On Media Literacy, Education & Interdisciplinary

Children and teenagers are the main target of the powerful mass media and their messages. We act, think, live and dream depending on what others think about us, so we create this imaginary world where we present ourselves as the reflection of a media constructed image. (Luz Becerra)

Many of the  view we hold of the the world around us is rooted in some cartoons, films, ads, magazines etc. that we encounter in our childhood and teenage years. (Venturo Bryan)

As Christensen experienced, my students were reluctant to see their favorite characters in a negative light. The Beauty and the Beast gets a particularly bad review from the analysts, saying that it is basically the story of battered women who excuse the behavior or their partners. This was tough to accept because this traditional story has a particular emotional appeal to most…. which is the whole point, right?

Interesting websites:

 http://antonioviva.com/2009/01/26/using-social-media-to-define-the-new-humanities-classroom/

Theme:  Can we harness the power of social media to provide students with a vehicle for exploring and creating original content?

http://technologysource.org/article/writing_process_in_a_multimedia_environm

Theme:  “Multimedia environments have changed each of the stages of the writing process—pre-writing, writing, re-writing, and post-writing.

http://teachartwiki.wikispaces.com/?responseToken=3dd786c7c691146dd45d1a4ffe5a2727

Theme: Teaching and learning about art using wiki.

Interdisciplinary approach:

1. The challenges to humanities as an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning reside in these constraints:
   • complexity involved in creating a framework necessary to analyze various angles of a problem: history, politics, etc.
   • knowledge necessary to the teacher in order to formulate this type of framework
   • teaching experience in experiential learning approaches: engaging students; relinquishing the role of “director of knowledge”; empowering students while simultaneously guiding them adequately
   • time to learn the technology
   • technology must come second… and learning what is to be taught should be at the forefront of the experience.
   • prioritize the outcomes… otherwise, the learning may be interesting, but lacking in focus
   • makes more difficult to define the purpose of a piece of work or interdisciplinary exploration.
   • Necessity to respond to a variety of questions such as what disciplinary insights are relevant, which disciplines should dominate, how disciplines could be combined to leverage or advance the goals of the work, how to decide when the work is done and its purpose accomplished.  
   • Knowledge required not only to use multiple disciplines but to integrate them to accomplish the purpose of a task.
   • Core concepts and principles can be lost using this approach.
   • Ensuring that students actually learn and respect different ways of looking at a particular issue
   • Significant challenges in understanding how to assess interdisciplinary in a student’s abilities and performance as opposed to competence in any of the contributing disciplines (Good and Jacobs 2006)

Analysis of projects:

1. “Weblogs in a Grade 6/7 Classroom: A New Vision of Technology and Humanities Integration”:
   • Students have the opportunity to enhance writing skills utilizing weblogs
   • Weblogs: are online journals (text, images, and hyperlinks)
   • Dynamic environment that facilitates reflection.
   • Strategy to get students motivated; to participate actively in the writing construction and encourage critical thinking
   • Allows active learning, get feedback
   • Access to a variety of resources and blogging & providing a form of online asynchronous discussion.
   • Possibility of customizing blogs by adding images, graphics, videos, pictures and many other features
   • Enhances writing skills and connecting and integrating technology to a traditional field of study to form a new method to understand the subject
2. “Incorporating Global and Collaborative Learning in Grade 11 Social Studies Via the Internet” (Derrek Beam)
   • Delineate what we can do in so much time
   • Ability / difficulty to work in group and to communicate
   • Many aspects of communicating transcend the “technology” utilized; or rather, new forms of communication are now necessary in order to use the new tools appropriately
   • Collaborative learning is very efficient and can be effective if done with clear guidelines
   • Measuring students achievements must be explicit from the beginning

References  

1. Christensen, L. (2000). Unlearning the Myths that bind us: Critiquing Cartoons and Society. In reading, writing and rising up: Teaching about social justice and the power of the written word (pp. 40-47) A Rethinking Schools Publication.

2. Stack, M. & Kelly, M. D. (2006). Popular media, education and resistance, Canadian Journal of Education, 29(1), pp. 5-26
http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/CJE29-1.htm