Media Literacy for Development & Children's Rights - Competencies Chart

Author: Media Literacy for Development & Children's Rights, UNICEF Canada
Level: Secondary Cycle One
Subject Area : English Language Arts, Moral Education, Drama

Description: "Media Literacy for Development & Children's Rights" was created by UNICEF Canada to help young people in grades 6 - 8 understand the role played by the media in influencing their attitudes and perceptions about developing nations and development issues. This module contains a series of lessons, exercises and background information to help familiarize students with the issues and challenges surrounding representation of other countries and cultures by the media.

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
  • If necessary, combines one or more text structures to present more complex issues or to create specific effects
• 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
• Uses linguistic structures and features to communicate her/his meaning and to influence the audience in the manner intended:
  • Selects relevant devices such as emotional or rational appeals to influence the audience
  • Selects the usage conventions suitable both to the text type and to the expectations of the audience
• Presents the spoken text to audience
• In postproduction discussions, evaluates the spoken texts of others, using agreed-upon criteria

Action Research

• Defines the issue to be researched by asking questions such as: what are the questions that are critical to this issue? What should we do with what we learn? Who should we talk to or interview? What other resources should we seek?
• Develops a research process to collect data, e.g. researching, interviewing, videotaping, discussing, observing, connecting ideas across disciplines, and using the practical knowledge and experiences of the group
• Analyzes the data and constructs a working theory to explain and interpret the data
• Questions and challenges different points of view

Classroom Drama

• Uses drama to explore complex problems and to extend the range of learning contexts
• Engages in on-the-spot improvisation and role-play in order to:
  • Represent different views
  • Experiment with possible social roles and power relationships
• Experiments with register and dialect in specific situations

Social Practices of Classroom and Community

• Examines the discourse used to present information in selected spoken, written and media texts
• Examines the characteristics of familiar dominant discourses and minority voices: whose voices are heard and whose are silenced

Competency Two: Represents his/her literacy in various media

Production Process

Preproduction

• Negotiates text type to be produced
• Manipulates visual elements to build skills for later production activities– 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
• Rehearses production process:
  • Creates criteria for guiding production, e.g. features of an effective poster or advertisement
  • Discusses the purpose, context, target audience and their needs
  • Decides about medium, mode and code
  • Shares draft with classmates and intended audience
  • Gives and seeks specific feedback from others in the class

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)

Postproduction

• Presents text to intended audience
• Evaluates production process and text produced, with group and individually

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT)

• Uses different available technologies in order to construct own texts

Text, Audience, Producer

Textual Features, Codes and Conventions

• Identifies and deconstructs codes:
  • Captions, credits and titles
  • Dialogue and voiceovers
  • Lighting and sound
  • Camera language
  • Symbolic
  • Narrative
  • Sequencing
  • Colour
• Interprets media texts:
  • Draws on knowledge of production process and codes and conventions of texts produced
  • 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
  • Compares codes of familiar media text types, e.g. how codes of television news (reporter, anchor, camera footage) and newspapers (framed photo, captions, lead paragraph) impact the coverage of a local issue
  • 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”
  • Recognizes purpose and function of stereotypes
  • Examines ways in which bias occurs in various media texts

Representation

• Analyzes the functions of familiar photographs (of self, family and community) to record events and memories
• 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
  • Local news reporting in newspapers, TV and radio such as: role of the reporter/interviewer; treatment of same event, incident, issue, topic or person by different media

Audience and Producer

• Explores self as individual member of audience (use, personal biases, prior experiences) and as part of a larger target audience
• Chooses texts to read, interpret and produce based on interest(s), purpose(s), and preference
• Compares:
  • Own values with those presented in media texts
  • Different uses s/he makes of media texts
  • Interests, attitudes, personal biases and tastes over time through survey of own reading habits
  • Own responses, reactions and consumption of media texts with those of peers and other age groups
• Examines how media target specific audiences:
  • Identifies ways that different familiar audiences use the media
  • Identifies and generalizes aspects of familiar audiences
  • Identifies subjects of interest for specific audiences
  • Explores how the structures and features of texts shape meaning for an audience
• 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

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:
  • Explores different interpretations of the same event/idea/subject/topic in two sources and their impact on self as reader, e.g. current events in newspapers, on television, or radio
  • 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
  • Uses an inquiry process and action research in collaboration with peers to organize and report information in nonfiction and/or popular texts of interest to young adolescents for a familiar audience

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

Deliberates on the elements of a moral frame of reference:

• With others, looks for the words to define moral references
• Compares definitions, opinions and viewpoints
• Questions values and social precepts, their validity and how they are applied depending on the context
• Considers the effects of diverse visions of human beings on community life

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
• 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

Translates his/her choices into action

• Uses criteria to evaluate different options
• Expresses his/her preferred choice and gives the reasons and emotional factors behind his/her decision
• Delineates the individual and collective responsibilities entailed in his/her choice of options
• Explores individual and group ways of taking action

Drama

Competency 1: Creates Dramatic Works

Uses ideas to create a dramatic work

• Is open to a stimulus for creation
• Is receptive to ideas, images, emotions, sensations or impressions evoked by the stimulus
• Explores various ways of conveying creative ideas through dramatic action
• Chooses dramatic actions that hold his/her interest and envisions his/her creative project

Uses elements of dramatic language and technique

• Experiments, through improvisation, with elements of performance, playwriting and theatricality
• Makes use of his/her dramatic experiences

Organizes his/her dramatic creation

• Organizes the improvisation material based on the creative intention

Competency 2: Performs Dramatic Works

Applies elements of dramatic language

• Makes use of sensory and kinesthetic experiences
• Adapts selected elements of dramatic language to bring out the character and action
• Links the dramatic actions in keeping with the structure of the work