There’s significant evidence that media education can counter unrealistic media representations of men’s and women’s bodies. For example, a 2015 study found that girls as young as Grade 5 who had received media literacy education in school had higher self-esteem and body satisfaction.
Television is an inescapable part of modern culture. We depend on TV for entertainment, news, education, culture, weather, sports—and even music, since the advent of music videos.
The music industry is a driven by economics, technology, gatekeepers and the ever-evolving ways people discover and consume music. Understanding these features is crucial to understanding the music itself and its impact.
Given the high likelihood that youth are going to come across or seek out online pornography at one point or another, not to mention the many messages they receive about sex through other media, it’s important that parents take an active role in their kids’ internet use and start talking to them about healthy relationships and sexuality at early ages to help them contextualize and make decisions about what they’re seeing online.
In Saskatchewan secondary English Language Arts, media-related objectives are provided under foundational objectives for speaking, listening, writing, reading, and representing and viewing.
In Ontario, media components are included in the English as a Second Language curriculum in the Social-Cultural Competence and Media Literacy strand. The document English as a Second Language and English Literacy Development (2007) identifies four overall expectations in this strand:
The Newfoundland career education curriculum includes expectations that incorporate media education themes. The curriculum document Career Development Intermediate (2012) includes a section that demonstrates the complementary relationship between media literacy and career education:
It’s hard to clearly define the effect media violence has on consumers and young people. This is mainly because terms like “violence” and “aggression” are not easily defined or categorized. To a child, almost any kind of conflict, like the heated arguments of some talk-radio shows or primetime news pundits, can sound as aggressive as two cartoon characters dropping anvils on each other.
One of the reasons why teens turn to shortcuts, such as judging a claim based on the reliability or apparent authenticity of the person making it, or turning to peers and influencers over trusted expert sources, is that they simply encounter too much information to deal with. To overcome this, we need to learn information sorting: how to quickly tell whether or not a source is even worth our attention before considering it.