Reading Media Literature with Young People By Amy Petersen Jensen Instructor Department of Theatre and Media Arts Brigham Young University My twelve-year-old sister Elisabeth is an accomplished, Suzuki-trained violinist. She likes to play a game in which her audience names a familiar song she has heard; then she plays the song by ear on the violin. An audience of family members and friends can be entertained for hours by her renditions of classical music, selections from Broadway musicals, and country music hits. Recently, at the end of one impromptu concert, I asked Elisabeth to play something she really liked. Her eager response was an enthusiastic mimic of Brittany Spears' "Oops! . . . I Did It Again." Elisabeth's performance included an exact replication of Spears' sexualized Mouseketeer movements from her music video and placed an explicit emphasis on the lyrics from the song's chorus, shouting the words "I'm not that innocent." Elisabeth is a smart young woman who loves studying science, practices the violin several hours a day, and lives in a home without cable television. However, she is also influenced by an image-based world where she can see the Spears video on MTV at a friend's house or on the omnipresent video monitors in department stores while she is shopping for school clothes with her mother. Like most young people today, Elisabeth is navigating a world of images without a media sextant. The ubiquitous outlets and expressions of our mass-media culture create a sea of content whose meanings are erratically interpreted as their audience digests them. In contrast to Elisabeth's estrangement from her own world of innocence through Spears' visual and verbal expression of rejected innocence, another young woman found affirmation of those seemingly antiquated values in a different artist and a different song, but within the same media construct and context. In diametric opposition to "I'm not that innocent," Jewel's lyric of "I'm sensitive and I'd like to stay that way" from her song "Every Day Angels" was read by a former high school student of mine as a confirmation of teaching from parents and church to embrace innocence. Each young woman turned to mediated content to contextualize her own world; one found alienation and the other found affirmation, each conclusion being reached randomly. Both young women responded to specific production, distribution, and artistic choices, which were specifically designed to influence people in their age demographic. Each approached the content and the messengers as authoritative. The dissimilar results are characteristic of the dilemma that family and community educators face as they approach mass-media messages that can be affirmative and alienating, informative and manipulative, often all at the same time. It is a quandary that is created when adolescent experience comes in contact with corporate sophistication. The 2000 U.S Census Report registered 31.6 million twelve to nineteen year olds in the United States (Evans 2000, 1). This is the largest generation of youth culture ever recorded and has proven to be an irresistible target for mass-media marketing executives. Teen Research Unlimited reports that in the year 2000, teens spent an estimated $105 billion dollars and influenced their parents to spend another $48 billion dollars (2000). We must acknowledge that the mass media have power to influence our children. Our responsibility as teachers and parents is to help students develop skills to understand the media's messages and the varying points of view the media presents as authoritative and authentic. This can only happen if we learn to respect and value both the artistic and promotional power the media have in our culture and the influence they have in the lives of our young people. The only way we can do this is to provide mediated opportunities for students in educational settings. Creating mediated experiences in the classroom requires that teacher evaluate their current teaching methods and make an effort to fuse media images into their classroom pedagogy. To do this, teachers must recognize that students are already bombarded with a multiplicity of images. Their school world is filled with word and paper images that encourage students to develop a sense of self by learning mostly about the past. It is in this atmosphere that I have often heard students exiting a discussion of eighteenth-century British literature, or a similar subject, asking: "What does this have to do with me?" In contrast, their life outside of school is crammed with provocative mediated images. These images are viewed as authoritative and therefore have tremendous influence over the students' world perspective. Outside the classroom adolescents are immersed in information about their own global, popular culture with increasingly sophisticated delivery systems such as satellites, cellular technology, and cable and computer networks. Our mediated world challenges them to acquire and digest more information than in any other generation. Educators teaching in this new world of technology are responsible for giving this flood of information meaning. Students understand, manipulate, and even dominate the devices that access vast amounts of information, but are often mystified by the volume and complexity of that information. Educators could contribute significant literary meaning by providing a context for this information avalanche. Furnishing contextual skills could be one of the most vital services that an educator might render to students who live in our constantly self-referencing culture. These contextual skills are precisely those that are part of a class curriculum that applies contemporary critical theory templates to the most popular forms of technological literature. Create a Rubric for Reading the Media Recently, Brigham Young University Media Arts Education students participated in a media strategies workshop with seventh and eighth grade students from Mountain Ridge Junior High School in Utah's Alpine School District. Adolescents were asked to examine and evaluate the cover of a Marvel Comic Book and a Ralph Lauren advertisement taken from Teen Vogue. We began by asking the students to respond to a set of questions about the media images presented. Our questions assumed that all media could be a story and were presented in the following order: * What is the story? * Who is the storyteller? * What techniques is the storyteller using? * Why is the storyteller telling this particular story? * Who is the story for and why is the story being told to that audience? * Is the story accurate, fair or complete? If not, what information or perspectives are absent and why are they left out? Creating a set of questions helped us generate a dialogue based on their insights regarding the popular images. From this general base, the BYU student educators guided the junior high school students to a more in-depth exploration of the aesthetic choices and marketing decisions made in the creation of the images. The media rubric is a device that leads students to begin thinking and talking. A well-planned rubric allows them to begin a conversation with teacher that can then lead to formal, guided discussions. For example, a teacher might expand the base dialogue to include a social/cultural discussion that addresses the unique formations of individual visual literacy skills, a discussion of aesthetic values (line, color, texture, shape, dimension) of the visual image, or a review of historical information about comic book design and magazine advertisements. The educator creating the media rubric should consider the age, race, gender, economic standing, and basic analytical skills of the students. Educators should elicit a quality analysis from the question base they create with those considerations. One substantive work on media literacy, Literac<full>Reading Media Literature with <full>Reading Media Literature with Young People By Amy Petersen Jensen Instructor Department of Theatre and Media Arts Brigham Young University My twelve-year-o<full>Reading Media Literature with Young People By Amy Petersen Jensen Instructor Department of Theatre and Media Arts Brigham Young University My twelve-year-old sister Elisabeth is an accomplished, Suzuki-trained violinist. She likes to play a game in which her audience names a familiar song she has heard; then she plays the song by ear on the violin. An audience of family members and friends can be entertained for hours by her renditions of classical music, selections from Broadway musicals, and country music hits. Recently, at the end of one impromptu concert, I asked Elisabeth to play something she really liked. Her eager response was an enthusiastic mimic of Brittany Spears' "Oops! . . . I Did It Again." Elisabeth's performance included an exact replication of Spears' sexualized Mouseketeer movements from her music video and placed an explicit emphasis on the lyrics from the song's chorus, shouting the words "I'm not that innocent." Elisabeth is a smart young woman who loves studying science, practices the violin several hours a day, and lives in a home without cable television. However, she is also influenced by an image-based world where she can see the Spears video on MTV at a friend's house or on the omnipresent video monitors in department stores while she is shopping for school clothes with her mother. Like most young people today, Elisabeth is navigating a world of images without a media sextant. The ubiquitous outlets and expressions of our mass-medi
