Quebec Competencies Chart - Buy Nothing Day
Author: Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, MediaSmarts
Level: Secondary Cycle One and Two
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Moral Education, Physical Education and Health
Lesson Link: Buy Nothing Day
Description: In this lesson Buy Nothing Day is used as a jumping-off point to look at the role of consumerism in our lives and culture. Students learn the definition of consumerism and consider its benefits and drawbacks; as well as where and how they receive consumerist messages.
Cross-curricular Competencies |
Broad Areas of Learning |
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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:
- Interprets audience’s expectations to determine which features are most important
- Analyzes the characteristics of the audience
- 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, if the context warrants it, and rehearses with peers as a simulated audience
- Uses language with the degree of precision and semantic and syntactic awareness required by the context
- Selects relevant devices such as emotional or rational appeals to influence the audience
- Experiments with intonation patterns, pitch and volume for desired effects
- Uses stylistic features and devices such as repetition, parody, exaggeration and imagery for emphasis, interest and special effect, and to create a personal style
- Selects the usage conventions suitable both to the text type and to the expectations of the audience
- Presents the spoken text to audience
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
- Link several scenes to create a longer improvisation
- Uses physical movement and nonverbal language such as sounds, images, gestures, facial expressions
- 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
- Writes script, storyboard or rough draft
- Shares draft with classmates and intended audience
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)
- Knowledge of structures and features of other media texts brought into own productions
Postproduction
- Presents text to intended audience
Text, Audience, Producer
Textual Features, Codes and Conventions
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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:
- 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
- Identifies connections made by producers between media texts, e.g. references to Disney in fast-food commercials
- Identifies aspects of media industry related to marketing and promotion
- 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 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:
- 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
- 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
- Expresses own interpretation(s) with clarity, openness and confidence
Other subject-specific programs
Ethics and Religious Culture
Reflects on ethical questions
Analyzes a situation from an ethical point of view
- Describes a situation and puts it into context
- Formulates a related ethical question
- Compares points of view
- Explains tensions or conflicting values
- Compares the situation with similar situations
- Compares his/her analysis of the situation with that of his/her classmates
Examines a variety of cultural, moral, religious, scientific or social references
- Finds the main references present in different points of view
- Looks for the role and the meaning of these references
- Considers other references
- Compares the meaning of the main references in different contexts
Evaluates options or possible actions
- Suggests options or possible actions
- Studies the effects of these options or actions on oneself, others or the situation
- Chooses options or actions that foster community life
- Reflects on the factors that influenced these choices
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.