George Washington would have supported media literacy

As I read Segall and Schmidt s article on the newspaper as a social text, I felt a pang of guilt: “They [newspapers] give teachers a sense of modernizing instruction and relating the curriculum to students lives and interests.” Ooops. Guilty. In my student teaching I used newspapers in nearly every lesson. I prided myself on using a variety of papers and patted myself of the back for hardly touching the textbook and instead bringing in current events. Isn’t this what good teachers do?

Segall, Schmidt and Considine imply it isn’t. Using a newspaper to make yourself feel good that you are leaving the cursed textbook shut and bringing in “real-life” isn’t going to get me teacher of the year. While I do think it is good to bring in current events in the news daily, I never had an explicit lesson on how to approach the news, how to access, analyze and evaluate its message. We discussed bias, certainly, but nothing approaching the TAP model. And for this, the authors would surely revoke my non-existent teaching license.

I really appreciated Considine’s discussion of media literacy and how crucial it is for young people to develop. We are living in a media crazy world, and we should be helping media crazy boys and girls to make sense of that world by looking at the very stuff that floods them with information. If students are drowning in information and starved for knowledge, perhaps media literacy will be their life preserver.

I appreciated the straightforwardness and practicality of the TAP model. I think this could be used with students just as he presents it. I also liked the practicality of representing the TAP approach as a triangle. Straightforward, usable, and not in any way asserting that history teachers should delegate George Washington to the backseat or disregard him altogether (!?!). I love it. I was also happy to see several websites and clear examples of how to approach analyzing media with students. The Cinderella Man example made me think back to how much I took for granted when watching the movie. It is exciting to think that I can go back again and look at it with new, more focused, media-approach savvy eyes, and perhaps bring this to my students in a lesson the Great Depression. Any day that links the Great Depression with Russell Crowe is a good day.