certain points of view 
• Communicates interpretation(s) of a text in an individual voice, referring to prior experience, own reading profile and understanding of texts as social constructs:
• Follows a process to compose, i.e. writes or produces own interpretation(s) of a text
• Interprets the view of the world in the text in different media, including mixed media, for a familiar audience
• Expresses own interpretation(s) with clarity, openness and confidence

Other subject-specific programs

Moral Education

Competency One: Constructs a moral frame of reference

Puts life situations and moral references into perspective:

• Makes connections between meaningful situations, their requirements, the influences at play, and the presence of known values or social precepts
• Identifies his/her own moral references
• Explores the diversity of beliefs, customs, visions of human beings, values and social precepts related to the same situation
• Identifies differences, similarities and tensions between different opinions and viewpoints

Competency Two: Takes a reflective stance on moral issues:

Identifies the ethical issues of a situation

• Describes the situation
• Explains how and why the situation poses a moral or ethical problem
• Identifies the consequences of the problem on himself/herself, on others and on the environment
• Draws upon a variety of information sources and the viewpoints of experts
• Analyzes the tensions that exist among different viewpoints, opinions, visions of human beings, values and social precepts
• Situates himself/herself in relation to the problem
• Expresses feelings generated by the problem
• Considers the viewpoints of classmates and those primarily concerned by the problem, and takes cultural references into account
• Identifies the reasons put forth in support of opinions and viewpoints
• Highlights the underlying visions of human beings and the social precepts and the values in question
• Explains the differences that exist

Imagines possible options and their consequences

• Proposes possible options and considers those of others
• Examines the consequences on himself/herself, on others and on society
• Makes a summary of the options and their possible consequences

Physical Education and Health

The Cycle One program states:

The messages conveyed by the media can have major repercussions on the behaviour of adolescents. Therefore, it is important that students be encouraged to maintain a critical distance with regard to the media. For example, during a big sports event, certain networks show violent images involving the athletes. Reports on doping, which some athletes resort to, raise ethical questions about respecting rules and about honesty and fair play. Advertising uses an infinite amount of female body images to demonstrate the effects of products that enable you to obtain the perfect body with no physical effort. This sometimes contradictory information cannot help but challenge students, who must exercise critical judgment when they situate this information in relation to the various contexts in which they develop the subject-specific competencies.

The broad area of learning Media Literacy is thus part of this program.