Rational For Teaching Media Studies

Here in the Minneapolis Public School District, we are very focused on the “basics”, partly because of our commitment to closing the achievement gap and partly because we are looking to raise student achievement and prepare them to be college-ready. Here at Folwell Middle School we do not currently have a media studies class. Presently, we are focused on traditional Language Arts classes as well as Read 180, which is a class that focuses on the basics for students who have fallen behind. For next year I have proposed a Media Studies class that focuses on learning critical and creative reading and writing skills through analyzing different medias. Parents have been supportive and would like their children to be challenged in this way.

Though teaching Media Studies is often thought of as “outside” traditional language arts curriculum, it is also a subject that teaches the basics; it just happens to do so through different mediums. The following is not an exhaustive list of reasons that media studies is a valuable course, but some examples that illustrate it’s importance.

Youth are Engaging in Media Use in Higher Amounts Than Previously: The youth of today are already heavily using and interacting with many different types of media. A study done by the Kaiser Network shows that youth ages 8 to 18 have increased their overall exposure to media content per day, this is to say that the study found “the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has increased by more than an hour over the past five years” (Key Findings from New Research on Children's Media Use, March 9, 2005, The Kaiser Family Foundation). Because of this, it is our responsibility to teach media literacy so that our students are learning through and about activities that they already engage in outside of the classroom. We need to build upon students’ active use of media.

Moving Media from Passive to Active Participation: A big part of education is drawing on students’ experiences to lead them to new discoveries and enhance their knowledge. Since students are engaging with media at such high amounts, we need to draw on these experiences and build upon them to enhance their knowledge and use of media. Many students sit in their homes and watch TV, surf the Internet, and flip through magazines. We need to foster a move from this passive interaction to an active interaction where they are reading information on the internet and critically analyzing the validity of it, creating blogs instead of just reading them, and watching TV and movies and interpreting and analyzing the messages that they are sending. In addition, the skills learned in this class related to using blogs, wikis and websites can be applicable to courses or jobs in the future.

It is not the medium, it is the content: Through such mediums as blogs and wikis, students are working on their reading and writing skills. Students can learn creative and technical writing skills, as well as reading skills through other mediums that can be interactive and familiar to students. Teachers can create lessons that incorporate higher order thinking skills through the use of any medium. The use of new medias can make the content appear more interesting and manageable to our media-savvy youth of today. Youth are interested in “new media”, shown by the increase in use. It makes sense to teach “basic” skills to students in an interactive and interesting way that they are familiar with and that they appreciate.

These are a few reasons why creating a Media Studies class would be beneficial to our students. Again, students need to be engaged and interested in what they are studying. Students in this class will learn to analyze texts, create texts of their own through blogs and wikis, as well as analyze images through comics and movies. This class will focus on the basics, using interactive and engaging medias.