Weekly Response 8: DIY Production and Developing News Literacy Skills

Posted by lisawilk on November 5, 2011 · 1 Comment 

While reading the two articles by Bailin, Kafai and Peppler, I kept finding myself comparing it to my field experience at the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush and envisioning ways I can use the information within the classroom. I particularly found Emily Bailin’s article, Philadelphia Students Explore Flash Mobs to Build Digital and Media Literacy Skills, to be a model of how Louis Mazza and I can have students can use published news stories to elicit their own opinions about an issue. Bailin explains how John Landis, a teacher at the Russell Byers Charter School, taught a lesson to his 9-11-year-old African-American students about the recent flash mobs in Philadelphia. Landis introduced the lesson with Red Lasso (www.redlasso.com), an online TV news search engine, and asked his students to look up local TV news stories about the flash mobs. The search elicited a discussion not only about the flash mobs, but also about how a news story is constructed. This would later tie into the media aspect of the lesson, in which students used a program called Scratch to create their own videogames about the flash mobs. Which in turn attracted the attention of the local NBC reporters, who did a 30-second story about the current topic being taught at the media literacy summer program. Once the story aired the students found out that the news media will often make mistakes to get a story to air as fast as possible and reporters often shape a story into their own vision or interpretation.

I thought that Landis’s introduction to this lesson could easily be implemented into the Video Journalism course at Rush. This week I introduced this idea of having students look up local, national and/or global news to not only keep them up to date with current events but also to see examples of work. Mazza had never thought of doing this because he has been so worried about seeing the students complete their multimedia community based stories. He has also been worried about the students utilizing their time in the classroom, but felt overwhelmed with the lack of production which causes some students to sit in class with nothing to do except brainstorm. I had been questioning how to approach this idle time issue and this approach had been at the back of my head for a while now. However, reading this article helped solidify the idea for me and even has provided me with an online TV news search engine that should be accessible in the school, unlike YouTube and Vimeo. The article also brought an issue that I actually see in the classroom, which is that in order for children “to grow up [as] citizens in a democracy, then it is important that they understand how news is constructed.” I asked the students if they read the newspaper and in a class of 28 I think I saw 4 or 5 hands go up. I believe that this really needs to be addressed in our classroom and this approach seems to be the best way to start to help students understand journalism in terms of its construction, impact, hidden messages and as examples of production.

Youth, Technology, and DIY: Developing Participatory Competencies in Creative Media Production, by Yasmin B. Kafai and Kylie A. Peppler also presented some information that felt was very relevant to the experience I am having Rush thus far. It actually also ties closely to a question that I brought up with Diana Laufenberg, one of the Social Studies teachers at the Science Leadership Academy, which is whether media production should be taught in media literacy classrooms. Since the article focuses closely on this idea of creative media production as “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Broadcasting,” I began to think about what we did this week with the Video Journalism class. Since I had suggested to Mazza that the students could cover school stories if they were having issues with their community ones, he decided that we should create a blog to house the students’ work. Kafai and Peppler actually refer to studies about how blogs are “potent forms of ‘Do-It-Yourself Broadcasting,’ creating links to academic writing while making connections to potentially broad audiences, informing affinity groups among youth.” I showed the students how to create a post, but we are not telling the students what to post. We are giving them suggestions for story ideas and they are able to use their own creativity to produce a media based story on their own. It is very DIY, but we are there to help the students through the process of production and post-production. However, we will not make sure that the story will be the student’s vision and not our own. I believe this is very important when teaching youth media literacy and the creation of DIY productions. I do not want to remove their voice from the piece. I am there to teach them, not to act as manipulate their work so that it meets my standards.

I also found Kafai and Peppler’s suggestions towards converging participatory competencies based on the advantages of DIY production used for creative media production. I had to agree the whole time I was reading the article because I really believe that this approach does allow students to have a deeper understanding of media and gives them the ability to voice their own opinions about the subject. This type of production allows students to have “critical reflection on media culture through visual instead of oral or written discourse.” In the Video Journalism course Mazza and I want to give the students the chance to have their voices heard. I particularly want the students to become more aware of the media as well as their own local and school community. Kafai and Pepper conclude that “creative media production pushes youth to question their current observations and understandings, make explicit their assumptions about new media, and discover the conventions of writing the language of new media by learning the visual, semiotic, aural, and technological literacies necessary to inscribe one’s self into the larger participatory culture.” This is exactly what Mazza and I would like the students to get out of this class and I believe DIY Broadcasting is by far the best way for them to understand these concepts. I do think the weekly current events assignment will also be beneficial, but there is no substitute that can be as active as this type of creative media production for learning about video journalism.

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