Método

As they are working with images and videos, it is important that students adopt a critical stance in terms of how these images or videos represent differences in race, class, gender, age, or professions in the media (Beach, 2007). Media representations often essentialize, generalize, or categorize people or institutions based on essentialist notions or stereotypical generalizations. For example, urban communities or neighborhoods are often portrayed in television news or crime shows as crime-ridden or poverty-stricken, without providing addition contextual information about the causes of these phenomenon: high unem -ployment, lack of government support, or lack of affordable housing.

Students can conduct critical-inquiry analyses of media representations, posing inquiry questions such as, “How often are people of color portrayed in prime time tele vision?” or “How are teachers portrayed in Hollywood films?” and then create produc -tions or exhibits representing their analysis (for a low-tech option, students could tear out images from magazines to create collages on poster-boards). Students could search for online images to create online collages or online image slideshows using Flickr or Google Images to portray consistent patterns in media representations of gender, race, class, and age differences, as well as the workplace, vacations, “desirable” neighborhoods, food consumption, etc.

In analyzing these representations, students ask the questions: “Where do these representations come from?” “Who produces these representations,” “Why are they pro -ducing these representations,” “How is complexity limited by these representations,”

and “What is missing or who is silenced in these representations?” The following are some topics about which students could create their productions or exhibits (See Analyzing film/TV and Media representations on the website.)

Gender

Students could analyze how females are frequently represented in terms of their femininity and sexuality based on idealized images of feminine beauty that objectify women. For example, female athletes are often described in terms of their appearances or relationships while male athletes are represented more in terms of their physical strength and skills.

Students may also examine representations of masculinity portrayed in sports, ads, and action/detective TV programs/films in terms of physical violence and toughness, as well as portrayals of homophobic attitudes in films such as Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005).

Anne and Jessica, referred to in the beginning of the chapter, have students analyze gender representations of male and female teenagers in teen magazines, creating poster presentations with images from the magazines to support their claims. They also write a response to the presentations answering these questions: “What message about your gender do teen magazines give to readers of the opposite gender? Is this message accurate?”

Finally, based on analysis of these representations, students write a proposal for an original teen sitcom or drama, depicting the characters, their typical dilemmas, and the intended audience, as well as some sample storyboards.

Class

Students could also examine representations of differences between working- versus middle- versus upper-middle-class worlds. For example, students may note how working-class people are represented in the news, political ads, or prime-time shows as “good, 106 WHAT LITERATURES ARE WE TEACHING?

hard-working, salt-of-the-earth” people who differ from knowledge-economy workers.

These representations shift the focus away from analysis of an economic system in which blue-collar wages have remained flat since the 1980s and that are used to pit working-class people in opposition to “government bureaucrats” in political campaigns.

Race

Students may also define connections in terms of how certain racial and ethnic groups are represented in the media in which “whiteness” often operates as the invisible norm positioning people of color as the “other” (Roediger, 2002). Few if any African-Americans or Latinos assume roles as news anchors, main characters in drama shows, talk show guests, characters in ads, or organizational spokespersons. Students could examine media representations of Mid-eastern and Muslim people portrayed in largely negative ways as suspicious and exotic.

In teaching Smoke Signals (Eyre, 1998), an adaptation of Sherman Alexie’s (2005) stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, to her 8th grade students, Rachel Godlewski began with the familiar topic of media representations of gender by having students first list adjectives associated with different gender groups and then have students find examples of gender representations from film, television, commercials, magazine articles and advertisements, newspapers, websites, books, songs/music videos, and cartoons. Students then made presentations in which they addressed the questions: “What adjectives describe the men and women being portrayed in their examples? If there is a power dynamic between people, who has the power? Who solves the problems? How do they solve the problems? What activities are the people doing in the images? Are all forms of media providing the same range of representations of gender? Are some widely different? If so, which ones? How can you account for the differences? How do the audiences affect the representations offered? Where are certain representations most prevalent?”

Students then turn to the less familiar topic of media representations of Native Americans. She started by having students list adjectives they would use to describe American Indian culture and people as a reflection of their preconceptions. Students then viewed “Images of Indians: How Hollywood Stereotyped the Native American”

(O’Brien & Witmer, 2003) and read excerpts from Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Rollins & O’Connor, 1999). Students then read the screenplay Smoke Signals, and wrote in their dialogue journals about the two characters’

relationships with each other. Students then view the film, noting the use of techniques, leading up to writing a final review of the film.

Places or Regions: Urban, Suburban, Rural Communities

Students could also examine how different places such as urban, suburban, rural communities are represented. While urban communities are often portrayed as problematic, dangerous, and blighted, without providing addition contextual information about the causes of problems: high unemployment, lack of government support, or lack of affordable housing (Macek, 2006). Suburbia or exurbia is often perceived in terms of being more “white,” as described in the book Searching for Whitopia (Benjamin, 2009).

Representations of rural American in the news also paints a relatively stereotypical portrayal of the issues facing rural America (Center for Media and Public Affairs, 2002:

75% of news stories about rural towns focused on crime; few stories dealt with issues of agriculture, despite the loss of jobs, and the decline of family farming).

MEDIA MAKERS AND MEDIA READERS 107

Advertising

In critiquing advertising, students can draw on semiotic analysis of the social and cultural meaning of signs and codes in ads (Scholes, 1985). Signs consist of an image, a word, or an object whose meaning depends on the relationships between the signifier (the image, word, object, or practice) and the signified (the implied meaning) (Barthes, 1974) whose meaning is constituted by cultural codes, for example, “codes of beautification” (Christian-Smith (1993) —that a woman’s physical attractiveness contributes to building relationships, or codes for “good” (heroes dressed in white) versus “evil” (the “bad man” dressed in black) in films. Ads for luxury items such as expensive jewelry or cars often employ images associated with an upper-middle-class lifestyle, for example, showing an expensive car parked in front of a mansion, meanings based on codes for class differences.

Students could also analyze rhetorical appeals to audiences through attempting to gain audience identification with groups or causes. For example, Pepsi ads portray people having a good time at a party, an activity with which audiences would identify given the fact that they would also want to be at a party. The ad may then show that the people at the party are drinking Pepsi, so that audiences may then equate having a good time with drinking Pepsi.

To engage in rhetorical analysis of ads, students can pose these questions:

• Who’s the intended or target audience?

• What signs, markers, images, language, social practices imply that audience?

• How is the audience linked to use of the product?

• What are the underlying value assumptions? (Having white teeth enhances your popularity; casino gambling is enjoyable.)

Learning to critique advertising becomes important given the influence of advertising on adolescents’ lives. For example, much of television advertising by fast-food restaurants targeted to children and adolescents involve promotion of often high-fat/calorie food, equating, as do McDonald’s ads for children, food with themes of adventure and magic.

One result of this glamorization of high-fat food is increased rates of obesity and diabetes in children and adolescents, who often select this food over more healthy vegetable or fruit options. (See Analyzing advertising on the website.)

A Unit on Consumerism

Central to all of this is a critique of a consumer culture/economy that attempts to create the need for consumer goods—the fact that one’s life is always inadequate or unfilled without certain products or that products will enhance one’s popularity and happiness.

For her student teaching, Becca Dalrymple created a unit based on the science fiction, young-adult novel Feed, by M. T. Anderson (2002). In this novel, adolescents live in a future world in which they are continually fed consumer messages into their brains.

Becca began the unit by having students identity their consumer habits—what they buy and what influences what they buy. The students then read popular teen magazines and identified teen consumer norms. Students then went to a shopping mall and interviewed store employees about their teen patronage; students also reflected on their feelings about being in the mall—whether they found it stressful, rejuvenating, exciting, boring, anxious, or calm.

Students then responded to the first section of Feed, entitled “Eden,” which portrays a world dominated by large corporations. Students discuss their attitudes about large 108 WHAT LITERATURES ARE WE TEACHING?

corporations—particularly Clear Channel, Fox News, Disney/ABC, Time Warner, and News Corporation—which control much of the media. For example, the students noted that Clear Channel not only owns nearly 1,200 radio stations, but they also own SFX Entertainment, the primary concert-venue owner and touring promoter in the country.

Clear Channel can therefore choose to promote only certain musicians on their stations that they have also signed up for their concerts. Students then discussed alternative media texts such as Utne Reader and Mother Jones magazines that portray alternative perspectives outside of the media conglomerates’ texts.

In responding to the second section, “Utopia,” students discussed the ways in which the main character, Titus, began to resist the consumer feeds, as he begins to recognize marketing strategies:

They’re also wanting to make you want things. Everything we’ve grown up with . . . it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to . . . they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you’re supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. (p. 80–81)

Students then identified the types of ads they might receive given their own possible

“types.” They also discussed the ways in the school in the novel (“School^TM”) is run by corporations to teach students how to consume, and the ways in which adolescents’

spending can result in financial debt and depression, as portrayed by the death of one of the characters in the novel, Violet.

For final activities, Becca’s students debated positive versus negative aspects of advertising or “feeds.” For final writing projects, students compared the novel to 1984, created a futuristic society that was similar or different to the society in Feed, surveyed their peers’ consumer habits and created a “handbook” for responsible teenage consumerism, or addressed an issue associated with media conglomerate control in which they assumed an active role in challenging a corporation’s control.