July 1, 2008

Media Matters in Middle School Years

BROOKLINE - Five years ago, Driscoll School art teacher Marianne Taylor and librarian Amy Neale noticed a disturbing trend in advertising: Corporations were increasingly marketing to children. Concerned with the effect that this advertising was having on their students, the two started an after-school class called Media Matters. The goal, according to Taylor, was to “get kids to be educated consumers and educated viewers of media.”

The course was so successful that it is now taught within the regular school day. With a grant from the Brookline Education Foundation, Neale, Taylor and computer specialist Bob Thomas developed a model for teaching Media Matters to middle school students. They shared this unit with Brookline librarians and teachers during a workshop last summer. Neale and Thomas describe the issues that have influenced this media literacy unit.

Why do corporations target children in their advertising?

Neale: If corporations can capture a child between the ages of 10 and 14 for a brand, they have them for life.

What are some of the ways that corporations achieve this?

Thomas: On a TV show, if they mention that a character wears a certain brand, that’s how they “niche” people now. It’s like saying, “He grew up in Iowa.”

Neale: They also do it through product placement. A book given to my daughter had 32 product placements in the first chapter.

How has marketing to children changed over the five years since you started teaching this course?

Neale: Advertising has diversified. There is no place that you don’t see an ad. They are on the side of the T, on the TV monitors at the market checkout. Four years ago, we asked kids, “How many of you have seen ads online?” A few hands would go up. Now, every hand goes up.

Thomas: Ads are in video games. The billboards that you drive by in racing games have ads on them. Kids who have g-mail accounts have ads on their g-mail desktops that are targeted to the contents of their e-mails.

Can any of this exposure to advertising be avoided?

Thomas: We’re not going to have success in getting kids to back away from technology. We need to be able to use the technology in a beneficial way, and teach kids to be aware of the media around them.

What are some of the techniques you use to help kids gain a greater understanding of what they are seeing in the media?

Neale: We examine print ads to see what kinds of messages they are sending. For example, we looked at a magazine ad that portrayed a little girl as a “beauty” and her brother as a “beast.” When the boys saw it, one of them said, “That’s so mean!”

Why do you teach this course to middle school kids as opposed to children in other age groups?

Neale: Kids in seventh and eighth grade are trying to figure out who they are. In the course, there is a whole section on race, gender and ethnicity. Do kids see themselves in the media? What is it like to see yourself or not see yourself represented in ads? Who are you supposed to be? What if you’re an African-American male and all you see in ads are gangster images?

During the course, kids get to create their own ads. Why do you have them do this?

Neale: When you allow kids to create media, they really get a sense of how they are manipulated by the media. When they are making the selection of the music and words to use, then they understand how powerful it can be.

You had a chance to present this information to teachers from other Brookline schools. What was the response?

Thomas: People were hungry for it. They want to talk about the influence of the media. They are affected by it. Kids are affected by it.

How did the Brookline Education Foundation grant help you to prepare the unit for presentation to your peers?

Neale: We wouldn’t have had anything to disseminate without the grant. It has been really powerful just to have that time to decide what materials to rule in and what to rule out, to organize the lesson, to create overarching questions and to create the desk of video clips.

What is the most important message you want children to understand when they complete your course?

Thomas: Be aware of how much the media influences you.

Neale: Think like a citizen, not like a consumer.