Rovereto,+review+of+Media+Constructions+of+Sustainability

Media Constructions of Sustainability []

This curriculum module, geared toward grade levels 6-8, was developed by Project Look Sharp, a group based in Ithaca College’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
 * What organization developed the curriculum module you are evaluating?**

The goals of Project Look Sharp are
 * What is the mission of the organization?**
 * To promote and support media literacy education at the community, state, and national levels
 * To provide teachers with ongoing pre-service and in-service training and mentoring in media education
 * To work with teachers to create new or revised teaching materials and pedagogical strategies that incorporate media literacy and enhance classroom practice
 * To develop and publish curriculum materials that infuse media literacy into core content
 * To evaluate the effectiveness of media literacy as a pedagogical approach to education
 * To develop a model for including media literacy in the school curriculum at all grade levels and in all instructional areas, and to show how media literacy can help teachers address new and existing learning standards
 * To work in collaboration with other entities at Ithaca College to promote and support media literacy integration at the College

The philosophy under which the goals of Project Look Sharp were formed is one focused on the importance of media literacy. Media literacy, for the purposes of the activities laid out on the website, ties in well with ecoliteracy.
 * What is the educational mission and philosophy of the organization?**

For Media Constructions of Sustainability, lesson objectives include:
 * What does the curriculum module aim to teach? In other words: what are the learning outcomes supposed to be?**
 * Learning key information about the sustainability of food, water and agriculture and reflect on the sourcing, accuracy, credibility and biases of their knowledge and understandings.
 * Identifying the different ways in which sustainability is defined and envisioned and what views, values and motives underlie these definitions and visions.
 * Analyzing and evaluating a variety of perspectives on how our current economic, social, political, industrial and environmental systems are or are not sustainable.
 * Asking and answering key questions about authorship, purpose, content, techniques, interpretations, context, and credibility when analyzing media messages.
 * Analyzing and evaluating diverse historic and current models for sustainability of food, water and agriculture, including reflections on social justice, global warming, energy use and unintended consequences.
 * Engaging in complex, reflective, open-minded analysis, and using skeptical critical thinking to develop reading, listening and visual decoding skills and attitudes that support life-long democratic citizenship.
 * Taking well-reasoned and self-reflective positions on controversial issues and considering actions that are consistent with their beliefs and knowledge about sustainability.

This curriculum is separated into many lesson plans, and is meant to be covered over a span of several days. As such, it contains quite a bit of material, with separate objectives per lesson (compiled into a list of the most important objectives above). Being from Project Look Sharp, the curriculum is focused heavily on media literacy and media sample analysis, but much is done to share an equal focus with sustainability as reflected in the objectives. This endeavor is mostly successful, partly because the huge amount of information in this curriculum is spread out into several lessons.
 * Do you think the curriculum is appropriately designed to produce the intended learning outcomes?**

This activity focuses specifically on media literacy, but this literacy can carry over into ecoliteracy as well. The focus is on understanding the portrayal of sustainability in the media with a particular concentration on issues related to food, water, and agriculture. With this focus in mind, information or a short video clip can be easily added to direct the objectives more toward showing the effects of media and corporate advertising on public perception. This can also work to show the effects of personal actions on the local and (most likely indirectly) global stage.
 * Does this curriculum teach the kind of literacies the EcoEd Research Group advocates?**

These modules are very well done, and could be used as-is. Given the time constraints of our modules, however, one or two would have to be selected for a day. Alternatively, they could be incorporated into other activities. These could be any of a variety of activities, including a press conference-styled activity. One or two lessons could be used as introductory material to teach about the analytical and inquisitive way of thinking necessary in journalism, as well as the biases that exist in media today. A press conference could then be held, with the children as the journalists and one or a group of us as the PR people or other members of a chemical company. Another configuration of this idea could be the observation of a pre-written press conference, then the distribution of different reports by some of the educators. Each of these “reports” would have a certain bias to them (an ideological twist, probably exaggerated to make it easier to identify), and the children would have to figure out what important information was left out or twisted in each report.
 * What could be layered into this curriculum so that it addresses more of the learning outcomes that the EcoEd Group advocates?**