Quebec Competencies Chart - The Girl in the Mirror

Author: Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, MediaSmarts
Level: Secondary Cycle one
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Moral Education, Physical Education and Health
Lesson Link: The Girl in the Mirror

Description: In this lesson, students look at how gender stereotyping may discourage young women from becoming involved in politics.

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

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

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

Production

• Communicates information, experiences, points of view and personal responses to a familiar audience

Text, Audience, Producer

Textual Features, Codes and Conventions

• Interprets media texts:
  • 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
  • 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
  • Recognizes purpose and function of stereotypes
  • Examines ways in which bias occurs in various media texts

Representation

• 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

Audience and Producer

• Explores self as individual member of audience (use, personal biases, prior experiences) and as part of a larger target audience
• Compares:
  • Own values with those presented in 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
  • Explores how the structures and features of texts shape meaning for an audience
• Discusses characteristics of producer:
  • Considers the stance of different media texts on issues and concerns of interest to young adolescents
  • Examines the impact of marketing on common social concepts such as childhood

Competency Three: Reads and listens to written, spoken and media texts

Reader’s Stance: Constructing a Reading of a 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)
• 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
  • Features, codes and conventions of known text types/genres,
• 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, e.g. in a popular television commercial, in a humorous text
  • 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
• Communicates interpretation(s) of a text in an individual voice, referring to prior experience, own reading profile and understanding of texts as social constructs:
  • 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

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
• 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
• 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
• 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

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

Physical Education and Health

The Cycle One program states:

The messages conveyed by the media can have major repercussions on the behaviour of adolescents. Therefore, it is important that students be encouraged to maintain a critical distance with regard to the media. For example, during a big sports event, certain networks show violent images involving the athletes. Reports on doping, which some athletes resort to, raise ethical questions about respecting rules and about honesty and fair play. Advertising uses an infinite amount of female body images to demonstrate the effects of products that enable you to obtain the perfect body with no physical effort. This sometimes contradictory information cannot help but challenge students, who must exercise critical judgment when they situate this information in relation to the various contexts in which they develop the subject-specific competencies.

The broad area of learning Media Literacy is thus part of this program.