Mirror Image Lesson Plan

Body Image
Gender Representation
Marketing & Consumerism
Tobacco Marketing

Level: Grades 5 to 9

Author: This lesson has been adapted from Smoke-Free for Life, a smoking prevention curriculum supplement from the Nova Scotia Department of Health, Drug Dependency and Tobacco Control Unit.

This lesson is part of USE, UNDERSTAND & ENGAGE: A Digital Media Literacy Framework for Canadian Schools.

Overview

In this lesson, students learn tobacco and nicotine advertising through the “rules of notice” of visual media. Students move from identifying factual design elements to interpreting their emotional impact and evaluating the broader societal implications of these constructions. Students then create an original counter-advertisement or parody ad that challenges industry narratives and unmasks manipulation.

Learning Outcomes

Big ideas/key concepts: Students will understand…

  • Each medium has a unique aesthetic form: media makers use a specific "language" or "rules of notice" to get and direct audience attention to affect what they think and feel
  • Audiences negotiate meaning: different people may interpret the same media work differently based on their own experiences and have the power to "read against" a dominant frame

Essential knowledge: Students will learn…

  • Reading Media: specific visual techniques, including line and shape, angle and distance, and composition (specifically the Rule of Thirds), and how these elements are used for narrative or expressionist purposes
  • Consumer Awareness: persuasion techniques in advertising
  • Media Health: misleading tobacco industry messaging

Key vocabulary: rules of notice; composition; rule of thirds; symmetry; Ragnarok

Core competencies: Students will be able to…

  • Use: Use rules of notice to create a media text
  • Understand: Analyze how rules of notice are used to create explicit and implicit messages
  • Engage: Use media tools to express themselves for social activism

Student-facing outcomes: We will learn how visual techniques are used to make us feel certain things and send certain messages. We will explore how we can identify and interpret messages in media. We will analyze and answer back to messages about tobacco and nicotine.

This lesson and all associated documents (handouts, overheads, backgrounders) is available in an easy-print, pdf kit version.

Lesson Kit