Week #7 Reading and Discussion

Identify three ideas you will use to inform your PSA of the need to teach critical media literacy in school.

Three ideas that I will use to inform in my PSA of the need to teach critical media literacy in school based upon the reading are: that the facts behind the goals of media are universal regardless of the way it is taught, that even though it is a new field it has great potential because media can be used to teach it, and students need to be challenged to use the skills after they learn them. The fact behind the goal of the media can be deciphered with the journalism questions - Who,What,When,Where and How. Who is advertising is critical in understanding if the message is for consumers or not, and will define the rest of the questions. Instructors ability to cite media readily in understanding it will help the field grow just as fast as new media is produced. Lastly, a student that doesn't use these skills and gain experience with them will be lacking when they need the skills.

Summarize what you learned about enacting critical pedagogy in your own classroom and detail what like about critical pedagogy and what concerns you.

I reviewed: http://ecommons.aku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=pakistan_ied_pdck

This article presented ways in which instructors could use "street theatre" to teach social studies topics. I really like the idea of acting before a audience to teach as a group as a break from the traditional setting of one person lecturing the information. 

I like that critical pedagogy is focused on questioning the source of information. It is critical for the historical process of using the primary source works of the people that lived through the events. Popular history often wants to judge the decisions of others with the information available many years later. Yet to understand the decisions that are made at the time, a student has to suspend this information and see what they knew, when and their response. The only concern I have is that instructors often want their students to have the same solution and can influence the results the students get along the lines of their choosing.