Week 7

The Role of Art Education in Teaching Students to be Media Literate Digital Citizen

Since the birth of the World Wide Web in 1993, the amount of information contained there is staggering, since 2008, it's amount of technical information has doubled every two years.   (Rewired, p 153) Our children are bombarded by electronic media from birth.  Zero regulation on advertising has made it possible for our children to be the target of high tech marketing with which they lack the skills and ability to resist.  Parents and teachers alike are digital immigrants. (Rewired, p.72)  We are attempting to guide children through a land where they are the natives, yet lack the developed mental capabilities to discern the terrain for themselves.  It should be the role of art educators, of ALL educators to assist our children in traversing this exciting, but dangerous new frontier.

From the time when FTC was deregulated in the early 1980’s, children in the United States have been the targets of television shows and movies designed solely for the purpose of marketing.  Product placement in video games, interactive website games, television and movies communicate ideas to children about what they want and NEED to be hip, cool, and happy. The YouTube video, Consuming Kids alerts us to neuro-marketing techniques.  By the use of MRIs and brain scanning technologies marketers have the capability to tweak their advertising until they achieve the exact response desired. Marketers respect no boundaries in their quest for brand loyalty from the cradle to the grave. Educated parents, anxious to combat this negative media effect turn to what they perceive as a positive media effect and seat their infants in front of television and videos which claim to promote a boost in everything from speech and language development to an appreciation for classical arts, though no studies support a benefit from this practice. Creative play through which children learn to socialize and problem solve is stripped away as commercials steer them towards toys which leave no room for imagination and deprive them the opportunities to participate in ‘real play’.  Real age is compressed and as our children grow, media continues to bombard them with the idea that they are not perfect because they are not trying hard enough.  Girls are objectified, encouraged to be passive, thin, and sexy, boys are empowered, and violence is presented as being positive. 

Without an education in what it means to be a visually literate citizen, children are victims of the media.  They lack the tools to steer through the vast arena of information on the web.  They can, quite innocently, set themselves as targets for sexual predators and/ or post information regarding themselves or others which could affect them later in life as they apply to jobs or schools.  They may not fully understand what plagiarism means, and suffer severe consequences as a result.  They may participate in cyber-bullying, or be the victim of a cyber-bully.  Already our nation is seeing an epidemic rise in childhood obesity, there is a direct correlation between a myriad of health concerns and the amount of media a child is exposed to. (Consuming Kids)

I like the proposal of George Lucas that language, graphics, art, and music classes be blended as one large ‘Communication’ class with students working on longer sustained projects which require the actual use of critical thinking skills. (Edutopia video, Media Smarts: Kids Learn How to Navigate the Multimedia World.) Coincidentally, my fourth grade students happen to be in the middle of such a sustained project which has tied in with this week’s study in multiple ways.  To fulfill the GLE that they create an example of graphic art, students studied cereal boxes and created a cereal box design of their own. We discussed nutrition facts and they added that information to their box design.  Students viewed the PBS video Buy Me That, which exposes many of the tricks that advertisers employ when marketing to children.  They have written a print ad for the cereal. This week they will break into groups and write scripts for a commercial, which they will then film, and edit.  Initially I had only planned the cereal box design, but as students became engrossed in the project I kept observing connections to their world and looked for ways to make the experience more meaningful.  Having spent so much class time on one project, I am certain that I will run out of time to teach some area of my fourth grade curriculum, but this sustained activity seemed worth that risk.  The point that I am making is this, in education today, the lines should blur!  An art project seemed to be a natural stepping stone to a lesson in consumer science.  Without even being aware I was doing it, I had created an activity such as Rosen describes, “…they can create a media-rich learning environment where children can learn from these images and narratives rather than just merely absorb them.”  (Rewired, p. 164)  It is easy to envision the art teacher incorporating similar sustained lessons on the big ideas of self-esteem and ideals of beauty.  These lessons would be the perfect vehicle for communicating the code of digital citizenship.  Even the youngest of elementary students could relate to the tenets of respecting and protecting themselves and others.  The concept of intellectual property was understood by fourth graders and could be introduced to younger students.

One could argue that these ‘blurred line’ types of activities would take time, and as I have pointed out, maybe even at the expense of the art curriculum.  I would counter with the idea that the art room is ripe with opportunities to synthesize information.  Art teachers are excellent at multi-tasking, we should seize these learning opportunities, and I believe our curriculum will afford that chance.  If not, perhaps it is time to reevaluate ALL curriculum,  making changes to reflect learning which meets the needs of twenty-first century learners.

There is no way that we will ever be ahead of our students when it comes to current technology.  There is no way that we can accurately predict for our students what their future world will look like.  What we can do for them, what we MUST do for them is, through Art or whatever means necessary, teach them the ways to think for themselves.   Only when our students have developed the tools needed to comprehend, create, and question the world in which they live will the goal of creating Media Literate Digital Citizens be realized.