Quebec Competencies Chart - Cyberbullying and Civic Participation

Author: Emmanuelle Erny-Newton, MediaSmarts
Level: Secondary Cycle One
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Moral Education
Lesson Link: Cyberbullying and Civic Participation

Description: This lesson allows students to explore the concept of civic participation in the creation of Canadian laws through a study of the consultation process found in the Canada Gazette. Students will create their own School Gazette by proposing and discussing rules against cyber bullying at school.

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
• 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
  • Chooses a level of language or register most suitable to the context
• Uses linguistic structures and features to communicate her/his meaning and to influence the audience in the manner intended:
  • Prepares several drafts
  • Uses language with the degree of precision and semantic and syntactic awareness required by the context
• Presents the spoken text to audience
• Uses selected feedback to revise own texts
• 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
• Questions and challenges different points of view

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
• 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
• Rehearses production process:
  • Creates criteria for guiding production
  • Discusses the purpose, context, target audience and their needs
  • 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)
• Reviews and edits text to focus on meaning(s)/message(s)

Postproduction

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

Text, Audience, Producer

Textual Features, Codes and Conventions

• Identifies and deconstructs codes:
  • Captions, credits and titles
• Interprets media texts:
  • Draws on knowledge of production process and codes and conventions of texts produced
  • Explores the codes that construct media texts
  • Constructs message(s) and meaning(s) using familiar codes from media texts
  • 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
  • Identifies and discusses some of the ways in which pictures, illustrations, symbols and images enhance the message
  • Explores the use of “formulas”

Audience and Producer

• Explores self as individual member of audience (use, personal biases, prior experiences) and as part of a larger target audience
• Discusses characteristics of producer:
  • Explores where, when, why, by and for whom texts are produced

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)

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
  • Texts s/he has written and produced that have similar structures, features, codes and conventions
• With guidance, examines text in its literary and/or socio-cultural context:
  • Identifies features, codes and conventions used to achieve a recognized social purpose and/or function and/or effect and impact on self as reader
• 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
  • 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
• Analyzes the tensions that exist among different viewpoints, opinions, visions of human beings, values and social precepts
• 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