Almost Any Subject — and Any Medium

The teachers’ response to Look Sharp, says Russell, has been "tremendous — over 100 teachers in the Ithaca City School District were involved last year." Teachers have used media literacy in almost any subject area you can think of. At Boynton Middle School, for instance, Marcie Wyant’s Life and Career Skills course has helped students analyze news and commercials and create their own public service announcements. Ithaca High School’s Jeff Spence and Roger Sevilla designed a course integrating video technology into the English curriculum; students produce a weekly news and variety program on the local cable channel.

Nancy Ridenour, chair of the high school’s science department, has required biology students to conduct research on the Web, then analyze the content "to make them aware that not all information out there is equal." To Ridenour, there’s no gap between media liter- acy and the sciences. "Media literacy and scientific literacy go hand in hand," she says. "Critical thinking is nurtured in both."

In fourth-grade math, Jane Koestler of South Hill Elementary School had students survey the use of various media in their own households, pool the data, and make graphs, as well as analyze graphs presented in advertising. The students also kept a diary of their own individual media use for a week and graphed the results. To assess the usefulness of this approach, Scheibe and Koestler designed a test to be given before and after the unit.

On the first test, none of the students could define media literacy, and as for naming kinds of media, "a lot of them thought TV was one, but that was about it," says Koestler. (Look Sharp’s media list also includes radio, books, magazines, newspapers, billboards, movies, recorded music, video games, and the Internet.) On the post-unit test, most students gave far more sophisticated answers. Presented with a misleading graph from an advertisement, students on the earlier test had almost nothing to say about it; on the later test they recognized that because key parts of the graph were unlabeled, no information could be drawn from it.

Pleased with what her students learned, Koestler says, "One of my goals is to write this up so other teachers can use it."

Ithaca’s deputy superintendent of schools, Randy Ehrenberg, calls Look Sharp "a major staff development effort that has grown by word of mouth" and says she’s "very excited" about the Iroquois Imaging Project in particular. "I look for avenues to teachers who have passed up opportunities to be involved. We need to show them [the IIP’s] potential, show them how it’s exciting to young people." That kind of enthusiasm is needed to overcome the feeling expressed by one third-grade teacher — that Look Sharp has good ideas, but attending even one extra workshop is "just one more thing to do" in an already hectic schedule..