“Since children engage with a variety of media texts, it is important to help them develop tools for questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions that are embedded in the messages, to reflect on their own reasons for engaging with such texts, and to have opportunities to use their developing critical skills to create their own media texts.” Continue reading What popular culture texts say?
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Media Manipulation and Critical Media Literacy
Media can actually shape a culture or possibly your views concerning a culture or a people. For some time now, the media has presented African Americans as people who are criminals, people who are slaves, and people who are dropouts or possibly video girls. The media has presented young African American children the false reality of becoming millionaires overnight by challenging them to become rap stars or famous athletes. It is sad that the media does not advertise youth excellence as much in the Black community. In the school where I teach, I saw the importance of making my students aware of options that they have in choosing their destiny. – Carr
The bold sentences of this page also draw my attention that “as teachers, when teaching for media literacy, we must be careful to not persuade our students according to our viewpoints but to teach them how to make an educated decision after researching many sources…” Most of time, students and even adults are manipulated by media. Continue reading Media Manipulation and Critical Media Literacy
How the internet s(l)aved me
For this week’s reading, 4 Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When Social Networking Was Enuf, I picked out two MVPs (I apologize, I couldn’t help myself). The first is:
“‘Tonight I did it,’ she continued, rehearsing the common wisdom of the street: ‘I had to do what I had to do.’ As she read, the air between us thinned. My mother’s eyes swelled with moisture as she continued with her story. ‘My babies can’t eat air. And it didn’t last that long anyway. But I am still ashamed of myself, but I can feed my kids and I didn’t have to rob no banks. I don’t know if I will do it again, but I will do anything to feed my kids, or I’ll die.’”
Bringing the digital world into the classroom to foster critical conversations
“Therefore it is important for educators to act in ways that allow us to know Black women today. In cyber space, those women are unlike my mother. They are, more and more, becoming writers of their own stories. Obtaining the evidence of this and studying this evidence, for me alone, has been transformative. I believe, if taken to scale in classrooms, such a study of digital texts will make for more informed, more loving, and more sensitive youth.”
Kirkland, D. E. (2010). 4 colored girls who considered suicide/when social networking was enuf: A Black feminist perspective on literacy online In D. Alvermann (Ed.), Adolescents’ Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, Media, and Paradigms. (pp. 87) Continue reading Bringing the digital world into the classroom to foster critical conversations
Profile Perceptions
While reading Subrahmanyam’s article “Constructing Identity Online: Identity Exploration and Self-Presentation”, the following quote caught my attention: “Whenever you put any kind of information out there you have the intention of what you want people to think about you” (Subrahmanyam 59). Continue reading Profile Perceptions