Viewing Media through Critical Lenses: Adopting Perspectives and an Observant Eye

When looking at how to teach these concepts and ideas to a group of students, I think that there are three things that have to be paid attention to.

First, students have to understand why it is even important to do this. They have to understand why we should adopt different perspectives when looking at media. They have to understand why it is important to think critically about the information that we are exposed to and they have to be able to see how these messages are affecting them without them even realizing it.
In order to get this point across, I think that I would start this lesson off with a discussion of subliminal messaging. Perhaps I would show the students a more obvious advertisement that flashed fries every .1 seconds. I would want to start a discussion about how these media messages are orientating them as a reader. This would then demonstrate the importance of being aware of this so that they are able to fight back! The point of this introduction is to just make students aware that they are not receiving these messages blindly and that they are being positioned in some way.

Secondly, students should be able to understand why it is important to look through different perspectives and what these perspectives are. While I have now positioned them as a reader, I think that it is essential to teach them that this goes beyond just buying a product. They have to understand how this affects their own identity and how media develops the norms of society and makes things seem natural that are indeed inorganic. For this portion of the lesson, I think that it would be beneficial to look at something like Disney movies and how they socialize young children. These movies teach both boys and girls how to behave. I'm sure every student can recall either him or herself or someone else who grew up watching those movies and wanted to be a princess who was waiting to be rescued by a handsome prince or the other way around. I would use these Disney examples to explain the socialization process of the media and how much we get from the world by what we see.
Another personal example I could use from this would be about when I used to watch Saved by the Bell when I was a kid. I used this show to picture in my mind exactly what high school was going to be like. I thought that I would make friends with the principal, I would have clothes being sold out of lockers like Lisa, and I would meet a smart alec kid like Zac who would take me under his wing. This show created norms inside my head that I assumed to be true. I did not even question them.

Finally, after students understand how the media socializes people and creates norms, they also have to understand why. In this example of the King of Queens, I would not just have the students discuss how the working class citizen was portrayed as a buffoon, I would also need to include a discussion of why these shows would bother to do this. For social class, I would lead a discussion about advertising and how they pay for these shows. What is the goal of advertising? For people to buy their products. By portraying working class people as buffoons, it forces people to aspire to be rich. It forces them to want to be intelligent and to demonstrate this by proving that they have money. How do you prove that you have money? You buy stuff, preferably things that are being advertised.

I think that in order for students to truly understand this assignment, they would have to develop several components of background knowledge. I could not just throw up a lesson plan that asked them to analyze a piece of text like the King of Queens as I did here. I want the students to understand how they are positioned as readers, why this matters, why it is being done, and what they can do about it.

For every perspective that I discuss, I would want the student to not just understand the perspective. I want them to look at how the media has affected this perspective. I want them to see the instability that lies in the definitions and the control that the media has on creating what seem to be like stabilities. Thus for each perspective, I would lead a discussion about what the students believe to be true about say, what it means to be female. I would then work to destabilize these definitions as I would disrupt the binaries that they may have created. I think this could easily be done by looking at how media portrayals have changed over the years and through different cultures. We could look at the 50's woman who is the caretaker of the family with a smile plastered on her face or we could look at the pop music star who is half naked, sweat dripping off her body as the ultimate sex symbol.
The representations of family, races, and cultures have changed as the media has created new definitions. I would look at how the media has helped to create these constructions. After I have done this, I would then bring in the text that they are to analyze.
Thus, once students see examples of how a text shows what it means to be a woman, I would have them take a media example and dissect what it is saying about a woman and how that fits with what we see as the norms of society.