media literacy

Family Portraits by 1st and 2nd graders

The other reason is related to the previous reason. Because it’s the norm to teach for compliance instead of creativity, I even find myself sometimes making lessons that check more for compliance than creativity! I’m working on a lesson right now about making New Yorker inspired still lives but halfway through the lesson I realized all the student works were so similar and it was because of how I structured the lesson! Reflecting on my lesson, I want to give students more examples and ways to experiment with their work. How can they play with scale or texture or design in a way that makes their work unique? How can I challenge them to not just award their peer who’s good at representational drawing but their peer  who decided to run with a concept that no one else even thought about? Even though it is challenging, I believe more than ever that to teach for creativity is critical to creating socially engaged, socio-emotionally healthy citizens. 

Currently, in the public elementary school where I am student teaching, technology is used pretty minimally. Zoom is used for all remote classes, along with other support platforms such as Dojo and Google Classroom but I’m not certain this would qualify as teaching technology to students. Sometimes videos are used to support lessons or to act as transitions but again, I don’t think this is really what Delacruz is arguing for.  Several years ago I taught 3D printing and modeling to middle school aged students. Students created drafts, prototyped, peer reviewed, and tested and retested their work- objectives that are all included in the Media Arts Standards. We had a “Marvelous Mistakes” board where students talked about what went wrong, how they worked through it and/or asked other students to help solve. This is an explicit use of technology, the 3D printer was a poster child for tech in the early 2010s, but I believe these same skills can be used with tech that is more accessible or even with analogue materials that are in conversation with the digital world.  For example, in the lesson I’m writing for class about creating a movie poster of your life (analog), I want students to think about how mainstream media uses images to maintain harmful stereotypes (digital). I think this kind of work although not explicitly technological is helpful in preparing younger students for the technologically entrenched world where they’ll be bombarded with loaded images and the need to decode them.

A sample artwork I made for a lesson focusing on using 3D paper techniques to create a food or dish that is meaningful to us

T- Tell your partner something you liked A- Ask your partner a question about their artwork G- Give your partner a suggestion I walked around the room, listening to students use this method and was blown away by their ability to offer and accept suggestions! We were working on drawing animals and the peer review was noticeable not only in their artwork but in how they continued to work on their art afterwards- continuing to ask their partner for their opinion even after the TAG exercise ended. 

For Monday’s class, the readings focused on how public schools receive their funding. The New Teacher Book provides some foundational stats as well as more nuanced insight about education’s depraved financial situation. In his piece School Funding Basics, Stan Karp states that state and local sources provide for 90% of school funding while federal funding only covers about 10%. This obviously largely impacts the students of poorer distracts. Sometimes the funding is so lacking that it’s not only unethical but actually illegal. Because funding is based on politician’s whims and biases and not actually student or school staff need, there is a lot of room to rob from education. On top of that, the “over-reliance on local property taxes also contributes to funding inequalities [...] with different tax bases” aka as long as so much of school funding is tied to private property taxes there will always be a gap in the quality of education in low-income, medium-income and high-income areas. This 90-10 (statelocal - federal) funding model is so problematic it makes me wonder what would happen if we flipped it so it was 90% federal funding and 10% state, local. Would we see the poorer states rise to meet the richer states?  Not only does this mostly affect poorer, browner and blacker schools but it also majorly affects students with special needs. When reading through the history of policies that affect those with special needs such as FAPE, IDEA and others, the government has been slow and conservative when pushed to give more than the bare minimum. This reading also reminds me of Endrew F vs Douglas County Schools where Endrew’s parents were advocating that IDEA should grant their autistic school an education “appropriate” to his ability not just an “adequate” one that takes the least amount of resources/money. Unfortunately The School won the case and Endrew’s parents put their son in a private school that better supported his growth. But not all parents can afford to do that. The slashes to public budget make way for gross privatization which further stunts resources and puts communities in a type of capitalistic chokehold. Opportunistic politicians profit off of this systemic failing. Cuomo has cut billions off the budgets of the schools with the highest needs for a decade now. During the pandemic when schools were getting much-needed additional funding from the CARES Act, he slashed their regular education budget so to cancel out the additional help in the time of a crisis. Bill Deblasio has mandated a school hiring freeze for the last few years to pull tenured teachers out of purgatory at the expense of students learning needs. There is hope though, like the teachers in Chicago, we must continue to fight in solidarity. The other essay in The New Teacher Book, “Aren’t You on the Listserv?” goes into the reasons and remedies of the disparity in who’s parents are represented in school involvement. The majority of white people involved in this diverse school reminds me of the “Nice White Parents” podcast and how a small group of white parents took over the PTA of a mostly black school in Brooklyn. The teacher and author implements a bunch of strategies to make involvement more equitable and finds a lot of success! One thing she did was to make every home notice in both spanish and english and to put spanish on top. I thought this was cool and also made me realize my own small bias- whenever I fill out online forms I expect USA to be on the top of an otherwise alphabetized country list... and this is just one small way it is engrained in me the false narrative of US superiority. 

At the beginning of this class, we started by watching John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”, I thought it was fitting to post how he continues to influence me now that this class is sadly coming to an end. 

Creating a lesson plan around the appropriation art means getting into what it means to re-contextualize something. Been thinking a lot about this Hank Willis Thomas interview about his series Unbranded (2007) where he takes off the logos of racialized ads so the images “can speak for themselves”.

Excerpt from “The Banking Concept of Education” by Paulo Freire

I think there’s something to be said about how the often authoritarian dynamic between student and teacher or even child and parent creates an inability to self-advocate. When you are always told what to do and it’s often only justified with a “because I said so” or “because I’m the parent”, it teaches you that your needs don’t matter and that you’re not respected enough to deserve a justification. This kind of dynamic reinforces a greater narrative of “those in charge decide and you’re at their mercy”. It makes you feel really small and this unfortunately gets internalized. Let alone, the societal consequences if you try to negotiate and you’re a person of color or a woman, you might be perceived as unreasonable just for trying to stand up for yourself. Which is also to say, it is capitalism that deeply benefits from all of us being unable to negotiate in our jobs and in our communities. Because capitalism profits from this, this invaluable skill is often a huge kept secret! I think it’s really smart and subversive to teach this skill to students, not only for use in the workplace but also among their peers as a way to better articulate their needs as well as understand the needs of others. I had never thought of negotiation as a tool to support healthy communication and empathy but I come away reading about this excited to try this in my future classes.

It’s bittersweet to admit that these two online communities have influenced me just as much if not more than any of my K-12 education. Why was so much of my learning happening outside of the so-called place of learning, school? Why is this often the case? It begs the question, are schools set up to deny students the real tools needed for learning (agency, creativity, experimentation, collaboration, collective intelligence, self-driven inquiry)? If so- how can we change that? I believe the tools and projects of media literacy are an essential part of the solution. In order to start engaging students, it makes sense to start with what they already engage with and it’s up to us as teachers to figure out what that is.