The Media Literacy Service-Learning Project
The Media Literacy Service-Learning Project
In one of the media literacy programs initiated by MLACC, César Chavez Elementary School (CCES) in East Salinas was paired with CSU Monterey Bay . As a result of that collaboration, the MLACC's executive director, CCES's principal, and a CSUMB faculty member worked together to organize a service-learning course specifically designed to place CSUMB students in CCES classrooms in order to teach media literacy to fifth- and sixth-graders at that school. César Chavez Elementary School was chosen as a pilot site because the newly built facility is one of the best technologically equipped elementary schools in the city of Salinas. Moreover, CCES's principal and key staff had been actively involved in the media literacy alliance and had participated in the 1997 Media Violence Summit.
The service-learning media literacy project and the class itself were marked by intense collaboration between the three main institutions involved, especially during the planning stage in the fall of 1998. In several meetings throughout that semester, we studied diverse media literacy curricula that have been employed in the U.S. and abroad; discussed different training pedagogies for the student facilitators; examined various topics which should be included in the class's curriculum; and took the necessary planning steps to get the project off the ground, which included laying out a very detailed schedule of meetings and workshop sessions.
The class itself, called Social Impact of Mass Media - Service Learning, was first offered by CSUMB in the spring 1999 semester as an upper-division course within the human communication major. Besides fulfilling specific major requirements, the class also fulfilled the students' university-wide upper-division service-learning requirement. The following learning objectives for the course were defined in the syllabus:
- To investigate and explain relationships among cultural ideologies and socio-historical experiences, interests, identities, and actions of specific cultural groups.
- To analyze different mass communication media (including new media technologies) and their cultural impact on society.
- To analyze diverse theories that have been formulated to explain mass media's social impact.
- To study and interpret various mass media products to better understand how those cultural products influence audiences.
- To compare how different cultural, ethnic and social groups have been portrayed by the mass media.
Two textbooks were adopted for the class: Television: The Critical View (Newcomb, 1994), and Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences (Croteau and Hoynes, 1997). Additionally, a widely used media literacy course called "Beyond Blame" was employed both in the university classroom and at César Chavez Elementary.
"Beyond Blame" is in many ways a very simple media literacy program based on educator Paulo Freire's literacy concepts and aimed at children from eight to twelve years old. The course is divided into eight one-hour sessions that rely on various pedagogical resources such as video clips, drawings, group discussions, and newspaper clippings, to increase awareness about media messages. Specific topics discussed include media genres, styles, and formats; production techniques; implicit and explicit messages; media violence; commercialism; sexual exploitation; and media overexposure, among others.
Twenty-four CSUMB students took the class in 1999 and 24 again in 2000. The class met regularly twice a week, for a total of four hours per week. In those regular meetings, the instructor facilitated the discussion about the readings and other media-related issues and also trained the students in the Beyond Blame curriculum to be employed at César Chavez Elementary. Two of those training meetings were conducted at the school itself, where the university students met the principal and her staff and were introduced to the school's policies and regulations.
The media literacy workshop was offered to the CCES students as an after-school program for extra credit. While several of the CCES students volunteered to participate, many others were chosen or nominated by their teachers and encouraged to attend. Beyond Blame's eight recommended workshop sessions were condensed into six meetings because of scheduling conflicts. Although 55 CCES students were enrolled in the workshop sessions each semester, attendance at the meetings fluctuated from 45 to 50 students; irregular attendance was one of the difficulties we encountered throughout the project. About 45 CCES students with regular attendance "graduated" at the end of each course, for a total of 90 students for the two semesters.
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