We live in a world where we are bombarded with media messages from various sources including television shows, movies, advertisement in both print and digital form, social media, and many more. Literacy is no longer limited to reading and writing. Members of today's society need to develop competencies that will allow them to access, analyze and reflect on the messages they are receiving. According to Rene Hobbs the five competencies are ACCESS, ANALYZE, CREATE, REFLECT, and ACT. Thus, educators must provide students with opportunities to practice and develop each and everyone of these competencies. Having competency in only a few of the five will put students at a disadvantage. For instance, being able to locate and identify relevant information is insufficient if they are unable to use critical thinking skills to analyze the message. Being able to decode messages is insufficient if they are unable to create their own and share them through the various digital tools available to them. Students also need to become responsible and ethical creators of media. This requires them to reflect on what they are sharing. The outcome we hope for is for students to apply their skills and digital competencies to solve problems.
Being responsible creators and consumers of media implies being able to decipher the text and subtext within each message. The message is not always written or spoken and at times the message contains subliminal messages. Like Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the Message". Do 9 out 10 dentists truly recommend that tooth paste? Does using AXE deodorant truly make girls attracted to men? Students will be better prepared to identify, interpret, and create messages by developing the five competencies that Hobbs suggests.
I myself am guilty of not doing enough to teach my students to check for reliability and credibility. Math lends itself more to checking for accuracy. I always have my students check their answers and ask themselves if their answer makes sense. We also have conversations about statistical data being presented in a misleading manner. It just takes changing the values of the y-axis to mislead readers. Can you identify which of the two bar graphs is misleading?
Your graph is a great example to illustrate how media messages can be manipulated, Enrique. You may not think you are addressing media literacy but that was the perfect example to show that you are helping students question what they see.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing the reality of items/things we may encounter every day. I even find myself standing in the aisle of Target for longer periods of time due to the number of products being produced and strong marketing methods these companies are using. Like Nicole said, that was a great graph-Until you asked that question, I didn't look at the .002% difference.
ReplyDeleteWhile I know that data can easily be skewed, it was kind of shocking to see your graph example. The numbers represented really aren't very far apart, and yet the graph on the left makes it seem like interest rates changed drastically over the years. It's really important that we start teaching kids when they are younger how to fact check information they are taking in, and help them to learn which sources are the most reliable.
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